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By Olga Bobrova
On July 1 we marked the 110th birth anniversary of Vera Mukhina. On July 10 we will mark the 125th birth anniversary of Sergei Konenkov.
"I love manly art," Vera Mukhina used to say. "Michelangelo is my deity." "Michelangelo has for ever become my guiding star" Sergei Konenkov echoed Mukhina.
"They are artists of absolute genius," says Natalia Alexandrova, an expert at the Tretiakov Art Gallery, which houses many works of the two sculptors. "Their work largely determined the development of the world art of the 20th century. Each contributed to it in his own way. Konenkov may be regarded as a more harmonious sculptor engaged in smaller-scale forms. He is a genius of Russian wooden sculpture. Thanks to him, wood is now one of the prerogatives of Russian sculpture. Vera Mukhina was a more europeanized artist. She was equally good at any technique ranging from marble to bronze. But she was also a master given to innovations, an artist of an outstanding avant-garde way of thinking. She was an artist given to dramatization. Her symbols include wings, flights, winds and challenges. Not accidentally her sculpture requires a huge space and a lot of air around it."
Born into a poor peasant family, Sergei Konenkov became an artist thanks to a lucky combination of circumstances. He received an excellent grounding at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. He had seen the world travelling to Italy, Greece and Germany. Education did not suppress his natural spontaneous energy of a rebel. In 1892, as he did his diploma work - the huge clay statue of Samson tearing the chains - Konenkov broke every existing law of academic art, including proportion and the aestheticity of the position. This put him at odds with his teachers. More than that, he instilled ideological implications in the work: "I wanted to reflect the mood of my environment," said he. "I could see that our great people could no longer tolerate the chains that bound them". That was said on the eve of the first Russian revolution of 1905. No wonder, when the revolution broke out, Konenkov was among the rebels on the barricades. In 1906, when the ashes of the revolution were still mouldering, he created the amazing marble portrait "Nike". He took the name of the Greek goddess of victory to call this radiantly smiling woman's head. "'Nike' is my challenge, my belief that revolution will shortly win", insisted Konenkov. Suddenly, at the turn of the 1920s, he, already a recognized master, switched over to wooden sculpture, a sphere absolutely new to him. He created the world inhabited with fantastic folk images, female figures, mysterious dryads, or nymphs of trees, dubbed "Koras" by him, old men and prophetic old women from tales and legends. Each of these was carved out of one piece of wood, a twig or a root. Naked female figures came to symbolize Konenkov's art.
Vera Mukhina came from a wealthy family of a merchant. Though she decided to become an artist against the wish of her relatives, the family supported her during her studies at the Grand-Chomier Academy. She studied in Paris from 1912 to 1914. Her teachers were Bourdel and Mayole - two giants of the European school of sculpture. She came in contact with the Cubists and went to study in Italy. Among her friends were such outstanding personalities as painters Lyubov Popova and Alexander Exter and clothes designer Nadezhda Lamanova.
In the 1920s Mukhina rose to national prominence. In 1925 she displayed the statues: "Julia", a female torso cut out of the trunk of a linden tree, "Wind", a small bronze female figure, amazing for its dynamics, and "A Peasant Woman" a two-meter bronze statue, one of her most perfect works. "She is a Russian goddess of fertility, a Russian Pomona," Mukhina described the statue, which is now in the exposition of the Tretiakov Art Gallery, and another cast of it stands in the museum of the Vatican.
All her life Mukhina sought to embrace large-scale forms. But only once did she manage to create such a composition. In 1937 at the International Exhibition in Paris the world saw for the first time her Worker and Farmer, a sculpture that later was replicated in thousands of posters, cards, and stamps and was used in cinema. The sculpture was a real accomplishment for Mukhina and her team. In a record short time of three months they built an enormous 24-meter-tall and 75-ton-heavy sculpture from sheets of stainless steel connected together with the innovative method of spot welding. These two powerful figures were erected at the highest point of the exhibition pavilion, 334 meters high. The figures seem to be moving fast. Their step is so wide and energetic that it resembles a lunge of a fencer. One hand of each figure shoots upwards holding the hammer and sickle, the two symbols of the Soviet Union, the other hand of each is thrown backward. The composition is, as the author put it, "a breakthrough into the future, to the light and the sun, to the feeling of human strength."
"Mukhina's Worker and Farmer is a monument to our time," says expert Natalia Alexandrova, "to the Russian culture of the 20th century, to its romanticism and tragedies. It may be regarded as a symbol of this country, and it retains its significance to this day."
The 1940s brought Mukhina a period of disappointments. Her artistic style, based on images and allegories, did not fit into the aesthetic standards of Stalin's time. Mukhina put up a desperate struggle for her ideas. But her projects were either suppressed or seriously distorted, as was the case with the monuments to composer Tchaikovsky in Moscow and writer Maxim Gorky in Nizhny Novgorod. Mukhina died in 1953 at the age of 64.
Sergei Konenkov died nearly two decades after Mukhina. He lived to see his 97th birthday. Konenkov was a favorite with the authorities. He worked in the United States and created there a gallery of portraits of great people - Chaliapin, Dostoevsky, Rakhmaninov, Pavlov and Einstein. Later he enriched this collection with another series, which included Mussorgsky, Leo Tolstoy , Darwin and Socrates, and created an outstanding auto portrait, which is now one of the assets of the Tretiakov Art Gallery.
Vera Mukhina is a titanic figure in Russian art. She overcame every obstacle, never giving in and accomplishing all she thought necessary.
Konenkov's was a happier life. He managed to fulfil himself. He was also uncompromising but in a different way. Wooden sculpture! He was engrossed in it without taking into account the Academy's criteria, clients' tastes or official aesthetics .
 By Natalia Vinogradova
The ballet company of the Bolshoi Theater is known the world over as the Bolshoi Ballet.
On June 25 the Bolshoi premiered the new version of the popular classical ballet "Don Quixote" according to Marius Petipa's libretto based on the famous novel of Cervantes.
The ballet's new edition was prepared by the artistic leader of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Fadeechev. This version used the best that had been created by the producers who had staged the ballet in Russia - Marius Petipa, Alexander Gorsky, Kasian Goleizovsky, Rostislav Zakharov and Anatoly Simachev. The costumes were made according to sketches done by the artist of Moscow's Emperor's theaters of the early 20th century, Vasily Diachkov. The new production employs a younger generation of ballet stars.
It's one of the Bolshoi's traditions to resume its favorite productions. "We have always been concerned with classical heritage," says the Bolshoi's artistic leader and director, Vladimir Vasiliev. "We have always believed that as long as a production makes our viewers happy, and as long as the dancers take pleasure in walking out onto the stage, the classical production must live. We have repeatedly seen a wonderful production becoming obsolete. We can feel the zest going, particularly, if wonderful artists begin leaving it. The interest subsides, and the production loses its energy. This resembles our life. Therefore we keep resuming classics in the Bolshoi repertoire. We give our ballets a second and a third life. One of the best productions of our last seasons is a new edition of Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet", a ballet in which the legendary Galina Ulanova was so brilliant. The Bolshoi Ballet embodies the classical concept of what is known as "the Russian ballet". Its repertoire is based on classics, which keep developing and renewing. In recent years both the theater's artists and authorities have repeatedly stressed the need to master contemporary choreography, show the new interesting trends that keep appearing on the world ballet scene, and acquaint our audiences with the art of the outstanding choreographers of the 20th century. We have taken the first steps in this direction: there have been joint productions with our British, German, Swedish and American colleagues. Among our latest premieres is an event devoted to Balanchine's choreography, which was held jointly with the Balanchine Foundation and with his colleagues Susan Farrel and John Taras."
"The company enjoyed working on this project. And I believe this is very important and useful to us," says the artistic leader of the Bolshoi Ballet, Alexei Fadeechev. "We haven't mastered western choreography yet. And I would like to fill the gap. I hope the Balanchine event will be one of the accomplishments on this road, and that Balanchine's ballets will take root in the Bolshoi repertoire."
This season Muscovites have seen two ballets by Balanchine - "Agon" to the music of Stravinsky and "Symphony in C Major" by Bizet.
The Russian ballet has always been famous for its stars. The decades-old system of training makes it possible for new stars to get to the world ballet scene.
"The tradition of our art is to pass down experience from hand to hand, 'from foot to foot'. It's essential that we preserve the link between generations," says one of the Bolshoi's leading soloists Nina Ananiashvili.
"Lessons taken from older colleagues and, of course, the required training with ballet masters, the former stars, have always been the Bolshoi's tradition," says a young soloist, Inna Petrova. "I admired the Bolshoi ballet dancers when I went to school. We all admired them from afar. But we tried to do something of our own. One cannot copy another person's performance. I have never wanted to copy anyone. But I have always been interested in the first performers of a production, in those who embodied the choreographer's concept. I always rely on my own emotions and put my own feelings into the character I dance."
Like Nina Ananiashvili, Inna Petrova dances practically all the leading parts from the Bolshoi repertoire. The ballet company has many promising young dancers and even outstanding talents, both among male and female dancers. One of the brilliant soloists, who is particularly good at character parts, is Gennady Yanin, a dancer who captivated his audience at a recent premiere of the ballet "Balda" based on a Pushkin tale to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich. Gennady Yanin dances in the Bolshoi company for the fourth season. Before that he was a soloist at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater.
"The Bolshoi was my dream from my childhood," says Gennady Yanin. "I have come a long way to this goal. After a choreography school I worked at the Stanislavsky Theater for nine years. All this time I continued to hope that one day I would get to the Bolshoi. This is always a dream of any dancer. There are only a few theaters in the world like the Bolshoi."
 
 

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