Vladimir Lisunov

Biography

In the spring of 1975 Lisunov was preparing to show his work at an exhibition of avant-garde artists in the Nevsky Palace of Culture. On the eve of the opening he was detained by KGB officers and spent several days in a cell in the “Big House”, the KGB headquarters on Liteyny Avenue. There he sketched in pencil the drawing from which the painting “The Fugitive” later grew. Lisunov himself regarded it as his calling card; in 2019 it was accepted into the collection of the State Russian Museum.

The exhibition went ahead without him.

He was born on 21 March 1940 in Leningrad, into a family of financial specialists: Evgenii Ivanovich and Valentina Filipovna Lisunov. His childhood fell in the years of the Siege of Leningrad, which he lived through with his mother and his older sister Galina. He began drawing at nine, learned the violin and wrote poetry at about the same time, and by twelve had decided to be a painter. In 1958 he finished a children’s art school and entered the painting faculty of the Leningrad Academy of Arts, where his teachers included Boris Ioganson, Smirnov and Kiparisov.

He lived on odd jobs. Lisunov worked at the Kirov Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Leningrad, making sets and costume sketches, among them sketches for the ballerinas Natalia Makarova and Alla Osipenko. He painted tableware at the Leningrad Porcelain Factory, and made papier-mâché toys and painted them. He had no studio of his own: some pictures, according to recollections, he painted on a stairway landing under the eyes of his neighbours. On his days off he went out to the Leningrad region, and brought back the landscape series “Little Villages” and “Winter Scenes”.

Mysticism was his way of escaping Soviet everyday life. He read hand-copied works by Papus, Blavatsky and Castaneda, talked with underground philosophers and occultists in Petersburg and Moscow, and attended mystical circles. Some of his paintings are full of mysterious images, others turn to biblical subjects and village landscapes. There are graphic series called “Astral Wanderings of the Soul”, “Landscapes of the Soul”, “Portrait of a Woman”, “Divas”, “Aerial Nudes”, “Portraits of Friends” and “Commuter Train People”. Of his style he said only: mystic symbolism. He also wrote poetry; in 2008 the publishing house Borey-Art brought out a collection containing fifty-two poems and three long poems.

Official exhibitions were closed to him: he was turned down at the very first stage of negotiations. In the mid-1960s he began showing work without permission and came to the attention of the KGB. His solo exhibitions were smashed up and the paintings destroyed by the militia. In 1970–1971 he took part in several joint shows in the studio of the artist Vladimir Ovchinnikov in Kustarny Lane, and they were closed in the same way. Most of what he had painted before the mid-1980s was lost in these raids. It is hard to check the scale of the losses now: I have not seen any documentary inventories. Between 1969 and 1985 he took part in no official exhibition apart from two or three small shows in private homes. Apartment exhibitions took place at Turovsky’s on the Okhta (1975), at Tamara Valenta’s (1977), and at the home of Alla Osipenko and John Markovsky on Zheliabov Street (1980). In 1977 one of his works was included in a group exhibition of 99 artists as part of the Biennale of Dissidents in Venice.

His earlier exhibitions had been student ones: in 1965 at the Leningrad Institute of Textile and Light Industry, then at the University of Tartu (1967), at Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Chemical Engineering (1968), and at the student campus in Leningrad and the Faculty of Journalism of Leningrad State University (1968–1969).

From 1984 Lisunov belonged to Ostrov (“The Island”), an independent association of Leningrad artists. From 1985, with the start of perestroika, artists who had been banned were treated more leniently, and he was able to take part in official exhibitions: with Ostrov in Leningrad, Moscow, Kuibyshev and Narva, and at the Museum of the History of the City (“Ostrov ’90”). In 1988 his solo exhibition “Metamorphoses by Vladimir Lisunov” was held at the Pishchevikov Culture Hall, and in 1990, for his fiftieth birthday, an exhibition at the Writers’ House; the same year he showed work in Paris in “Leningrad: Traditions and Perestroika”. He also appeared in two films: “The Moment…” (1989) and “A Crystal Story” (1990, Lenfilm), in which he played a wizard.

Contemporaries remembered his appearance: a floor-length overcoat, a red scarf thrown around his neck, a wide-brimmed hat. He hardly changed this look throughout his life.

On 27 July 2000 Lisunov was murdered. The crime has never been solved. He was buried at the Kovalevskoe Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. That same year exhibitions marked his sixtieth birthday at the PEN Club and, posthumously, at the Shuvalov Palace. Later his work was shown at the Museum of Nonconformist Art: paintings in 2007, graphic works in 2008.