The Role of Accident In the History of Art

Wednesday evening. 46 Volodymyrska Street. A line of foreign cars at the building entrance. Presentable gentlemen in expensive suits and elegant ladies. The scent of fine perfume. Hip youths hanging around. Fashionable designers and prim foreigners. Eccentric personalities leaving no doubt about their belonging to quite a creative profession, and journalists relishing the spectacle. All kinds of people here, standing patiently in line to enter the building. I do remember sausage-counter and bus-stop lines, but it is an unheard-of thing to stand in a line to visit a gallery or an exhibition.

That’s not quite right. In the now distant Soviet times, when Kyiv hosted the Armand Hammer collection or Ilia Glazunov’s evergreens, there were also lines. But that was so long ago. Everything has changed so much since then. Out went the lines. In came quite a number of art galleries. Exhibitions are being opened every week. True, this causes no special stir. This is mostly for a narrow circle. And then I understood what made this line remarkable: not so much that it was there as by the fact that it had gathered those able to create, appreciate, and afford the luxury of acquiring art. This is as it should be, in principle, at any art exhibition. Otherwise, such a thing as an art market cannot exist normally, normal meaning galleries working at capacity, artists living carefree lives, and we get and enjoy our share of beauty every day, of all places, at home or at work.

However, this simple pattern is typical of a normal art market. Here, the latter, as well as many other things, has some marked national specifics. For want of demand, supply also changes its form. If galleries fail to enlist the support of sponsors, they have to put out far from perfect, easily salable items, artists sink to opportunism, and we are robbed of a chance to see good art.

It is thus quite an event when downtown Kyiv opens a new gallery of impressive size, which is rare by itself, exhibiting the works of avant-garde artists from all over Ukraine, without fearing not to please mass taste. Even if, as it often happens, the pictures do not get bought. And it is twice an event if the gallery premises also manage to gather potential buyers and turn the exhibition into a true feast with live music, a lottery of the exhibition participants’ works, with waiters serving champagne, and lively chats on a spacious balcony — a feast democratic, nobly discreet, bohemian and bourgeois at the same time (depending on one’s taste). No doubt, such things do not happen every day. Yet, it happened at the end of April. A gallery called City N opened at 46 Volodymyrska Street. Incidentally, many will recall that this building has long had a gallery. Why a new one then? Because it is in striking contrast with the old, even though it employs the same team. But the quality and level of works and the very atmosphere are entirely different. Oleksiy Shevchuk, Borys Yehizarian, Oleksandr Dobrody, Anatoly Furlet, Oleksandr Ruban, Heorhy Zaichenko, Roman Reshetov, Vladyslav Sheryshevsky, Ihor Romanko, Mykola Zhuravel, and Serhiy Savchenko (the exhibition presents the works of twenty artists). If these names do not yet ring a bell for you (although they do to connoisseurs of fine art), you are sure, after visiting City N, to remember them and their various and talented pictures ranging from the enchantingly beautiful to strangely attractive, from joyful to melancholy, all executed in most diverse techniques.

Then why has the gallery changed its face? People most directly involved in the emergence of City N tried to persuade me that it was quite accidental. But I think it follows a certain scheme. Judge for yourself.

The National Reserve Bank of Russia plans to open a branch in Kyiv in September. Incidentally, financiers and entrepreneurs do not need to be told about this bank, but the public at large also knows it very well, even without suspecting this. It is thanks to this bank that we relished the tour of PСtr Fomenko’s theater last year. The bank supports this theater in every way possible, having had a building put up for it in three years. In a word, serious philanthropy is not averse to but ingrained in it. But the bank has never extended its attention to art galleries, at least not in the Russian capital. 

“Many things in life happen by accident. That we want to work in Ukraine, where we have a lot of friends, in earnest and for a long time is an open secret,” Aleksandr Lebedev, president of the National Reserve Bank of Russia, told us. “It is by chance that the building we were going to acquire housed a gallery. The latter was such a poor state of repair, and we couldn’t let it go under. So we decided at the very outset to save it. Then we thought it should be developed. And when we met the artists and saw their works, which was a genuine revelation for me, we understood that establishing another good gallery in the capital of Ukraine was exactly the right thing to do. I have always known Kyiv as one of the most cultured cities of Europe (familiarity with the works of Ukrainian artists is more testimony to this), but even I was pleasantly surprised to see such attention the Kyiv public paid the exhibition. It is splendid if we managed to bring the people such joy. “I am often asked: if businesspeople deal with a modern art gallery, what is it, some tactic or strategy for increasing profits or evidence of aesthetic taste? I hope when the doubters see the exhibited pieces they will admit this is taste rather than something else. Nobody is seeking any surplus value. It will be good if the gallery pays off one day. But without a doubt this not the way to make money. “The post-Soviet period is hard for us all. We have seen no concrete benefit from money. But what can this benefit become manifest in? In philanthropy and the development of culture and art. I hope this kind of cooperation among artists, musicians, and banks will become in the next few years a new symbol of the current epoch, when money will find it proper use from the moral standpoint.”

I listened to Mr. Lebedev without the slightest desire to object. Why? Everything was in the right place. I wish I could hear more words like this, backed up by deeds, which is essential, from the mouths of bankers. And it is in fact not so important for me, unpatriotic as it may sound, what kind of bankers, Ukrainian or foreign, they are. We so often scare ourselves and those who surround us with all kinds of horrors stemming from foreign investments, we are so afraid of intellectual invasion allegedly launched against us either from the West or the East that we place all our strength in mental torment, leaving nothing for creativity or at least some kind of action. Everything has been squandered on words about patriotism, independence, and love of the fatherland. What we lack is true love for our country — shown in deeds, not words. So if it is a question of this kind of invasion, I’m for it.

But let’s get back to the gallery. The story about it would be incomplete if I did not mention two more actors, two Natalias, Andreyeva and Syhliar. They were employed at the former gallery, where they were bored with their lack of independence or the right to choose pictures and with the gallery being totally profit-oriented. When representative of the National Reserve Bank of Russia in Ukraine, Vyacheslav Yutkin, met them, he insisted they stay behind and take up the establishment of a new gallery. They agreed, provided that they had complete freedom, which was in fact granted them. Another thing is funding. Natalia went to the provinces, meeting artists and selecting works, and, as Mr. Yutkin is convinced, she did an excellent job. They are today both curators of the City N gallery which promises to live a full- blooded life in the future as well. For this only requires such things as freedom and money, while so far there is no shortage of talent, thank God. It is not only artists whom the bank gives an opportunity to demonstrate their talents. It is planned to open a cinema-cum-concert hall in the same building in September (with 600-800 seating capacity), with state of the art equipment (Mr. Yutkin nurtures a hope, perhaps not ungrounded, that this will be one of Kyiv’s best movie theaters), a concert cafe, and, of course, a bank of his own to play the role of economic buttress for all these cultural institutions.

***

The exhibition was drawing to a close. The audience was gradually leaving. I strolled over the gallery’s emptying halls with Oleksiy Shevchuk who exhibited at City N his romantic paintings, nice sculptures, each having a character and soul of its own, and untraditional furniture which keeps your eyes glued to it. We were discussing the exhibition and wondering at the number of visitors. Any, even occasional, attention to the artist benefits everybody: it means society is getting healthy, Oleksiy thinks. He admits, though, that artists have a hard life these days and are beset by the notorious problem of selling their works. True, there is some movement. A rich class interested in works of art is emerging. “Look at the luxury buildings being built now,” said Oleksiy. He is an architect by education, so this subject is naturally very close to him. “They require cool design and painting. This is exactly what is exhibited here. Today (but in my absence), a certain tycoon saw my works and the catalogue: a wall in his new house has twelve niches for sculptures. So he is interested. This means we are still needed as artists. Yet, all this is happening against the backdrop of falling general living standards. The average man does not buy paintings; it has nothing to do with him. This is painful. But still, we have to work.” And Oleksiy cast a quizzical glance at me. Again, I didn’t feel like objecting.

№15 May 15 2000 «The Day»
In using our publications, reference to The Day is mandatory. © "День"