Russian Painter Brushes Away Regrets on Artistic Compromise

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia —  He started out convinced that he would become Russia’s Picasso. But it’s unlikely you will have heard of Sergei Yushkevich.

At 43, his hair is graying and slightly wispy, and the skin around his eyes is delicately etched with the wrinkles left by a million smiles. He knows he is good at what he does.

He wields his brushes and oils with dexterity and skill. But doubts swirl in his soul like snowflakes whipped by the winter wind outside his studio window. Is he an artist?

When Yushkevich graduated from the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg in 1985, the Soviet artists’ gravy train--which guaranteed a living to approved artists painting approved subjects--was chugging into decline. Artists were suddenly free. It was an exciting, inspiring, terrifying time. But those schooled in the only approved style, Socialist Realism, had a hard time figuring out who they were or could become.

Like yachts racing out on a stormy sea, Yushkevich and other young artists launched themselves into a chaotic, undeveloped art market. “I had no fear,” Yushkevich recalled. “I felt optimism and enlightenment.”

Artist Envies Creative Drive

Today, older and wiser, he derides much of what he did then, some of which, garish and amateur, is turned to the wall in his studio.

Sometimes Yushkevich thinks wistfully of artists who struggle--restless slaves to creativity who do not starve, yet barely survive. And he envies the hungry, creative kernel that makes their lives both torment and delight.

No matter that he lives quite comfortably, has a decent car, supports his family: He knows that as well-executed as his canvases are, they are only copies.

Oh, he might remove a horse or some other living beast from a masterpiece he is copying for the Arab hotel market. He might get a commission to paint the faces of an Englishwoman’s children into a famous Impressionist work. He can paint seascapes galore for an American hotel. He can change the shape of a masterpiece to fit a space on someone’s wall. He is fast, efficient and utterly reliable.

Whenever the icy regrets blow too hard in his soul, he impatiently brushes them away. He smiles with quiet philosophy, and the lines around his eyes deepen.

Life has sweet moments. When he puts the final brush stroke on one of his reproductions and takes a few paces back to find it turned out particularly well, he gets goose bumps.

“Vanity and ambition is not something that is alien to me. Of course, I should have aimed higher and become something bigger,” Yushkevich said. “I’m trying to quell those feelings of envy and wistfulness. I think it’s better to concentrate on the positive things. It’s better to concentrate on enjoying the process.”

“I don’t consider myself a loser. The Picasso story didn’t turn out. What I turned into was a normal, honest executor of paintings.

“Some people torture themselves with what they didn’t achieve,” Yushkevich said. “But if it doesn’t come naturally, why torment yourself and your family because it didn’t turn out that way?”

When Yushkevich was starting out, a Soviet state body called Kombinat--literally the Factory--was operating, listing thousands of art orders from all over the country. It guaranteed approved artists a living, even if they painted only a single work all year, perhaps a Lenin portrait for a factory somewhere in the Urals or a fairy tale scene for a kindergarten.

Yushkevich painted a series on the life of railway construction workers destined for a barracks.

Introducing Country to Contemporary Art

The Socialist Realist style was the only one Soviet art schools and the Kombinat required. According to Alexander Borovsky, head of the contemporary art department at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, Russian art has not yet recovered.

“I thought the Kombinat would be forever, Soviet government forever, Lenin forever,” Borovsky said. “I was 100% sure I could never do what I am doing now.”

But in its final years, the Soviet state could not afford to pay artists for pictures of nuclear submarines or socialist visionaries. Officially sponsored artists and underground artists alike “felt themselves absolutely naked in the new situation,” Borovsky said. “Ten years ago, no one knew what contemporary art was.

“People, especially old people, had a lot of trouble adjusting. Some of them sold their paintings in the street,” Borovsky said. Others sold to new rich Russians.

Abstract art had been seen as anti-Soviet. There were huge gaps in Soviet art museums and ignorance among the population.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Borovsky has striven at the Russian Museum to foster an understanding of contemporary art--which he sees as a key step to creating a normal art market in Russia. The museum is running a large exhibition of contemporary Russian art.

Yushkevich said that what most artists produced at first was far below museum quality.

“People thought that now they were free they’d be able to produce something the likes of which the world had never seen. But when they got freedom, they were lost. They didn’t know what to do.”

Of his own early efforts to develop a contemporary style, now stacked in his studio, he said: “This is all rubbish. This is the manifestation of that freedom I was telling you about.”

Demand for Russian Art Collapsed in 1990s

In the early 1990s Yushkevich sold still life paintings in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands. The first time he went to Sweden, he sold six and made enough to buy his first car.

But international demand for Russian art collapsed in the 1990s because much of what was snapped up out of curiosity in the late 1980s was later judged to be junk.

With the Russian market undeveloped, the mid-1990s were tough. Yushkevich spent three years selling almost nothing, confused about what the market would accept. He eked out a living using his car as a freelance taxi.

In the late 1990s, through a Russian artist in Britain, Yushkevich started to get bulk orders for quality reproductions, 20 at a time. Yushkevich gathered a group of five to 10 artists, who were paid for their paintings by the square foot, reaping $700 or more for a work that might take a few weeks. Compared with many of his contemporaries, it was fantastic money.

The English firm was used to dealing with artists who specialized in one subject.

“They asked me strange questions: ‘Can you paint a horse?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you paint a man on a horse?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Can you paint the sea?’ ‘Yes.’

“They were shocked. How could one person paint all these things?”

Sometimes he copies works in the Russian Museum. Sometimes his clients send pages from British art catalogs, with instructions for changes.

“It’s going back to the idea of the Kombinat we had in Soviet times,” Yushkevich said. “It’s not highly paid. But it’s guaranteed employment.”

“I’m not driven by a creative desire to paint, like some,” Yushkevich explained. “Sometimes it is enough for me to picture a painting in my head.”

Even some purists are forced to compromise a little to avoid going hungry. Andrei Kolkutin, 44, of Nalchik in southern Russia, a classmate of Yushkevich at the Repin Institute, describes himself as a postmodernist. There have been occasions when there was nothing to eat in the house.

“But I never wavered, I never let it touch or affect my inspiration, my calling,” he said by phone from his studio. “If I can’t sell a single painting in a year, it doesn’t mean that my attitude is wrong, that my art is not required. It is required by me and that is the main thing.”

He has no car and lives simply. His wife lost her job as a waitress recently and probably won’t get another. But Kolkutin said he would never take a more commercial path. To do so, he said, “kills your art and kills your soul. Why live then, if you are ready to kill or sell what you live for?”

With two daughters to support, Kolkutin can dash off a traditional landscape or still life and sell it when he is really desperate.

Last year, when a Danish gallery exhibited some of his works, he sold 36 of them, more than during the previous decade in Russia. But he shrugs at the good fortune.

“It is good that my paintings are sold now, but even if they were not it wouldn’t affect the essence of my work. I will continue painting the way I feel I should, whether I am rich or poor.”

There is no longer a confrontation between an artist and the state. An artist’s work is his own choice. Yushkevich has chosen a less tortured path, but he respects artists who struggle against all odds for their creative ideals.

“That’s what I lack,” he said. “Maybe if I had it that way, things would be different for me now.”

With deadlines to meet and reproductions to deliver, Yushkevich usually works 12 or more hours a day. He slaves to achieve precisely the right highlight on a beetle or an ant.

“I never thought of changing my job,” he said. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”