Art From the Land of Soviet Exiles

Galina Lavrentyeva stepped slowly past the gloomy landscapes in one of the spacious halls of the Central House of Artists.


"Have you ever been in the steppes in early summer?" she asked, pointing at a moody oil painting. "This is the most beautiful season there, in Kazakhstan."


But the Kazakh steppes have seen harsher seasons -- and eras: During the Stalin years, the land received prisoners of the Soviet state and exiled members of ethnic minorities. Lavrentyeva has gathered together the artistic recollections of that time in "The KarLag and Generations," an exhibit that features paintings by artists who survived the years of repressions in Karaganda in Kazakhstan.


"The purpose of the exhibit is not to let people forget about the past," said Lavrentyeva. "I used to know some of these artists. They were people of quite a different breed. No one ever heard from them a single complaint about their destiny, a single reproach."


The exhibit opens with the works of Vladimir Eifert (1884-1960), the director of Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts until 1941 and a noted authority on antiques. One of the most competent art experts in Stalin's Soviet Union, Eifert, an ethnic German, was exiled to Karaganda at the beginning of World War II. He and his wife were resettled in a desolate village, where they worked on a collective farm.


During that period, Eifert formed a circle of pupils and taught them to paint, and created his cheerless series of severe Kazakh landscapes.


"He liked to paint the sky," said Lavrentyeva, a confidant of Eifert's wife. "It symbolized freedom and infinity.


"After the war, some of Eifert's works were found in the garbage cans on the street," said Lavrentyeva, who was given the collection of paintings by Eifert's widow, Yelizaveta. Lavrentyeva donated half of the collection to the Kosteyev State Museum of Arts in Almaty, Kazakhstan; the second half, on display at the Central House of Artists, is kept in storage at the exhibition hall in that Lavrentyeva runs in Karaganda.


The pride of the collection on exhibit is four oil landscapes by Alexander Chizhevsky (1887-1964). A talented physicist, he was arrested in 1942 and was sent to Karaganda, where, while a laborer in the mines, he continued scientific research and tried his hand at painting.


The display, organized and sponsored by the Culture Ministry, also features works by the descendants of former KarLag prisoners or others forced to relocate to Kazakhstan.


The most eye-catching works are tempera paintings by Pavel Rechensky, born in 1924. His education was broken off at age 12 when his well-off peasant parents were forced to move from the Saratov region to Karaganda during forced collectivization.


Rechensky's naive paintings find communist luminaries Stalin, Beria and Lenin in the company of the devil. The works possess "some folk wisdom," according to Lavrentyeva.


The exhibit also includes canvases by Korean painter Alexei Tsoi, Chechen artist Almandy Asukhanov and other artists whose parents were forced to relocate to Karaganda.


"What I admire about these people is their desire to live despite everything," Lavrentyeva said.


"By the way, Alexander Leonidovich [Chizhevsky] met Solzhenitsin at the Ekibasstus camp," she said.


"We have invited Alexander Isayevich [Solzhenitsyn] to visit our exhibit. He thanked us by phone but hasn't come yet. So, maybe he will find the time for us in future."





"The KarLag and Generations" runs through Sunday in halls 17 to 23 of the Central House of Artists, which is located at 10 Krymsky Val. Open daily 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. except Monday. Tel. 238-9634. Nearest metro: Oktyabrskaya or Park Kultury.