Vlady Kibalchich Russakov

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Vladimir Victorovich Kibalchich (Rusakov) (June 15, 1920-July 21, 2005) was a Mexican painter. In Mexico he is best known by the name "Vlady." The Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts (2002)

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[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Vlady's father Victor Lvovich Kibalchich was a Belgian-born Russian revolutionary who wrote in French under the pen-name Victor Serge. Serge arrived in Russia in 1919 and Vlady was born the following year in the Russian city of Petrograd. Serge worked in the creation of the Comintern, and went to Germany on a Comintern assignment in 1921 with his family. Vlady’s first language was German, but he was most at home in Russian, French and later Spanish. The family returned to the USSR in 1925 when Serge joined the front ranks of the Left Opposition to fight against Stalin’s corruption of the Party and the revolution. The family was relentlessly persecuted : Vlady’s maternal grandfather Alexander Russakov was driven from his factory and union, denied a bread-card and an internal passport and died from the privations. Vlady’s mother, Liuba Russakova, was driven mad by the persecution and admitted to the Red Army's psychiatric clinic.

Vlady accompanied his father to the Gulag when he was deported in 1933. During three years of complete penury, Vlady lived in Orenburg, (Kazakhstan). His teachers there were Old Bolsheviks, Lenin and Trotsky's companions who were also deported by Stalin.

Thanks to the intervention of French intellectuals (particularly Romain Rolland), Victor Serge was granted freedom. Vlady and his parents left Russia for Belgium, then France. A supporter of the anarcho-syndicalist cause during the Spanish Civil War, Vlady was not able to reach the front because of communist hostility. He decided to become a painter and spent time in the studios of Joseph Lacasse, Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, and sculptor Aristide Maillol.

After the Nazis invaded France, Victor Serge and Vlady had to flee again. Vlady's mother remained in a psychiatric asylum in Aix-en-Provence, where she died in 1985. In Marseilles, Serge and Vlady joined Varian Fry, Mary-Jayne Gold, Andre Breton and others in a lovely villa that Serge dubbed “château espere-visa.” The surrealists around Bretón shifted their presence from the cafés of Paris to the beauty of the château. Vlady, considered the passionate young Marxist of the crew, developed his entrepreneurial talent, collecting dried fruits and nuts and making them into croque-fruit, or fruit rolls, to sell, so there would be food to eat. While Serge wrote The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Andre Bretón was writing Fata Morgana, Vlady sketched relentlessly. After a long wait, Vlady and his father boarded a ship in Marseilles that took them on to Martinique, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. They were turned away from each port because they were considered as “communists”. The United States also denied a visa for Serge because of his past Bolshevik activity. They finally sailed to Mexico where they were welcomed. They arrived in 1941, months after the murder of Leon Trotsky who was also welcomed in Mexico.

[edit] Artistic career

Vlady was immediately fascinated by the muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, but his first attempts to paint a mural were unsuccessful. He had to humbly learn how to be a “Mexican” artist by traveling all over the country drawing hundreds of sketches of daily life, villages, peasants, farms, domestic animals, landscapes, etc. He adapted himself to the landscape, the soil, and the light of the country that was to be his new homeland.

1947 marked a crossroads in Vlady’s life. His father Victor Serge died of a heart attack. That same year, Vlady married Isabel Díaz Fabela, who would be his companion until his death. Isabel became "Vlady's homeland", to quote the phrase coined by critic Berta Teracena. She gave the Franco-Russian refugee a country and a language. She had become the primary inspiration for his art, giving a face and a body to the Eternal Feminine underlying his quest for the absolute. Vlady became a Mexican citizen two years later.

Even though he greatly admired Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Vlady’s painting was a strong reaction against their nationalist and didactic stances. With a group of young Mexican painters (Alberto Gironella, Héctor Xavier and José Bartolí, soon to be joined by José Luis Cuevas), Vlady created the Prisse Gallery in 1952. Every month, a new exhibition presented the works of the three founders and their friends. At the time, Vlady explored a near abstract way of painting, but one that was still linked to the elements – sun rays, sea waves, sand on a beach, the trembling of the air. Even when he seemed to turn his back on realism, Vlady maintained links with the elements. But the Prisse Gallery was not a painting school. Each painter retained his specificity. Their only common ground was the rejection of the established art. The Prisse Gallery only lasted one year, but Mexican art was deeply renewed. Some critics later spoke about a so called "Rupture Generation".

Vlady then made some long trips to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s (mainly France, Spain and Italy). His artwork was exhibited in Italy, Brazil and Argentina. Thanks to a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation he spent an entire year in New York City (1967-68) where he met Mark Rothko, who had just finished painting his Houston Chapel. Deeply troubled by Rothko’s art (The painting you make is suicide!), Vlady came back to Mexico and severed all links with the Rupture Generation, now at the pinnacle of its success. Henceforth, Vlady’s painting would be realistic. During the same years, Vlady painted what may be considered as the peak of his art: the Trotsky trilogy. The Bolshevik Magiography (1967) is a giant 140 square foot painting that represents the triumph of Trotsky marching proudly with his fellow comrades on Moscow’s Red Square with the Kremlin in the background. La Casa (1973) shows the death of Trotsky with long lines of warriors from all ages: Russian revolutionaries, Zapatista guerrillas, Arab cavalrymen, etc. In the third giant painting, The Instant (1981), Trotsky has disappeared. There only remains a table seized by a sort of frantic dance. A masterpiece of the 20th Century painting was born.

[edit] Later life

In 1989, following the Gorbachev era, Kibalchich traveled to USSR to press for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and Serge.

Vlady lived and worked in Mexico City until 1990, when he moved to Cuernavaca, where he already had a country house with a giant studio. He died of cancer in Cuernavaca.

[edit] Artwork

Vlady was a painter, muralist and printmaker, and a leader of the contemporary art movement in Mexico. His main influences were Mexican muralism and French surrealism, even though he rejected both schools of painting. His painting became “minimalist” for a period during the 1960s, but never completely abstract, before reaching its full expression in the 1970s. There were some marks of expressionism in his mature way of painting, but his acknowledged model was definitely the Italian Renaissance. Vlady lived amidst Caravaggio, Tiziano and Artemisia Gentileschi as if they were his contemporaries. Flemish and Dutch painting was a source of inspiration as well, in particular Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt. Many of his themes were borrowed from classical painting but distorted, ground into multiple fragments and finally reinvented, exactly as Francis Bacon made his famous study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

This protracted acquaintance with classical painting induced Vlady to paint according to the strictest techniques of his masters, using natural products such as egg yolk and earth powders, and entirely rejecting what he called industrial painting. Every morning, Vlady would go to his studio hidden between palm trees, bougainvillea and other tropical plants to prepare his tempera and his colours. He would then paint using layers of oil and varnish in order to give depth to his painting and to make the light leap out of the canvas by a sort of alchemical transformation of matter into a quasi-living vibration. This insistence on classical technique induced Vlady to reject most contemporary art that he believed had forgotten the principles of good painting. He enjoyed saying: “If Picasso, Pablo Ruiz or Bacon could come through a time channel and come to Verrocchio’s studio, or Rafael Sanzio’s, they would not last a week, they would be kicked out as bad painters…”

Between 1974 and 1982, Vlady painted the murals of the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada library of the Secretariat of the Treasury of Mexico. Called Revolution and Elements, this 22,000 square feet (2,000 square meters) mural is an heroic ode to revolutions, not only the Russian Revolution, but also the French, the Latin American, the English and the (US) American Revolutions. The declaration of independence of the 13 colonies was as important as the storming of the Bastille by the Parisian crowd. Typical of Vlady’s encyclopedic mind, social and political revolutions were not the only ones that mattered. An important part of the Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s fresco is dedicated to the Freudian Revolution which praised the sexual freedom of the 20th Century through the great founding myths of the Western civilization: Narcissus, Adam and Eve, etc. In 1987, Vlady was invited by Nicaragua’s Sandinista Government to paint a fresco in the Palacio Nacional (Managua) with the Canadian-Mexican painter Arnold Belkin.

In 2004, Vlady announced that he wanted to donate his collection of 4,601 pieces, drawing, paintings and etchings. On February 9, 2004 the official inauguration of the Personal Room of the Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Arts Vlady (Kibalchich) with the 154 etchings, donated by the author, in the Orenburg Museum of Fine Arts (Russia). On May 17, 2004 he donated the first 500 artworks and the rest is currently split between the artist's home and the Centro Vlady in Mexico City ( 63 Goya Street, Col. Insurgentes Mixcoac, Del. Benito Juárez, in Mexico City). On Juny 15, 2005 the personal anniversary exhibition of dravings in the Russian Academy of Arts. In 2006, a retrospective exhibition of his artwork was held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts). Under the title "Vlady. La sensualidad y la materia" (Sensuality and Matter) the Palacio presented 500 paintings, watercolours and drawings. This giant retrospective put together by Mercedes Iturbe cameomes with a magnificent catalogue (perfect illustrations, thorough analysis). In 2007, the Centro Vlady was launched in a building belonging to the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM). The new institution makes Vlady's archives accessible to the public.: 318 notebooks, 245 engravings, 63 oil paintings and 376 drawings are being exhibited. More than a "simple" museum, the Centro Vlady is a cultural space that opens free artistic, political and philosophical debates of our time.

[edit] References

VLADY (Vladimir Kibalchich), full-colour album, Engl./Russian, 112 p., Orenburg, 2003. By Igor Khramov, Ernst Neizvestny. An exhaustive biography was published in December 2005 by Jean-Guy Rens under the title VLADY: DE LA REVOLUCION AL RENACIMIENTO, Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico, 266 pages.

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