[SergeiSK]

The exhibition Eye of the Beholder
Reporting Anna Tolstova ("Kommersant")

It's just two rooms, and there do not know, happy or sad. On the one hand, we show only schedule the 1920's and early 1930: surely it's heyday, Vladimir Lebedev (1891-1967), a great artist without any exaggeration, a children's book and an excellent draftsman, but would like to see a full retrospective, not many Who knows what he did after "Detgiz. On the other hand, when a vegetarian during the thaw elderly Lebedeva, People's Artist of the RSFSR and the corresponding member of USSR Academy of Arts, was asked whether he had a retrospective, he replied that he is not ready yet, and it became clear that the retrospective he emphatically does not want all about knowing yourself.

The curator of this exhibition, Galina Cedric seems to have decided to spare the classics. For example, Lebedev posters for "windows GROWTH" Civil War is, even though they are - in Mayakovsky vociferous and colorful - knocked out of the intimate tone of this subtle and refined, similar to her hero, the exposure. But notice that the bourgeois, fluttering balloons from under the feet of printing step of the proletarians of the poster "In Europe moves red specter of communism", will soon turn into a fat, greedy piece of "Ice Cream" Samuil Marshak. But Lebedev posters for "windows TASS" the Great Patriotic War was not, because they made a completely different person. The man who headed the art editor marshakovskogo "Detgiz" up until the spring of 1936 in the newspaper "Pravda" was not named "artist-shit" (that was the latest stage in a campaign to exterminate the intelligentsia), and every distant from art bastard is not began to explain to him how to.

Chapter books for children in the Tretyakov Gallery is a small but. It starts with two works of 1921, when some of the illustrations in children's magazines and almanacs, which he began to study more at a time of apprenticeship, Lebedev passes to design the book as a whole. And if he had written himself Adventures Chuch-lo, he is still in captivity futuristic "zaum", in Kipling "elephant" we see that the artist who created the Soviet children's book - not in terms of ideology, but in terms of aesthetics, assimilated seems to be everywhere. When out of spots, dots and lines on the plane are formed such figures giraffe and hippo that the child is reaching for a pencil and paper to draw as much as the first time got into the zoo, instantly "know" each animal. As if the extreme asceticism of military communism led to the strictest economy of artistic means: no image - pure gestalt. Following the "elephant" - a whole wall of books Marshak-Lebedev. The names of the poet and the artist as an equal wrote on the cover of one font size, and sometimes they even changed roles: it Marshak had to illustrate his poems funny and poetic images colleagues. So, incidentally, there was "Circus": on the sketches can be seen as typed text on tracing delicately, so as not to offend, is glued to a picture, tightly stranded sheet. Constructivist layout, suprematic color oberiutsky laughter - all the best in accordance with the slogan of the era Lebedev gave children.

Yet the principal at the exhibition was the "adult" art of Vladimir Lebedev. Rather quickly finished his cubistic experiments, he finds his own style, which has no name (Lebedev himself liked to say of himself: "I am - a lonely artist), but there are plenty of poetic analogies in the literature of those years. Dashing revolutionary sailors from the jowly stolen - this is seen background "Twelve" Block. Overdressed Nep, elegant hookers, punks, bohemians - so imagine the characters of novels Deblin and Remarque. Some of these drawings were printed in the years 1927-1928 in the journals Buzoter "and" Beach ": cartoons were made witty signature by an unknown author (" Why the court has described your films as marriage? - Probably because I just shot his wife "), but by themselves they would not fit into the narrow borders of satirical graphics. A former poster "windows Growth" was so highly esteemed in the poster tenacious, attentive to detail characteristic of the eye, but was and so not typical poster soft, gentle irony.

Mostly, it comes out in the famous nude Lebedev - gave them a room, and it is a true encyclopedia of graphic techniques, in any of which the artist was a virtuoso. In the run-flat hose, skirts unbuttoned, her ballerina tutus, with guitars and quite without anything - posing nude statues in the neoclassical figures lead pencil, melt in the shifting light hydrocarbon hatching, dissolved in water colors, grow out of spots lampblack and tremble under the contour line of the carcass. It erotomanskaya collection - in the sense that it is not from the image, and how it is done, you can get an almost physical pleasure. Anti-Soviet "shit" Lebedev was not even in how he was able to create an atmosphere of intimacy for adults, alone with his drawings, and a child left alone with his book. It was the art of giving a sense of fullness of life, although none of its governing bodies to not empowered.
(Kommersant "№ 87)