Before <i> Glasnost</i> : New Generation of Soviet Art Would Be Unthinkable Without Bulatov’s Work, Expert Says

In the 1960s and ‘70s, the exciting art in the Soviet Union was being produced on the sly, in ramshackle garrets where artists, after finishing their menial day jobs, gathered to drink vodka, smoke and recite poetry. They saw themselves in a romantic, tragic light, as martyrs to the cause of freedom of expression.

One member of this first generation of so-called dissident artists was Erik Bulatov, whose realist canvases are--thanks to glasnost-- the subject of an exhibition at Newport Harbor Art Museum. A lecture Wednesday night at the museum by John E. Bowlt, professor of Slavic languages and literature at USC, illuminated some of the reasons Bulatov paints the way he does.

To set the stage, Bowlt, 45--a slight, birdlike man wearing a denim jacket--recalled the 1924 anti-Utopian novel, “We,” by the Soviet satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin. The book is about a country in which people live in glass houses, have numbers instead of names, wear identical uniforms, eat chemical foods and partake in rationed sex.

There were two enemies of the Single State, as the country was called: imagination and the outside world. So, by the end of the novel, the inhabitants had their imaginations surgically removed, and a hermetically sealed glass dome was installed to seal out the rest of the world.

When Bulatov was a child--he was born in 1933--life had come to resemble the Single State. Under Stalin, as Bowlt said, “the outside world had become ever more inaccessible (thanks to) the sealant of propaganda.”

Bulatov’s first art teachers painted in the only officially sanctioned style, Socialist Realism, dedicated to revealing the glories of the socialist state. Workers reaping abundant harvests in the bright sunshine were frequent subjects. Others included idealized portraits of men in power and unbelievable scenes like “Memorable Meeting” from 1936, in which the wife of a shopkeeper sent to Siberia smiles happily as she shakes the hand of Stalin, the great leader responsible for her husband’s banishment.

This kind of painting lasted into the eras of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. “Poor Grades Again,” from 1953, is a dead wringer for a Norman Rockwell scene except for the unfamiliar clothing. The family dog comforts the towheaded kid who is failing the State by not applying himself in school, while Mom sits wringing her hands and Sis looks shocked.

Younger Soviet artists began to get notably restive during the ‘50s, however. In 1959, a Moscow exhibition of contemporary American painting and sculpture had enormous impact, and some artists began experimenting with contemporary Western styles. But a short three years later, Khrushchev became enraged at the new-style work on view at an exhibit called “30 Years of Moscow Art.”

“Jackasses!” he snarled. “We’re declaring war on you!”

Bulatov’s approach to painting was shaped by this grimly repressive environment as well as by a pair of distinctly Russian attitudes. One is that art is considered an ethical statement as important to humankind as the sciences--a way of remaking the world. The other is that Soviet culture stresses literary expression. Narrative is important, even in the visual arts. In fact, artists celebrating and deriding the state are both likely to use the same repertoire of images.

Other influences on Bulatov included a meditative offshoot of Cubism practiced by Russian artist Robert Falk, whom Bowlt called a “a Pasternak of painting” and the Soviet rediscovery during the ‘70s of a vital pocket of their own art history--the work of such 20th-Century avant-garde artists as Malevich and Rodchenko.

Today, the climate in the Soviet Union is undergoing previously unimaginable changes under Gorbachev, and Bulatov is middle-aged, no longer a Young Turk. But Bowlt assured his listeners that the new generation of artists--the darlings of collectors in the West who have been snapping up their work--”would have been unthinkable without the prior presence of Bulatov.”

His paintings are permeated by “total and gripping irony and parody,” Bowlt said. Even allusions to freedom and the great outdoors are ironic. Referring to two paintings--one, of a young woman in a vivid winter outfit who stands out sharply against an all-white winter landscape; the other, of a skier with a grid of red bars walling him off from the viewer--Bowlt said, “Whether you’re Natasha or a skier in the snow, you’re always locked out or locked in.”

When Bulatov invokes the heraldic kind of “parade portrait” that commemorated living or dead great men--as in the painting “Brezhnev (Soviet Cosmos)”--he uses a set of pictorial devices that no longer convey the uplift and energy of decades ago. An age that no longer believes in such patriotic displays laughs at this imagery, Bowlt said, “in the same way we in America smile upon a Rockwell or a photograph in Life magazine.”

In Bulatov’s painting “Television,” an elderly woman watches a news program on TV. As Bowlt pointed out, the scene could take place anywhere. Russian characters on the screen inform the viewer that the program is called “Time,” and the anchorman is saying, “Tass is informing you that. . . . “

But the scene is “a parody of time and communication,” Bowlt said, noting that the viewer has no idea what time it is or what is being communicated. “We hear (only) silence,” he said. “We are all the victims of artificial intelligence, potential inhabitants of the glass dome.”

Paintings by Soviet artist Erik Bulatov are on display through Sept. 24 at Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Admission: $2 to $3. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Information: (714) 759-1122.