Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism by Howard Jeremy Buinska Irena Strother Z. S. & Irēna Bužinska & Z.S. Strother

Author:Howard, Jeremy, Buinska, Irena, Strother, Z. S. & Irēna Bužinska & Z.S. Strother
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

II

We hate the copying of nature, this bankruptcy of ideas and feelings. We hate studies of light and shade, studies of air and light, studies of sun and rain. All this has nothing in common with the study of the world of colour. Conveying the faktura of visible objects is not the aim of art but of craft. It should not give pleasure to the public or artist. All these things are children’s exercises in grammar. Let us study the world of lines.

Free from anatomical laws and conventions line is also rich in surprises. The square, cone, cylinder and sphere have infinite variations in architecture. It is just a shame that the pyramid with its inclined planes and large base has been so little developed and is rare in architecture. Greece expelled this grandiose, monumental and mystical form. Not a single palace, temple or house is built using the form.

In the Gothic style lines extend into infinity. Here line is cold and serious. In the East line is impassioned and infinite in its variations. India, China, Assyria, Byzantium – every country and people breaks lines according to their taste and in their own way. Each has its own ornament. And it is not just nations but every great artist who has their own calligraphy: Neroccio, Lorenzetti, Botticelli, Cranach, Beardsley and so on.

That which is created by man is never created by nature. Buildings and piazzas, fashionable drawings and caricatures – all these are the concern of human hands.

Zola’s formula that art is nature passing through the prism of temperament is inappropriate for us. Nature is unnecessary to us. We attempt to express that which we desire with the most simple of means. In order to catch that beauty which hides beneath the cloak of realism we sometimes, appropriately, distort nature.

We seek only beauty.

Buddhism teaches that there are several circles of our existence.

The innermost circle is that of the lowest instincts, the circle of earthly desires and earthly sensations. It is the furthest from the divine and light. Next comes the external circle. This is the circle of the spirit and intangible nature. One must possess subtle and finely ordered thoughts and feelings in order to forget the ordinary and mundane and penetrate into the sphere of this circle. Here there is a totally different kind of desire, another beauty, other secrets and other motives. In ancient times people were able to penetrate this world, and we can only gaze enviously at the East as the cradle of so many great religions. Assyria, India and Japan have amassed so many miracles that our hearts sink and minds weary in awareness of our own feebleness.

This spring in St Petersburg there was a Buddhist exhibition which displayed the paintings and sculptures discovered in the Tibetan town of Khara-Khoto.

All this was ancient art. General Kozlov, with an Imperial subvention, found and excavated this town in the sand. He brought to St Petersburg all the frescoes, canvases and boards upon which something had been drawn, plus all the sculptures that were discovered.

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