The underground poets read their works in those barracks rooms and also in Moscow apartments. They were fed by the “patrons of the arts” of the period like the pianist Richter and the poet Pasternak; the latter usually stuffed an “honorarium” into a performing poet’s coat pocket (amusingly, it was in strict accordance with the number of poems read). These were the first tentative hints at a developing system of private funding, as opposed to state financing.
But when the enterprising dissident Alexander Ginzburg began distributing the poems in typed anthologies (the
The underground artists, who were watched as closely as their literary brothers, managed to find themselves a more comfortable niche, nevertheless. One of them thought it was because Khrushchev considered avant-garde artists “run-of-the-mill swindlers, something akin to fleas under a shirt,”35 so they were not squeezed until they jumped out too boldly onto the surface.
The first big news on Soviet nonconformist art came in 1960 from
Soviet private collectors began buying the watercolors by Anatoli Zverev, featured in
When Zverev worked, it was a real show: he would come to someone’s luxurious home, toss sheets of paper on the floor and then spatter paint on them, holding several brushes at a time. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, dancing a jig, Zverev growled and cursed, imitating a shaman, as he covered the papers with new color splashes and strokes, the final ones being his famous initials, AZ. His portraits, amazingly, bore quite a resemblance to the sitter, and it is not surprising that collectors (dentists, lawyers, engineers) picked them up by the bunch, since in the beginning they went for a trifle: three rubles apiece.
The big-time Soviet collectors, even those who, like the legendary Georgy Costakis, were already collecting Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lubov Popova, did not pay attention to the second avant-garde until the West did. The sudden attention of the foreign press turned the underground artists into tourist destinations, along with the Kremlin and the Moscow metro, and their exotically grimy cellars were visited by foreign businessmen, journalists, and Western diplomats.
Dip-Art (art for diplomats and other foreigners) burgeoned in the early 1960s, changing the position of unofficial culture. Private enterprise until then had existed quietly on the sidelines, where a few legal private dentists and tailors toiled. Culture, on the other hand, as an important part of ideology, was a total state monopoly.
Since the relevant documents are still classified, we can only guess why the ubiquitous secret police looked the other way as the Moscow Dip-Art scene (followed by Leningrad) expanded and flourished. It is a fact that this unofficial guild, which at its peak had at least several dozen participants (probably around two hundred people), gradually turned into a tempting alternative to the state system of rewarding artists.
The underground Dip-Art market grew more orderly and prices rose, evolving from primitive barter, when the artist traded a painting for a bottle of whiskey or a pair of jeans, to significant (by Moscow standards) sums in hard currency.
Outstanding among the first serious Western buyers was the American economics professor Norton Dodge, who wanted to create an exhaustive collection of Soviet nonconformist art. Traveling regularly to the Soviet Union, the stocky, mustachioed, walrus-like Dodge brought out around fifteen hundred works by underground artists, which became the basis of his permanent collection at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The collection, now numbering approximately twenty thousand works by hundreds of artists, may be regarded as definitive.
Dodge began his purchases with Lianozovo artists, then added the works of the hyperbolic figurativists Vladimir Veisberg and Oleg Tselkov; the neoprimitivist Vladimir Yakovlev; the metaphysical surrealist Vladimir Yankilevsky; the abstract artists Eduard Shteinberg and Lydia Masterkova; the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov; and artists from the conceptual camp who differed in approach, like Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Grisha Bruskin; the inventors of Sots-Art, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid; and artists working in the same vein, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, and Vagrich Bakhchanyan. Perhaps the best works of these artists are in the Zimmerli Museum.
Some Dip-Artists became well off, converting their hard currency and ruble earnings into cars, dachas, and co-op apartments. The boldest and most determined of them, like Oscar Rabin, started having one-man shows in the West with the help of foreign diplomats and Russophile gallery owners. This led Rabin, a born activist and leader, to the idea of a show of nonconformist art in Moscow, outdoors, like Paris exhibitions on the banks of the Seine.
Rabin’s idea, when he first proposed it in 1969, was dismissed by his fellow artists. But by 1974, the underground artists felt confident enough to try it. They gathered on September 15, a Sunday, in a vacant lot for a happening, which they called “The First Autumn Painting Exhibition in the Open Air.”
This was intended as a rather modest action, with perhaps a dozen participants, including Rabin and his wife and son, Komar and Melamid, and the Leningrad artist Yevgeny Rukhin. The overzealous authorities, intending to teach the disorderly artists a lesson, turned it into a symbolic event with international resonance.
When the artists began setting up their works on folding aluminum tripods, they were attacked by young toughs who had been waiting for them; they grabbed the paintings, broke them and tossed them into parked dump trucks. Some canvases were burned on the spot. The attackers beat up anyone who resisted, and finally unleashed several bulldozers and street-washing trucks, whose icy streams of water completed the destruction.
Rabin jumped in the path of a bulldozer to rescue a painting. Several Western correspondents, who had been invited to the happening by the artists, were also beaten up. The result was a series of Western reports with headlines like “Soviet Officials Use Force to Break Up Art Show. Painters, Newsmen Roughed Up in Turbulent Public Confrontation” and “Art Under the Bulldozers.”
This altercation created friction between the secret police and the Party. As General Filipp Bobkov, chief of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, created by Andropov in 1967 for “countering ideological diversions by the enemy,” that is, supervision of culture, described it in his memoirs (which were published in post-Soviet times), the “absurd decision” to use bulldozers against paintings was not made by the KGB and those were not its brawny thugs
