The Sixties and the Thaw
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B.Y. Kafengauz
In 1959, my grandfather Bernhard Borisovich Kafengauz purchased an apartment through the USSR Academy of Sciences, and our family (grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, and I) moved from a communal apartment (apartment shared by several families, with communal kitchen and facilities) on Yakimanka to a separate, large for those times, four-room apartment on Dmitry Ulyanov Street. In the new apartment, the most spacious and bright room was turned into my father’s studio for many years. There, my father worked from morning until late evening, and often all night long. He smoked heavily and walked kilometers every day, quickly approaching a canvas on the wall to apply a brushstroke, then slowly moving away from it to evaluate the result.
Many of my father’s paintings and sketches for his monumental works were conceived in this studio. For a while, I tried painting under my father’s supervision, but I was eventually expelled with the comment, “Interesting, but you’re distracting me.” It must be said that while my father regularly took me to exhibitions, he did not stimulate my drawing abilities in any way. Moreover, he repeatedly said that women artists were terrible; “they were always covered in paint, smelled of turpentine, dressed sloppily, and cooked poorly.” My father, in all honesty, did not like the fact that, as a rule, children of artists followed in their parents’ footsteps. He believed that a child should be given colored pencils, but not paints. Only when the desire to paint was so great that it forced the child to steal from the artist-parents could such a child be left alone with paints. Only sometime after that the child could start painting classes. My father either was unaware of the benefits of painting on a child’s development, or he deliberately ignored the opinion of psychologists on this issue. He was only concerned that there were fewer bad artists on earth.
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In the 60s, Yuri Kafengauz was intensely preoccupied with “easel painting”. (In Russian, “easel painting” is recognized as an art form separate from monumental painting.) He also briefly taught at Moscow Children’s Art School No. 1 on Prechistenka street, where, thanks to his originality and excellent knowledge of art history, he left a bright mark on the hearts of his students. Tatyana Dobrynina writes about this in detail in her article “Three Meetings with the Teacher.”
Kafengauz experimented with book graphics and designs for several books, among which I would especially like to note the illustrations for Herman Melville’s book “Israel Potter” (1966).
Front and back endpapers of Herman Melville’s book Israel Potter, 1966.
In 1962, the National open competition for the project of the monument “To the Heroes of the Virgin Lands” was held.
More than 100 works were exhibited in the RSFSR pavilion at the National Exhibition of Economic Achievements. Kafengauz proposed an allegorical project, “The Sun in the Hand”, representing a hand directed upward, holding the sun. The project was noted as one of the most interesting; it was written about, and its photographs were published in the press.
Design of the monument Sun in the Hand, dedicated to the Heroes of the Virgin Lands. 1962.
In the same year, 1962, the Moscow Union of Artists established the Workshop of Decorative and Design Art (A state-sponsored bureau, distributing commissions). Kafengauz soon started working here. Orders for the decoration of industrial and cultural buildings flowed into KDOI from all over the country. These orders were distributed among artists on a competitive basis. Here, artists received a “guaranteed” monthly salary, which was issued as a loan against a future order. The artist’s work consisted of several successive stages, including: development of a sketch, entering the sketch in a competition, and approval by the artistic council in Moscow. What followed was the coordination of the project with the customer, preparation in the halls of the “Combine” of the so-called “cardboard” – a large sketch of the work, executed in a particular proportion to the natural size. As a result, an estimate of the upcoming work was drawn up, and the artist, together with a team of assistants, set off to carry out his project.
“Guaranteed salary” was very attractive for artists. At that time, one could paint as many pictures as one wanted and participate in exhibitions. Still, there was no mechanism for selling works from exhibitions in the country, and the artists’ families lived very poorly. But something else turned out to be much more important than money: monumental and decorative work in the 1960s acquired clear creative advantages in the eyes of artists compared to easel painting. While official art exhibitions were held under the banner of socialist realism, the spirit of the Thaw had already seeped into the art council, which assessed monumental and decorative works. This council was more loyal and allowed modern trends in the visual arts. A striking example of this is the design by a group of young artists (E. Ablin, A. Gubarev, G. Derviz, I. Lavrova, I. Pchelnikov) of the Palace of Pioneers on the Lenin Hills in Moscow (1962), perceived not only by the professional community, but also by ordinary Muscovites as a gift to the city, as a breath of fresh air, “as a ray of light.” Freedom of creativity naturally attracted artists.
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B.Y. Kafengauz
I was 9 years old when my father took me to the Palace of Pioneers to see how mosaics were laid out on its facades, how artists and designers worked on the scaffolding, and introduced me to them.
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The permanence of the monumental exhibition also attracted the artists. Easel works at any exhibition are exhibited for a limited time and then returned to the artist’s studio. Paintings and mosaics on the facades and interiors of buildings remain alive among the people for whom they were created. At that time, it seemed that they would stay forever.
