Nikolay Punin is not a
name widely known in the West, primarily because his file languished in the KGB
archives since he died in 1953, partly because his grave in the Gulag where he
died is marked only by a number, and partly because his own reputation became
submerged under that of his lover, the poetess Anna Akhmatova; evidence of this
is that the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the House on the Fontanka in St.
Petersburg, is in fact in Punin’s old apartment.
Photograph of Nikolay Punin (1920s), Punin family archive, St. Petersburg
Yet, during his life, this remarkable
individual was one of the most influential figures in the turbulent but
exciting arena of post-revolutionary Russian art and its social and political
context. Throughout his life Punin was also one of the most persistent and
uncompromising propagators of Paul Cézanne and his legacy.
Nikolay Punin was a critic of the
new era, promoting new art, proclaiming that: ‘Our art is the art of form, of
shape, because we are proletarian artists, artists of a Communist culture. He welcomed the October revolution as
an opportunity to establish new art, which would be based on the achievements
of such artists as Cézanne.
Punin’s ‘Cycle of lectures’, which
were given in Petrograd in 1919 and published in 1920, aimed to give an
overview of Western-European art and to identify the Russian avant-garde with
it. In these lectures Punin tried to distinguish which elements make an artist
great, rather than ordinary. He felt that artists such as Cézanne and Picasso
had the power to break free from the accepted rules and laws. In his sixth
lecture the art critic announced: ‘Cézanne broke painting from the shackles of
subject matter.’
Admiring this unique French artist,
Punin felt that ‘nature for him was only the reason, only the dictionary for
perfectly constructed work of art.’ He believed that what matters for the
artist is what he feels rather than what he understands and that ‘the major aim
of artistic activity is to transform the world through new forms of beauty’.
In his review of the new trends in
the art of St. Petersburg, which was written by Punin for the magazine ‘Russian
art’ in 1923, the art-critic described Cézanne’s painting ‘Grand Pin Près
d’Aix-en-Provence’, which was purchased by Ivan Morozov in 1908. Comprised of
separate blocks of paint, this painting represented the new era of
post-impressionist art. Punin used this painting for his explanation of
Cézanne’s work. He compared it to the academic landscape by the representative
of ‘Peredvizhniki’, Ivan Shishkin. He said that if you pull a branch of
Shishkin’s tree, it will come out together with roots and earth; in Cézanne’s
painting, together with the branch, part of the sky will be torn. Punin’s
comparison reflected the wholeness of Cézanne’s landscapes.
By 1921, many artists and writers
had left Russia in anticipation of arrests and deportations. They lived in
Russia through the most difficult post-revolutionary years of starvation and
poverty, driven by their faith in building the new art of the new nation. Their
disillusionment and their emigration signalled the beginning of the end of the
Russian avant-garde.
Punin had written four books and
more than forty articles in three years after the Revolution and played a
leading role in all the major developments in artistic life in 1920s
Russia. But now, Nikolay Punin, like
many, began to feel frustrated by the limitations of the new communist system,
and increasingly by his limited success in trying to ‘defend the freedom of
artistic arts’.
Punin was arrested for the first
time on 3rd August 1921 – just a few months before the Department of Visual
Arts of Narkompross was closed. Later he would say about these events: ‘It was
the end of my love-affair with the revolution.’
From 1923, he concentrated mainly on
lecturing, writing and museum work. After being excited about all the new
possibilities which came with the change from a rather hard hearted imperial
regime and being the right hand of Lunacharsky in the first years after the
October revolution, already in February 1920 Punin had written in his diary: ‘One quality of the revolution – life gets to
be a risk.’
But despite his first encounter with
rejection and with persecution by the state, Punin continued his attempts to
educate new Soviet people in modern art. ‘Nothing can happen to me which can
crush me. And that’s my destiny,’ – wrote Punin to his wife in July 1923.
On 3 April 1921 the Museum of
Artistic Culture was officially opened in the Myatlev House, which used to
house IZO Narkompros. Researching the experimental nature of avant-garde art,
the museum was the only institution of its kind in the world. It represented
the new art, striving to explain it to the masses. In 1922, at Filonov’s suggestion and through
the determined efforts of Malevich and Nikolay Punin, the Institute of Artistic
Culture (Inkhuk) was established with the Museum of Artistic Culture as its
base. It was a truly unique establishment, where artists explored the laws of
visual perception and the formation of art. For Punin this newly-established
institution represented the fulfilment of all his dreams about educating
workers in modern art with Cézanne’s legacy as its focal point.
Malevich suggested that the ideal
museum exhibition of new art should have several parts, such as ‘Painting as
such’ with Cézanne in the centre of it. But in 1926 the museum together with Inkhuk
were closed over-night, and even though its priceless collection was moved to
the department of the newest movements, which was headed by Punin at the
Russian museum, the doors, opened for the avant-garde artists by the October
revolution, were gradually closing down.
In January 1933 Punin also lost his
job as the head of already non-existent department of Newest Movements and was
ordered to change the exposition of the 20th century Russian art at the Russian
museum in two weeks. From now on he was only allowed to remain a member of the
artistic committee of the museum. However, when the flames of the
revolution have died down, Punin still kept his position as a fighter for
Russian avant-garde and promotion of Western-European modern art – it was his
brave choice, the price of which was first his career and then his life.
Back in 1919 in one of his articles
in the newspaper ‘Iskusstvo kommuni’, Punin wrote: “We were persecuted and will
be persecuted, not because we are anti-bourgeois, or the other way around, but
because we possess the gift of creative art. This is the reason we cannot be
tolerated by mediocrity, even by Communist mediocrity.”
During the late 1930’s, Punin was
working on the last serious work of his life - a text-book on the history of
Western-European Art. It was 494 pages long, and it was written in three months
in the spring of 1939. After putting lots of pressure on Punin and the four
other authors to finish this book quickly, the publishers then sat on it for a
year, reducing chapters dedicated to the art of the second half of the 19th
century and the beginning of 20th century to 35 pages (less than 10% of the
whole text-book). The text-book was then
reviewed by the famous Moscow-based art-historians, Lazarev and Alpatov.
Originally,
the chapter on the ‘Art of Imperialism’, which then meant ‘Impressionism’ and
‘Post-Impressionism’, was written by another art-historian, Valentin Brodsky.
But in 1940 he had already been mobilized to the front, and Punin decided to
re-write this controversial chapter. In
the beginning of this chapter Punin explained that the ‘art of imperialism’ did
not deny traditional art – instead modern artists studied and criticised it,
and finally created new art in accordance with the tastes and ideas of their
time. He dedicated the large part of this brief overview of Western-European
art to one of his most admired artist – Paul Cézanne, about whom he wrote:
“Cézanne – is one of the most
intense artists ever known in the history of Western-European art. Absorbing in
his art the whole richness of the painting tradition of his predecessors,
denying any romantic or idealistic associations, he saw the expression of
painting in everything around him…”
Punin felt that Cézanne brought back
the classic traditions of French art, which were denied by the Impressionists,
and that his followers, rather than Cézanne himself, made his inventions look
formal. Punin always adored Cézanne. In 1915, he had written to his wife, Anna
Arens: ‘Will I, like my contemporaries, leave the content [of the painting]
behind, and for another year will be hating Gauguin and loving Cézanne?’
Punin never betrayed his love for
Cézanne. In 1940 Lazarev was writing to him how all the professors of the
history of art at the Moscow State University were against his chapter on the
‘Art of Imperialism’. At the time Lazarev was still on Punin’s side, saying
that the ones who criticized him the most would never be able to write like
him. He wrote that he really liked this chapter, but advised Punin to make some
characteristics smoother and milder in order to minimize criticism. Punin ignored this suggestion, but,
much to everyone’s surprise, the text-book was still published. In the bizarre
circumstances of the day, this was because Vyacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the
Council of People’s Commissars and Stalin’s right hand man, apparently liked
it.
However, in nine years’ time,
Punin’s text-book was heavily criticised in an article by one Gyakov called
‘Formalists and aesthetes in the role of critics’. He declared that Nikolay
Punin ‘openly advertised decadent, corrupt western art and such representatives
of it as Cézanne and Van Gogh’. He complained that Punin dared to call these
‘formalist artists’ geniuses.
Soon after this article was
published, in 1946 Punin was fired from the State Leningrad University and
Academy of Arts, where he taught for 20 years, for ‘not succeeding in providing
ideological and political education of his students’. In August 1949 he was sent to GULAG for
‘preaching Cézannism’. All copies of his
text-book were removed from all universities and libraries. Most of them were
burned, and only a few survived to modern days.
In February 1946, Punin once again
wrote in his diary: ‘Recently I was not able to write at all’. One of his
students, Mikhail Flegel, had returned from Vienna, where he was posted as a
soldier, and brought back with him some beautiful reproductions of French
Impressionists. Punin and his student Ciciliya Nissel’shtraus went to Flegel’s
house to see these photos, which Nikolay Nikolaevich would later use in his
lectures. He admired all the freedom of expression and sincerity of these
paintings, which were classified as a bad influence on the young builders of
Communism in the Soviet Union.
In March of the same year Punin
wrote again about his beloved patriarch of Modernism, Cézanne:
“Cézanne’s feat is not just in the
fact that he was a true painter, as everyone thinks of him, but in the way in
which he stood in front of the world with such an opened heart, cleared from
all the additives not related to art - such an opened heart, that no other
artist ever had before, including Rafael, Titian and Velasquez. Cezanne is the
main representative of visual art, its fullest impersonation. That is the main
goal and idea of Cézanne’s art. For everyone who can relate to it, his
paintings are like the house, in which the soul has a beautiful life, <…>
because his art – is the house, built in painting materials.”
Punin also came to the conclusion
that there should always be a strong connection between ‘people in paintings’
and ‘people in real life’. He wrote in his diary that in the Hermitage people
moved in ‘a more natural way’ in the rooms with Impressionist and
Post-Impressionist art, and looked rather ‘awkward’ in the room with
Renaissance art – ‘walking like spirits surrounded by the immortal’.
In April 1946 Punin was writing to
his old friend, artist Lev Bruni, that ‘art did not prove worthwhile’ and that
‘Cézanne and Van Gogh are its fruitless victims’. Bruni replied that Punin
should not despair, and that no one can be greater than Cézanne, who was ‘the
first artist, apart from Delacroix, to show people the way to Painting.’
However, after Punin’s lecture on
Impressionism, which he gave at the Union of Artists in April 1945, criticism
of his views on Cézanne and Van Gogh was getting stronger. In February 1946 he
wrote in his diary: ‘Life is difficult, and I am tired.’
In his lecture Punin bravely
announced: ‘Whether or not our government likes it, our art will have to take
modern Western European art into account.’ After Punin’s arrest in 1949,
Vladimir Serov, who at the time was the president of the Union of Artists in
Leningrad and the prime cause of art-critic’s arrest, told the prosecutor about this bold phrase
from Nikolay Nichoilaevich’ speech, and added that when the stenographer gave
Punin his speech for corrections, he did not want to change it. Even when he
was told that it was inappropriate to leave such a phrase in the stenographic
copy, he crossed out the word ‘government’ and wrote ‘governing board’. Now it
looked as if he was holding the board of the Union of Artists rather than the
whole Soviet government accountable for bad Soviet art.
Not surprisingly, in 1949 Punin was
arrested and sentenced for 10 years in GULAG. At his questioning in connection
with Punin’s case, Vladimir Serov also quoted Punin’s other phrase from his
earlier speech ‘Impressionism and Paintings’:
“Soviet
art is a backward art, while contemporary Western European art, such as art of
Picasso, and also the art of Western Europe of the beginning of the 20th
century, such as art of Cézanne and Van Gogh, are the highest achievements of
contemporary culture.” Expressing such views in the Soviet Union equalled inevitable
arrest and a prison sentence.
In August 1953 64-years old Punin
died in Abez settlement. He had managed to fit several lives into this
relatively short time, a colourful life in Imperial Russia, Revolution, three
arrests, two World wars, the siege of Leningrad and the Gulag. Back in 1940 he
had written:
“It is such a happiness to be still
alive; I did not expect this; I never thought that I would live for so
long. Levushka Bruni told me a long time
ago: ‘What an amazing Guardian Angel you have.’ Art does not want to part with
me. It still needs me for preaching it in front of the mad people, who have
lost it.”
In 1953 – the year when both Stalin
and Punin died – 36 Picassos were released by the Soviet museums for exhibition
in Italy, and then in Paris. In December 1954 an exhibition of 19th century
Dutch and Belgian Art was opened at the Hermitage. For the first time the
timeless paintings by Van Gogh, so beloved by Punin, were exhibited.
But the real breakthrough happened
three years later when first at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and then at the
Hermitage museum in Leningrad, the first and the largest exhibition of 19th and
20th century French masters was opened.
At the Hermitage this historic
exhibition occupied 54 rooms of the Winter Palace, and included more than two
thousand works of art, from David to Cézanne. By the cruel irony of his life,
Punin did not live to see this ground-breaking exhibition. But one of his
students, Anna Izergina (who became a curator of 19-20th century
French paintings at the Hermitage museum), curated this ground-breaking
exhibition.
Jealous and greedy Soviet officials
may have managed to get rid of Punin, but his followers, his students,
continued his mission of educating people in true art.
This article was first delivered as a paper at the postgraduate conference 'Cultural Exchange: Russia and the West', University of Bristol in April 2011. Natalia Murray is a Russian art-historian. She comes from St. Petersburg, where she graduated from the Academy of Arts and the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. She is currently working at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her biography of N. Punin 'The Unsung Hero of the Russian Avant-Garde. The life and times of Nikolay Punin (1888-1953)' will be published by Brill Academic Publishers in March 2012.
