Out of Obscurity : Exhibit Features 8 Russians Who Eschewed Official Decrees

In a twist as unpredictable as the fall of communism itself, the Malibu Community Center tonight will display the works of eight Russian artists who have started making waves in California after enduring two decades of government-enforced obscurity in their homeland.

The free showing, scheduled for 6:30 to 9:30 p.m., will include an appearance by the eight classically trained painters, who for more than 20 years eschewed the state-sanctioned school of social realism for the isolated pursuit of an aesthetic rooted in the Renaissance masters.

“Maybe this was a kind of escapism, maybe we wanted to run away from this terrible time,” painter Sergei Daniel said, trying to explain the group’s fixation on centuries-old masterworks. “But I think the main value of this experience was the possibility to be a pupil of Rembrandt’s, a descendant of the great masters. Our other teachers, they were not so good.”

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the eight artists banded together under an unofficial association, the Artistic Assn. Hermitage, which was organized by the late painter and educator Grigory Dlugach.

The association attached itself informally but inextricably to the spectacular Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which Dlugach saw as a “silent school of art” and which painter Daniel says offered an artistic alternative to Moscow’s “officially administered norms.”

Deprived of opportunities to exhibit their paintings, much less sell them, the painters labored in humble conditions and virtual obscurity until 1989, when Santa Rosa businessman Tony Wolff discovered them through a chance meeting during a trip to Russia initially intended as a search for his family roots in Lithuania.

By then, glasnost was in full swing and the loose-knit collective was starting to emerge from its isolation, having secured the support of a Soviet entrepreneur and even experiencing a few modest exhibitions.

Wolff, now 46, had recently closed his marketing consultant firm and was looking for something new to devote his energies to. “I was on that track to make my millions and I just wasn’t having any fun,” he recalled in an interview. “I set up the goal that the next thing I’d do with my life, I’d do whether I got paid or not.”

Although his wife is an artist, Wolff himself has no artistic background. Still, he said he was struck by the quality of the Hermitage group’s work and the depth of their commitment. When he asked one of them what had compelled him to keep painting when there was no hope of being discovered, the artist replied, “I must paint or I get sick.”

Wolff was so moved that he decided to abandon his family quest to concentrate on bringing the artists and their works to the United States. After an arduous battle with the Russian bureaucracy, he succeeded in organizing a series of exhibitions in Sonoma County last February.

Working through the Sonoma County Foundation and the Exchange Bank of Santa Rosa, Wolff orchestrated a series of local exhibitions, culminating with a show at the Sonoma County Museum. The exhibitions, in turn, produced enough revenue to help pay for the artists themselves to travel to California last month.

Tonight’s show at the Malibu Community Center--at 6955 S. Fernhill Drive, Point Dume--will be the only one in the Los Angeles area, coming on the heels of exhibits at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts and the Riverside Art Museum.

While in Malibu, the painters--Alexander and Sergei Daniel, Albert Bakun, Boris Golovachev, Vladimir Kagarlitsky, Vladimir Obatnin, Mark Tumin and Yuri Gusef--will stay at the home of actor A. Martinez of “L.A. Law” and “Santa Barbara” fame.

The show will feature about 50 oils, ranging widely in style and subject matter--cubist experiments, depictions of village life, landscapes and portraits of Russian intellectuals.

Many of the works reflect the turmoil of life in the pre- glasnost era, yet manage to avoid the direct Communism-bashing typical of art from the Soviet underground. Instead, says Wolff, the paintings often reflect a search for form and a brooding spirituality that he calls remarkable in an age of official atheism. “They (the artists) describe the underground, radical political stuff as ‘trendy art,’ ” Wolff said.

Shunning the political and the trendy, the Hermitage group embraced a brand of radicalism inspired by the timeless paintings of Da Vinci, Veronese, Rubens, Poussin, Rembrandt and others.

Inevitably, painter Daniel said, the Hermitage experience branched off in different directions, with many of the painters desiring more than to merely “sit at the foot” of the great artists.

“But no matter how wide the tree spread out its branches,” Daniel added, “the search for form keeps the artists connected.”