THE OTHER LOSKH: 1960–1980s

On December 4, 2015, the Youth Center of the Hermitage will launch the project “The Other LOSKH: 1960–1980s”. Works from the Collections of Nikolai Kononikhin and the Franz Family” as part of the program “Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg. Retrospective” (curator: Sofia Kudryavtseva).

The Leningrad Branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR (LOSKH), a monolithic and powerful state structure ideologically rooted in socialist realism, provided its members with guaranteed livelihoods in the absence of an art market. However, despite the rigidity of the declared creative norms and rules, nonconformist artists were part of the Union from its inception. Alongside official masters of socialist realism, there were “other” artists who participated in the Union’s life only formally. Many of them experienced isolation, loneliness, and misunderstanding, retreating into their creative searches while maintaining contact with a narrow circle of like-minded individuals.

The role of independent artists working within the framework of the official Union, in comparison to representatives of the underground, remains insufficiently studied and appreciated in St. Petersburg’s art history. The “Other LOSKH” project includes exhibitions of works by these artists, round tables, and meetings with collectors and critics.

The project’s exhibition features more than 60 works of painting, graphics, and sculpture by the following artists: Yevgenia Antipova, Zaven Arshakuni, Yevgeny Baykov, Mikhail Belomlinsky, Semyon Bely, Valery Vatenin, Rostislav Vovkushevsky, Vladimir Volkov, Lev Volshtein, Solomon Gershov, Ivan Godlevsky, Herman Egoshin, Boris Yermolaev, Vladimir Zhukov, Vyacheslav Zagonek, Alexander Ignatyev, Grigory Izrailevich, Boris Kalaushin, Anatoly Kaplan, Maya Kopytseva, Boris Korneev, Valentin Levitin, Vladimir Malagis, Vera Matyukh, Galina Molchanova, Gerta Nemenova, Sergey Osipov, Valery Rabchinsky, Boris Starodubtsev, Mikhail Skulyari, Viktor Teterin, Leonid Tkachenko, Yuri Tulin, Vitaly Tyulenev, and Lyubov Kholina.

Program:

• December 4, 2015, 6:30 PM – Opening of the exhibition. Presentation of N. Kononikhin’s book Ivan Godlevsky. Dedication to Art.
• December 5, 2015, 4:00 PM – Roundtable discussion: “The ‘Other’ Artists in Official Art. Leningrad Art: 1960s–1980s.” Moderator: Stanislav Savitsky. Guests: A. Boyko, N. Vatenina, M. Dzhigarkhanyan, G. Ershov, A. Zaslavsky, I. Karasik, N. Kononikhin, S. Kudryavtseva, A. Lyubimova, A. Mitin, A. Franz, L. Franz.
• December 9, 2015, 6:30 PM – Lecture by N. Kononikhin: The Territories of the ‘Other’ LOSKH.

Collections:

Anna and Leonid Franz collect works of Russian art spanning from the 1920s to the present. Their collection includes paintings, graphics, sculptures, videos, and multimedia objects, with a particular focus on works by St. Petersburg artists. In January 2013, as part of the “Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg. Retrospective” project, they curated the exhibition Simple Rules at the State Hermitage Museum’s Department of Contemporary Art. This exhibition featured works from Russian and international private collections, including over 40 pieces from the Franz collection by artists such as Sholom Schwartz, Valentin Gromov, Vladimir Shagin, Valentina Povarova, Gerta Nemenova, and others.
Anna and Leonid Franz also sponsored the publication of exhibition catalogs for Maria Gorokhova and Lyudmila Kutsenko, whose solo exhibitions were held in 2012 at the Rumyantsev Mansion in St. Petersburg.

Nikolai Kononikhin’s Collection, formed in the 1990s, centers on works by artists from the “left” LOSKH: students of A. Osmerkin, the “Group of Eleven,” Kondratyev’s circle, the Lithography Workshop, and others. Kononikhin curated exhibitions such as In Memory of the Teacher (1997), Artists of the “Group of Eleven” (1998), Abstractionism and the Apollo Society (2001), Media Art and Mass Media (2001), Soviet Impressionism (2013), Leningrad Underground (2014), and exhibitions of B. Korneev (1997), V. Tyulenev (1998), Y. Ivanova (1998, 2014), A. Chezhin (2001), V. Zhukov (2013), V. Matyukh (2015), and others.
He is the author of the book Ivan Godlevsky. Dedication to Art (2015) and lecture series such as Art Through the Eyes of a Collector and Inside Art at the Russian Museum, and Pavel Kondratyev and Artists of His Circle at the Museum of St. Petersburg Avant-Garde (Matyushin House).