Vlady

Biography

In 1933 the thirteen-year-old Vladimir went to Orenburg with his father, who had been exiled there for his opposition views. His mother, Liuba Rusakova, had shortly before been committed to a psychiatric clinic and stayed behind in Leningrad. His first pencil and watercolour sketches date from the Orenburg years, 1933–1936.

He was born on 15 June 1920 (2 June, Old Style) in Petrograd, into the family of Victor Kibalchich, known as Victor Serge. His father was a writer, translator and revolutionary, formerly a Socialist Revolutionary and an anarchist, then a Party member and an official of the Communist International, and a supporter of the Left Opposition. In 1921 the family left for Germany for a time, and the boy spoke German first; they returned to the USSR in 1925. After his father was expelled from the Party, persecution began.

In April 1936, after a campaign by French intellectuals, among them Romain Rolland and André Malraux, the family was allowed to leave. They lived for a few months in Brussels, then in Paris. As a teenager he sympathised with the Spanish Republicans but was too young to fight. In Paris he studied in the studios of Victor Brauner, Wifredo Lam, Joseph Lacasse and André Masson, and visited the sculptor Aristide Maillol. The German advance into France forced the family to flee again. In Marseille his mother had to be hospitalised once more; father and son left for Martinique, while she remained in a clinic in Aix-en-Provence. The sources give different dates for her death: by some accounts 1943, by others 1985, and the latter date looks wrong. By way of the Dominican Republic and Cuba they reached Mexico, where the former president Lázaro Cárdenas helped them obtain a visa. Vlady settled in Mexico City in 1943, aged twenty-three; Mexico became his country for the rest of his life.

At first he tried to imitate Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, without success. Then he travelled around the country and filled sketchbooks with people and landscapes. His first solo exhibition took place in 1945 at the Instituto Francés de América Latina, and a few days later his father died (the year of the father’s death is given as 1945 by some accounts and as 1947 by others). That same year Vlady married a Mexican, Isabel Díaz Fabela; he took citizenship later, in 1947 or 1949.

In 1952, with Alberto Gironella and Enrique Echeverría, he opened the Galería Prisse. It lasted a year but is credited with giving impetus to the Generación de la Ruptura (the Generation of the Rupture), young artists who did not want to live in the shadow of the great muralists. From 1951 to 1961 he took part in the Paris biennials, and in the biennials of São Paulo, Tokyo and Córdoba. In 1950 he toured Europe and made a series of lithographs. In 1967–1968, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a year in New York and met Mark Rothko; Rothko’s work troubled him, and on returning to Mexico he went back to figurative painting. The main canvas of this period is considered to be the Trotsky Trilogy.

In 1972 President Luis Echeverría invited him to paint murals, and in 1973 Vlady began his major work, “Las revoluciones y los elementos” (“The Revolutions and the Elements”), in a 17th-century former church that now houses the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada Library. The painting took about eight years and was inaugurated in 1982 by President José López Portillo. Unlike most Mexican murals, it does not confine itself to national history: it takes in the Russian and French revolutions, the American struggles for independence, even the sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The chapel, painted first, was renamed the Sala Freudiana as a result. The work caused controversy but brought new commissions: a ceiling in Culiacán (fifty square metres, in a Venetian technique) and murals for the Palacio Nacional de la Revolución in Managua in 1987, together with Arnold Belkin.

He painted by the rules of the old masters: egg tempera, earth pigments, layers of oil and varnish to give the light depth. He liked to say that Picasso or Bacon would not have lasted a week in Verrocchio’s studio. That explains, to my mind, both his dislike of industrial paint and his isolation among his contemporaries.

In 1994 he completed a cycle of four murals, but soon after their presentation at the former Lecumberri prison they were destroyed; this is linked to his open support for the Zapatistas in Chiapas. I have seen no documentary confirmation of the reason. The monumental “Tatic”, a portrait of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, was begun in 1995 and finished in 2000.

In 1989 Vlady travelled to the Soviet Union, seeking the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Serge. From 1990 he lived in Cuernavaca, in a house with a large studio. In 1998 he received the French Order of Arts and Letters, and in 2002 he became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 2003 he gave Orenburg 145 etchings, and about 4,600 works he gave to Mexico; roughly a thousand are held at the Centro Vlady at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. In 2004 a personal gallery of his work was opened in Orenburg.

Vlady died on 21 July 2005 in Cuernavaca. In August of that year a memorial plaque was put up in Orenburg on the school building where he had studied.