Solomon Nikritin

Biography

In 1935 Nikritin submitted his painting “The Old and the New” to Vsekokhudozhnik, the cooperative that controlled commissions and exhibitions for Soviet artists. A scandal followed, after which, as one publication about him puts it, the artist “miraculously remained at liberty”. I have found no details in the texts available to me, but the result is known: he abandoned experimental painting and almost stopped exhibiting.

It all began in Chernihiv.

He was born there on 12 December 1898 (30 November, Old Style), into a Jewish family; his father was a dentist. From 1909 to 1914 he studied at the Kiev Art School and in the studio of Oleksandr Murashko, then in the private school of Leonid Pasternak in Moscow and in the Petrograd studio of Alexander Yakovlev. In 1916 he took part in an exhibition of contemporary art in Moscow. Around the same time he belonged to an informal circle of young Kiev artists together with Alexander Tyshler, Mark Epstein and Isaac Rabinovich; the group tried to define what a modern Jewish culture might be. In 1917 Nikritin returned to Kiev and attended the studio of Aleksandra Exter.

In 1920 he won second prize in a competition for a military and political poster for the Red Army and took part in designing a ballet production by Bronislava Nijinska. In the summer, when Polish and Ukrainian troops were advancing on Kiev, he left for Kharkiv. There, together with Kliment Redko, he showed his work to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Education, who gave them letters of recommendation to Moscow. In the autumn of 1920 Nikritin entered Vkhutemas, the state art and technical school in Moscow, in the class of Wassily Kandinsky. In 1922 his work was shown at the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin, alongside Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Exter, El Lissitzky and Nathan Altman.

In the same year, 1922, he formulated a direction he called “Projectionism” and founded the Theatre of Projectionism, which drew on the ideas of biomechanics. Later, in 1923–1924, together with Redko he developed theories of “Electroorganism” and “Luminism”. By 1924 the Projectionist group included Redko, Sergei Luchishkin, Tyshler, Mikhail Plaksin and Nikolai Tryaskin; it made a loud entrance at the First Discussional Exhibition of Associations of Active Revolutionary Art in Moscow. Among his plans of those years was a typology of human voices, movements, gestures, emotions, sounds and colours, framed in terms of biomechanics, musical harmony and acoustics: part of a system for training actors. At that time he also won first prize in a competition for designs to decorate Red Square for the Third Congress of the Comintern. From 1925 he headed the Analytical Cabinet of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in Moscow, where he worked on a programme for a new analytical art history, and he stayed there until the museum closed in 1929. His solo exhibitions of 1926 and 1927 were held in the museum. In 1929–1930 he taught in Ryazan, and from 1931 he belonged to the association Izobrigada.

In the 1930s Nikritin was chief artist of the Polytechnic Museum and of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, now VDNKh. In 1932 the work of Akhmetev, Prusakov and Nikritin was shown at the Club of Art Masters in Moscow. In 1934 he painted “The People’s Court”, regarded as his best-known picture.

During the war he and his wife, Dora Kazhdan, took part in preparing the “TASS Windows”, the hand-made propaganda posters displayed in shop windows. He was awarded the medals “For the Victory over Germany” (1945) and “In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow” (1948). In 1951–1955 his paintings and graphic work were shown in a solo exhibition in the halls of the Moscow Union of Artists. To my mind, this late period is the least studied: detailed information about it is scarce.

Nikritin died in Moscow on 3 December 1965 and was buried in the Vostryakovo Cemetery. A posthumous exhibition was held at the Moscow Union of Artists in 1969. Many of his works survive thanks to the collector George Costakis. In 2004 the exhibition “Spheres of Light, Stations of Darkness” was held in Thessaloniki, and in the summer of 2007 his paintings and graphic work of the 1920s and 1930s were shown at the Tretyakov Gallery.