Beyond Order by Jordan B. Peterson;

Author:Jordan B. Peterson; [Peterson, Jordan B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

One Room

I live with my wife in a small semidetached house, with a living room that cannot be larger than 12’ x 12’. But we worked to make that room extremely beautiful, while endeavoring to do the same with the rest of the house. In the living room hung some large paintings (not to everyone’s taste, certainly: they were Soviet realist/impressionist pieces, some illustrating the Second World War, some representing the triumph of communism), as well as a variety of cubist miniatures and South American pieces heavily influenced by the native tradition. Prior to our recent renovations the room had held at least twenty-five paintings, including about fifteen smaller pieces (12” x 12”). There was even one—reminiscent of a medieval etching, although painted on canvas—on the ceiling, where I had attached it with magnets. It was from a Romanian church. The largest was 6’ high and about 8’ wide. (I know perfectly well that aggregating all these paintings together in such a small space contradicts my earlier point about devoting a room or even a building to a single work of art, but I have only a single house, so I plead necessity: If I wanted to collect paintings, they had to be put where I was able to put them.) In the rest of the house, we used thirty-six different colors, and a variety of different glosses on the walls and the trim throughout the building—all from a palette that matched a large realist painting of a railway yard in Chicago in the 1950s, created by the same artist who helped us plan and then renovate our home.

I bought the Soviet pieces on eBay from Ukrainian junk dealers specializing in Soviet-era artifacts. At one point, I had a network of about twenty people in the Ukraine sending me photographs of whatever paintings they had scrounged from the ruins of the Soviet bureaucracy. Most were awful. But some were amazing. I have a great painting, for example, of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, standing in front of a rocket and a radar installation, and another from the 1970s of a lonesome soldier writing his mother in front of a large radio. It is really something to see relatively modern events memorialized in oil by talented artists. (The Soviets kept their academies functioning continuously from the nineteenth century onward and, although tremendous restrictions were placed on what could be produced, those who passed through them became highly skilled painters.)

The Soviet paintings eventually took over our house. Most of them were small and insanely inexpensive, and I bought dozens of them. The Soviet era produced its own impressionism, often depicting landscapes, rougher and harsher than the classic French versions but much to my taste and reminiscent of where I grew up in western Canada. While seeking them out, I exposed myself to a larger number of paintings, I like to think, than anyone else in history. For at least four years, starting in 2001, I searched eBay, looking at roughly a thousand paintings a day,* seeking the one or two in that number that were of genuine quality.

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