Avant-Garde artist Aleksandr Manusov produced a body of work that thrived under Soviet pressure.
By:Ilene Dube
Avant-garde. Nonconformist. Creative freedom and independence. These are words we normally associate with artists.
But the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement happened in reaction to the Soviet policy (1953-1986) that required artists to serve their political ends. Artists with talent who were accepted into the USSR Union of Artists received the highest level of training and the best materials and facilities, all so they could depict the Soviet way of life and glorify Soviet leaders Lenin and Stalin and members of the Communist Party.
Until Glasnost and Perestroika came about in the mid-
1980s, Nonconformists did their work underground. One such artist was Aleksandr Manusov (1947-1990), whose work is on view at Rider University’s Art Gallery through Dec. 8.
"It seems I am a lucky man," he wrote, "since I had the good fortune, in 1974, to become part of a group of artists called by others avant-gardists, nonconformists and so forth. This was one of the most significant events of my life. The world of true artists was revealed to me. These were people of an uncommon freedom of spirit… (they) were my principal teachers."
Mr. Manusov was born in the Siberian city of Omsk, where his family had been sent during World War II. At age 11, he and his mother returned to Leningrad, where he studied art with some of the best teachers. At Mukhin College of Fine Arts he received classical training and graduated with a degree as artist-designer.
The artist always stood up for his convictions. "What moved him was the pressure he knew he’d be under if he took work from the Soviet authorities," says Irene Goldman, guest curator of the Rider exhibit. "So he left that behind him and took a different path."
After joining the underground he became a part of the fellowship of experimental fine art (TEII Tovarishchestvo Eksperimental ‘nogo Izobrazitel’ nogo Iskusstva). "This was an association of artists who, for the most part, were not members of the official union of artists of the USSR… This association insisted on artistic freedom
and creative independence from official Soviet ideology," said Mr. Manusov’s widow, Regina Solovieva-Manusova, in an interview with Rider Gallery Directory Harry Naar. (The text of the interview appears in the catalog accompanying the exhibit.)
But it’s never been easy to be labeled nonconformist, and certainly not in the Soviet Union. The KGB kept watch over these artists, and physically restrained them from attending exhibitions, according to Ms. Solovieva-Manusova, who lives in Texas with her daughter, a student at Rice University. They would be taken into custody without cause, and their studios would inexplicably catch fire.
The first breakthrough came during an exhibition of unofficial artists at the Gaza Palace of Culture in 1974. The area was under heavy police surveillance. Despite the fact that it had been verboten to advertise the exhibition, viewers came in droves.
Until then, artists had worked secretly in their studios, but suddenly "The floodgates… flew open, giving way to a torrent of art, not by government order but real and honest," said Ms. Solovieva-Manusova in the Harry Naar interview. "For many artists, this was a time of revelation and delight, obtained through freedom of expression."
This is Mr. Manusov’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., and some of the paintings have never been exhibited before. The curator stresses this is not a retrospective. "The ‘Tree of Life’ has so many meanings," says Ms. Goldman, a Ewing resident. "There are trees and people in his work, and he connects the earth and sky through the universal themes of humanity."
"This is a wonderful opportunity for the university and community to see an artist who struggled to present his own visions in a restrictive society," says Mr. Naar. "Viewers should recognize the work on exhibit is just a small portion of the artist’s oeuvre, that this work was selected because it fits the curator’s directions and focus, the theme of the tree of life."
The paintings are exhibited without frames "so there isn’t anything to come between the artist and the viewer," Ms. Goldman says. "His use of color how he communicated his internal vision, through canvas, paint and form have significance. His colleagues comment on the power and feeling his use of direct color has."
A self-styled advocate for artists and human rights, and particularly for Russian émigrés, Ms. Goldman is a
Douglass College graduate who majored in Russian language and literature with an art history minor. She is fluent in Russian, having spoken it at home with her parents: Her father was from Ukraine and her mother from St. Petersburg.
Ms. Goldman has been to Russia between 30 and 40 times, she estimates, representing artists in the sale of their work; working on U.S.-Soviet Union peace missions involving artists, musicians and performers; and facilitating communication in an exchange between Russia and TAWA (Trenton Artists Workshop Association) in 1989. As president of the Nakashima Foundation for Peace, Ms. Goldman fulfilled her promise to George Nakashima made before he died: to establish his peace table at the Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow.
She came to know Ms. Solovieva-Manusova in 1996 while leading a three-year campaign to recover missing paintings from an exhibit of Soviet Nonconformist art in California, Keepers of the Flame.
"When I got the call from Regina, I connected to her," says Ms. Goldman. The group of 20 artists from Leningrad had been misled by an intermediary in the series of exhibitions. The artists had given permission to the representative to sell their works after the exhibitions, but then never saw their paintings again. This was during a time when Nonconformist Soviet art was selling for "astronomical prices," says Ms. Goldman.
"It was so unfair and so unjust, it appealed to me," continues Ms. Goldman, who helped find a legal firm to track down the dealer and the paintings. When she saw Mr. Manusov’s paintings for the first time, "I knew he was somebody extremely important," says Ms. Goldman.
Not one to hide his Judaism during a time when all religious worship was banned in his country, Mr. Manusov attended synagogue and was drawn to Jewish liturgical singing. However, he kept much of this inside and surrounded himself with friends from all walks of life, observes his widow.
The artist started the Aleph group, named for the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. "To acknowledge having Jewish roots and openly declare oneself as an artist who is Jewish in a country where many feared any reference at all to being Jewish this was truly an unheard of act of courage," says Ms. Solovieva-Manusova, who will be visiting Ewing for three weeks during the exhibition. Members of the Aleph group would wear a Star of David or Menorah badge during their exhibits to make a political statement.
"Even under the unrelenting scrutiny of the KGB, the (Aleph exhibits in apartments) were visited by thousands," says Ms. Solovieva-Manusova.
Many of the images in his paintings have biblical themes, and his Babi Yar series was motivated by the murders of peace-abiding Jews by German fascists at Babi Yar, just outside Kiev, Ukraine, during World War II.
Mr. Manusov never expected any particular reaction to this work, according to his widow. "He took great pleasure in describing to some people that it is impossible to interpret a work of art in words, just as it us impossible to express the content of a complex work of music in words," Ms. Solovieva-Manusova told Mr. Naar. "It is the work of the soul, attaining what words fail to express."
Tree of Life of Aleksandr Manusov: The Russian School of Painting at the end of the Twentieth Century is on view at the Rider University Art Gallery, Bart Luedeke Center, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrence, through Dec. 8. Reception: Nov. 3, 5-7 p.m.; gallery concert: Nov. 16, 7 p.m.; gallery talk "Earth, Air and Fire: The Elements of Aleksandr Manusov" with Indiana University art history professor Janet Kennedy: Nov. 17, 7 p.m. Gallery hours: Tues.-Thurs. 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Sun. noon-4 p.m. For information, call (609) 895-5588.