publications

22 Апреля 2008

John E. Bowlt

Nikolai Zagrekov and the New Objectivity

In the race to establish the sequence of semaphores that has directed the evolution of modern Russian culture, particular attention – both critical and commercial -- has been given to those artists, writers and musicians who broke with tradition and invented a radical language of expression such as Vladimir Maiakovsky, Kazimir Malevich and Igor’ Stravinsky. That the actions of iconoclasts dominate our appreciation of modern Russian art is understandable since, in trying to recognize and define cultural progress, the psychology of enquiry tends to be driven more by the energy of change, infidelity and innovation than by stasis, loyalty and continuum.

This exhibition, where the pride of place belongs to works  by Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zagrekov (1897-1992) forces us to question the exclusivity of this approach, because his paintings and drawings were not avant-garde in the conventional understanding of that term, he accepted the august weight of the Classical canon and he did not transcend the established perimeters of genre or social behaviour – unlike the “barbarians” of Russia’s modern movement. Zagrekov’s numerous sketches of nudes and drapery, part of the Academy mainstay, such as Seated Nude, Leaning to the Left [Сидящая натурщица, наклонившаяся влево] (1922) and Nude with Mirror [Обнаженная с зеркалом] (1930) are powerful witness to his respect for artistic tradition and professional skill.

True, living and working in Saratov and then Moscow and Berlin, axes of new cultural and social structures, Zagrekov was well aware of the extreme gestures and histrionic postures of the avant-gardists – of their ”slap in the face of public taste”.[1] Yet Zagrekov remained untouched by their body-painting, outlandish dress, transrational poetry and discordant music, preferring an art of technical mastery, physical resemblance and reasoned intuition to the rampant dismissal of hallowed values.

       Examination of Zagrekov’s life and work touches on a number of important issues, esthetic, philosophical and social, which tend to be disregarded or hastily swept aside in attempts to measure the values of 20^th century Russian art by outward inventiveness and novelty alone. Here was a professional painter, aware certainly of Neo-Primitivism, Cubism and Futurism, thanks especially to his Moscow mentors, Petr Konchalovsky and Il’ia Mashkov, who chose not to investigate Cubo-Futurism and abstract painting,[2] but, on the contrary, to uphold the narrative and documentary function of art; here was a Russian artist who lived in Germany for almost sixty years, discrediting neither Russian lineage, nor Soviet sympathy, who worked under Hitler’s political dictatorship without placing his art in the service of Nazi ideology and who looked equally to the images of Russian Modernism, the German Neue Sachlichkeit -- and the Italian Quattrocento -- for inspiration, combining their assets in his landscapes, portraits and still-lives.

       These attitudes and conditions became especially manifest from the recent retrospective exhibition of Zagrekov’s paintings at the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and from the accompanying bi-lingual monograph, a valuable source of information on his artistic career.[3] The promotional activities of the Galerie Sagrekow and the Nikolai-Sagrekow-Freundeskreis in Berlin have also done much to place Zagrekov’s achievement in a more synthetic context and to bring his name to a wider audience. This is needed because, for all his desserts, Zagrekov is not an artist of universal renown and, to complicate matters, most public museums, even the State Radishchev Art Museum in Saratov, the painter’s hometown, do not possess examples of his work. Finally, if gregarious and civil in his human relationships (he was married three times), Zagrekov was not vociferous in promoting his image or his ideas in the way that some of his more boisterous Russian colleagues such as David Burliuk and Malevich were.

Perhaps for these practical reasons Zagrekov has been omitted from all the recent major reexaminations of Russian-German cultural relationships, including key publications such as Russkie v Berline and comprehensive exhibitions such as the two surveys called “Moskau-Berlin/Berlin-Moskva”.[4] Such consistent exclusion may also be explained simply by Zagrekov’s comparative youth and immaturity (he was only 25 when he arrived in Berlin): at that point he had no diploma which might have advanced him professionally, he had no real exhibition history (and had not been represented at the celebrated “Erste Russische Kunstausstellung” in 1922) and had not cultivated the kind of social and cultural networking in Moscow which might have proved beneficial in Berlin.

So what, we may wonder, prompted Zagrekov to emigrate to Germany? Reasons are legion – the manifest instability of the young Soviet republic, misgivings about social background in a Communist state (Zagrekov came from a wealthy, bourgeois family, his father being a successful lawyer), resentment at the leadership invested in the Moscow avant-gardists such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin and the radical orientation of Vkhutemas, perhaps even the desire of his wife, Gertruda Galler, to rediscover her German roots.  As a young and optimistic student and in the wake of the German and Hungarian revolutions of 1918 and 1919, perhaps Zagrekov was also drawn to the promise of international social reform and democracy which, in the early 1920s, many associated with the immediate future of Europe.

 Yet Zagrekov was a profoundly Russian artist, coming from the heart of Russia, i.e. Saratov (Galler, his first wife, hailed from one of the old German families there), and he never forgot his Russian ancestry. He was among the first to welcome the Soviet army into Berlin in 1945 and hastened to design a monument to the fallen Soviet soldiers, even if he did live most of his life outside of Russia. In any case, particular reference to Zagrekov’s Russian connection helps us to assess Zagrekov’s artistic accomplishment more readily and to explain more fully his life-long and passionate interest for things Russian.

       There is much typicality in his biography ‑- he lived and worked much like many other Russian and German painters in the 1920s onwards, that he catered to an upright middle-class and that he enjoyed the outward trappings of success – affiliation with professional organizations (for example, the Verein Berliner Künstler and the Accademia Italia delle Arti e del Lavoro), prizes, regular exhibitions, honorable mentions and positive reviews.[5]  As a synoptic phenomenon, as an artist who upheld the traditional criteria of his métier and as an artist who still developed an individual style, neither convoluted, nor simplistic, Zagrekov deserves attention and appreciation, even if objective enquiry is hampered by certain deficiencies in his biography, e.g. the lack of early works produced in Saratov and Moscow and of information regarding his life under the Nazi dictatorship or the Soviet commissions for his twelve portraits of political and military leaders in 1945-48. These uncertainties may never be resolved and, as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia recede into remote history, will no doubt, become less topical and less urgent.

However that may be, we are left with a corpus of paintings, drawings and designs, distinguished by their physicality and objectivity, a kind of corpulent Realism rich in ocher and red, dense in texture, resolute in form. These portraits, nudes and flowers speak of a sureness of eye and hand, an unswerving respect of the Classical standards of perspective and proportion and a disinclination to trammel art with occult, religious or subjective imposition. That Zagrekov painted what he saw without undue speculation or caprice is indicated by the title and subject of one of his earliest -- and most arresting -- drawings, The Eye, of ca. 1915.[6]

The preference for the visible over the invisible may come as a surprise, given Zagrekov’s initial training at the Bogoliubov Drawing School and then the Svomas in Saratov and his general involvement in the artistic life of Saratov.[7] After all, in the early 1900s Saratov contributed much to the evolution of the Russian Symbolist movement, and, naturally, Zagrekov was well aware of this accomplishment.[8] On the other hand, it is important to remember that Zagrekov’s first – and perhaps most influential – teacher at the Bogoliubov School was Fedor Korneev who was firmly convinced that students must learn and practice the basic, academic rules of drawing and painting before embarking upon alternative, experimental paths. Zagrekov remembered his professor with great affection: “He was a superb teacher….A new world opened itself up to me….If previously my drawings had been boring and indifferent, I now began to make sketches from nature with fervor and delight”.[9]

Zagrekov may have admired the painting of Viktor Borisov-Musatov, Mikhail Vrubel’ and other representatives of Russia’s fin de siècle, but he was not an apologist of Symbolism, and other, less esoteric, artists of the Volga school, such as Aleksei Karev, Aleksandr Savinov and Petrov-Vodkin, exerted a more formative influence: Karev and Savinov, for example, were among Zagrekov’s principal teachers and Petrov-Vodkin (or, rather, his students such as Leonid Chupiatov, Gerasim Efros and Evgeniia Evenbakh) seems to have inspired some of the first major pieces such as Lovers [Влюбленные] and Rhythm of Labor [Ритм труда] (both 1927).[10] Even if by then Petrov-Vodkin had long been teaching in Petrograd/Leningrad whereas Zagrekov was in Moscow (and then Berlin), the analogies are striking.

Petrov-Vodkin’s reconfirmation of the traditional axes of the Quattrocento, especially the painting of Fra Angelico, must have appealed to Zagrekov.  On the other hand and in spite of occasional sallies into Biblical imagery such as Flight into Egypt [Бегство в Египет] (1923), Zagrekov was not especially drawn to Petrov-Vodkin’s religious attributes, finding a stronger sympathy with Karev’s unpretentious cityscapes and portraits. In any case, in the hustle and bustle of 1920s Berlin with its initial social unrest and subsequent call to order, Zagrekov seemed drawn more to outwards, physical transformation – the spare architecture, the modern dress of the emancipated woman, the prominence of the working-class and the cult of sports -- producing urban masterpieces such as Double Portrait [Двойной портрет] (1927), Girl with a T-Square [Девушка с рейсшиной] (1928), Sportswoman [Спортсменка] (1928), and “Hertha” Attacks (Hanne with the Ball) [“Герта» нападает (Ганне с мячом)] (1930). Still, Zagrekov could also retreat to the tranquility of the trees and flowers or to the naked privacy of his studio as if to reinforce the lyrical mission of art which the Saratov school had advocated so fervently. Throughout his long life Zagrekov used the flower arrangement, the windswept clouds and the female nude as points of emotional withdrawal and gratification, refreshing in their clarity, reassuring in their actuality.

If Zagrekov recognized (but did not champion) the importance of Saratov Symbolism, he was -- by nature, age and mental outlook --  closer to the young, experimental artists teaching at the local Svomas there in the early 1920s, especially Valentin Yustitssky and David Zagoskin. Certainly, Zagrekov did not share their abstract vocabulary and neither Suprematism, nor Constructivism were his currency, but, nevertheless, he recognized the importance of their laboratorial exercises in rigorous formal relationships, in the “color” black (returning in the black backgrounds of Girl with a T-Square and Sportswoman), and in the application of abstract compositions to commercial and architectural design (Zagrekov made promotional posters for corporations such as Trumpf Chocolates and worked as a private and civic architect in the 1930s).  Indeed, Zagrekov’s most successful paintings of the 1920s are distinguished by the qualities of severity, balance, economy and efficiency. The Still-life [Натюрморт] of 1926, for example, with its black and white table, absence of ornament and almost mathematical distribution of weights and measures is reminiscent of the painterly constructions of Yustitsky and Zagoskin – and also, incidentally, of Sándor Bortnyik and László Moholy-Nagy, the prominent Hungarian contributors to Berlin Constructivism.

In August, 1919, Zagrekov moved to Moscow where he enrolled in Vkhutemas,[11] taking courses under Konchalovsky and Mashkov.[12] As stellar players in the pre-Revolutionary avant-garde and founding-members of the Jack of Diamonds society, Konchalovsky and Mashkov believed in the need to reproduce the sensuality, vitality and flesh of things, whether in a nude or in a spread of fruit and vegetables and, in attempting to elicit the “sensation of taste, touch and smell” in the viewer,[13] they proceeded to emphasize impasto, texture and density of color. Zagrekov explored this premise in his own tangible and robust paintings of the human figure.

       In the wake of revolution and civil war, Zagrekov left Moscow for Berlin in January, 1922, joining an enormous exodus which bore some of Russia’s most gifted artists. History books tell us of the luminaries who emigrated temporarily or permanently (Natan Al’tman, Marc Chagall, Naum Gabo, Vasilii Kandinsky), but give little space to the vast majority of the 250,000 “ordinary” Russians living in Berlin by 1923. Often lacking language skills and social connections, this vast contingent of artists, actors, businesspeople, nobles, engineers and publishers still constituted a dazzling mosaic of Russian cultural enterprises, often fragile and shortlived – from the nostalgic Zhar-ptitsa [Firebird] magazine to the Blaue Vogel cabaret, from the internationalist review Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet to the productions of the Moscow Chamber Theater on tour. As Chagall recalled, the Berlin of those days “had become a kind of caravansary where everyone traveling between Moscow and the West came together”.[14] Zagrekov was one of many young and promising Russian artists in that caravansary – Boris Bilinsky, Konstantin Gorbatov, Vasilii Masiutin, Ivan Miasoedov, Georgii Pozhedaev, Ivan Puni and Oleg Tsinger, to mention but a few. Most moved on to other cities, especially Paris and New York, but a few, including Masiutin and Zagrekov, stayed behind, weathering out the Nazi storm and witnessing allied victory in 1945. The story, often tragic, of Russia’s “non-avant-gardists” in emigration such as Andrei Rubtsov in Morocco, Leon Gaspard in New Mexico, Nikolai Tarkhov in Paris, and Sergei Vinogradov in Riga has yet to be recounted in full.[15]

       On the one hand, artistic Berlin of the post-War period was an exotic orangérie of Dada, Expressionism and Constructivism, a forum of tempestuous debates on the function and meaning of art and a center of new cultural institutions such as the Novembergruppe (founded in 1919 by Willi Baumeister, Otto Dix and Eric Mendelsohn), the Bauhaus (founded by Walter Gropius also in the spring of 1919, Kandinsky arriving at the end of 1921) and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst spearheaded by Bruno Taut.  On the other hand, Berlin was also witness to the consolidation of a more academic tradition, specifically, to the formation of a Neue  Sachlichkeitkeit to which Dadaists and Expressionists alike (e.g. Grosz and Dix) turned with curiosity, if not, enthusiasm.[16]

   This “new objectivity” was a primary component of the international return to order which characterized much painting and sculpture of the 1920s-30s and which can be associated with both adjacent and distant régimes – from the pittura metafisica and valori plastici of the Italians to the Ash Can school of New York, from the Heroic Realism of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) to Picasso’s new Classicism.  What G.F. Hartlaub, initiator of the term, Neue Sachlichkeit, said of the movement in 1925 -- that its artists “have retained or regained their fidelity to positive, tangible reality”[17] – was relevant to many of these phenomena, even to El Lissitzky’s and Il’ia Erenburg’s Constructivist journal, Veshch’/Gegenstand/Objet of 1922. To an artist such as Zagrekov, foreign to both philosophical rumination and abstract reduction, Neue Sachlichkeit appealed by its attention to the substantiality of things – the texture of a garment, the fullness of a physique, the durability of stone and wood. Together with German colleagues such as Ivo Saliger and Udo Wendel (cf. The Art Journal, 1930s), Zagrekov explored the new objectivity with dexterity and aplomb, submitting his pictures to exhibitions at the Prussian Akademie der Künste, the Verein Berliner Künstler and other venues – and generating favorable reviews.[18] 

       Zagrekov’s paintings of the mid- and late 1920s pay homage to the basic tenets of Neue Sachlichkeit, presenting humans and objects as components of a gelled arrangement dependent upon calculation, materiality and restraint and paintings such as the Double Portrait (1927) and Rhythm of Labor (1927) seem to be extending Grosz’s sentiment that “man is no longer depicted individually in subtle psychological delineation, but as a collective, almost mechanical, concept. Individual destinies are no longer important”.[19] Zagrekov’s range of images (nudes, sports scenes, industry) and methodology (spare palette, simplicity of form, frontality) – his Realism – reflects this urban sensibility of post-War Europe and post-Revolutionary Russia: accelerated industrialization, sports and gymnastics and the factographic media of the wireless, photography, cinema newsreel and documentary reportage. Here was an Amerikanismus which countered the flaccid style of Art Deco and the impasse of abstract painting, a gesture to the Machine Age which Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Louis Lozowick and Charles Sheeler were also praising so fervently in their paintings and prints in New York.

       A major aim of this exhibition is to place Zagrekov’s new objectivity within a Russian or, rather Soviet, context and to indicate that, even if, artistically, he was more at home in post-War Berlin than in post-Revolutionary Moscow, there are strong parallels between his Neue Sachlichkeit and the restoration of  narrative painting in Soviet Russia supported by the very disparate talents of Fedor Bogorodsky, Chupiatov, Nikolai Dormidontov, Aleksandr Labas, Sergei Luchishkin, Solomon Nikritin, Gеоrgii Riazhsky, Kliment Red’ko, Aleksandr Samokhvalov, Aleksandr Shenderov, Nikolai Sinezubov, David Shterenberg and Aleksandr Tyshler, among many others. Representing different stylistic camps (Bogorodsky was a member of AKhRR, Labas, Luchishkin, Shterenberg and Tyshler were members of the Society of Studio Artists OST, Sinezubov was a member of Makovets), many of these painters had already experimented with Cubo-Futurism (Bogorodsky, Shterenberg) and abstract art (Labas, Nikritin, Riazhsky) and were now elaborating pictorial systems which, however complex, reinforced the solidity of matter and the scientific explanation of phenomena. Red’ko’s, Nikritin’s and Tyshler’s promotion of “electroorganism” and their depiction of scientific phenomena such as luminescence, electric power and refraction are a case in point.

All these artists were united by a common dissatisfaction with Suprematism and Constructivism and by a common return to figuration, although they reached and formulated their conclusions in distinctive, independent ways. There are shades of Cézanne in Bogorodsky’s Waifs Playing Cards [Беспризорники, играющие в карты] (1925), of Expressionism in the haunting portraits and interiors of Sinezubov, of transrationality in the still-lives of Chupiatov, and a lyrical école de Paris in Alt’man’s Mimosa [Мимоза] (1927). In subject and palette perhaps the Soviet Realist who is closest to Zagrekov is Samokhvalov whose sportsmen and sportswomen such as After the Long Distance Run [После кросса] (1934-35) and Girl Gymnast [Физкультурница] (1935) are no less determined, confident and monumental than Zagrekov’s.

Just as most of these Soviet artists adjusted to Socialist Realism in the 1930s, so, willy-nilly, Neue Sachlichkeit, with its emphasis on Positivist reality, paved the way for the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur which Alfred Rosenberg established in 1927 and renamed as the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur two years later, and for the Reichskulturkammer supervised by Goebbels in 1933 onwards.  This is not to say that the supporters of the Neue Sachlichkeit such as Christian Schad and Zagrekov himself became Hitler’s court painters, but, indubitably, their strong consolidation of the Realist esthetic appealed to a more conservative, bourgeois taste and to a regime which, in art, emphasized universal accessibility and lucidity of message.  There can be no question that Zagrekov recognized kindred spirits in the primary representatives of Neue Sachlichkeit such as Dix, Rudolf Schlichter and especially Schad, and his paintings such as Spanish Girl (Испанка) (1928) and Sportswoman (1928) have much in common with the masterpieces of the new German Realism.  The choice of subject (the nude, the new urban woman, industrial labor), the taut color scheme of red, brown and ocher and the placement of the subject at the very front of the picture producing a Nahbild (a device borrowed from the Expressionist arsenal) – all these elements bring Zagrekov close to the leading painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

       Although Zagrekov’s work can be accommodated easily under the general rubric of Neue Sachlichkeit, the genesis and evolution of his interpretation differed from that of Dix, Grosz and Schlichter. In German examples such as Dix’s Two Children (1921) [Ill. 1 the morbidity and cruelty of an Expressionist decade of violence are very apparent, rendering such pictures disturbing, if not, ill digestible with their physiological deformations and pathos of ennui. Certainly, like his German (and Italian) colleagues of the new Realism, Zagrekov favored particular genres, especially the portrait, but he imbued his people and places with serenity, security and cordiality, qualities often missing in the more visceral presentations of Dix and Grosz, especially.

       On the other hand and unlike Leo Breuer (cf. Girl Seated, 1928) [Ill. 2] and Schad (cf. Nude, 1929, ) [Ill. 3], both apologists of Neue Sachlichkeit, Zagrekov did not pursue an illusionist approach to painting and a comparison of their nudes, for example, demonstrates that he was occupied more by the painterly elements of texture, gravity, color and rhythm than by a need to render the image in a poster-like or photographic way. Indeed, Zagrekov seemed not to be preoccupied by the cruel social conditions of post-War Berlin and his repertoire does not include the crippled veterans, bloated businessmen and ladies of easy virtue of Dix, Grosz, Erich Heckel and Conrad Felixmüller. On the other hand, Zagrekov recognized the symptoms of a bolder and more robust Germany, hastening to describe, for example, the new status of women (Sports Woman [Спортсменка], 1928), the agricultural campaign (cf. Reaper [Косарь], 1930s) and the regimentation through sports and physical education (cf. Spear-Thrower [Метатель копья], 1930).

Zagrekov portrayed his secure, but unpretentious heroes in a variety of poses and professions – the boxer Hans Breitenspäter (1925), the artist Clasnitz (1928), the student Gory von Stryk (1929), a peasant with an axe (1935), etc. All are united by their sobriety, serenity and self-confidence, unyielding to caprice, humor or prodigality. Here are the new people of the new Germany who, like the nudes of Saliger (cf. Judgement of Paris, 1939) [Ill. 4], the family scenes of Adolf Wissell (cf. Kahlenberg Farmer and Family, 1939) [Ill. 5], the portraits of Rudolf Schlichter (cf. Portrait of Margot, 1924) [Ill. 6] and the sportsmen of Lothar Bechstein (cf. Discus Thrower, 1930s) [Ill.  7], exude self-assurance, ethical uprightness and physical prowess. 

Neue Sachlichkeit emphasized not only objectivity and materiality after the deformations of the Expressionists and Dadaists (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Johannes Baader) and abstractions of the older generation (Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Malevich, Mondrian), but also a pristine order of unhesitating contours, correct anatomical proportions and receding perspectives. As in the case of Schlemmer’s robotic humans (cf. Stairs at the Bauhaus, 1932) [Ill. 8] and Schad’s portraits, Zagrekov’s nudes and still-lives of the 1920s seem riveted to their local spaces, destined to move only in accordance with a preordained formula, never spontaneously or arbitrarily. Even labor is controlled (Rhythm of Labor, 1922) and physical emotion is redirected into the encoded rules of sports and gymnastics.

       Until 1925 Zagrekov studied and then taught until 1933 at the Gewerbeschule für Kunst und Handwerk in Berlin, polishing the skills which he had assimilated in Saratov and Moscow and exploring a variety of genres – studio painting, commercial design and public art.  Some of the portraits and sports scenes which Zagrekov painted in the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit during his tenure at the Gewerbeschule find ready parallels with Soviet painting of the same period. In particular, the “Expressionist-Realist” style of the ostovtsyy comes to mind, e.g., the sports scenes of Aleksandr Deineka, the still-lives of David Shterenberg and the war episodes of Yurii Pimenov, which were also informed by the Expressionism of Dix and Grosz – artists familiar to the Moscow public from two German exhibitions there in 1924 and 1925.[20]

Before the formal imposition of National Socialism, Zagrekov was the unfailing adept of a style of painting which rediscovered social identity, physical tactility and material substance.  Furthermore, like countless others, Zagrekov may not have understood the deep and tragic prescience of governmental actions in the late 1920s onwards, regarding them perhaps as rhetorical and transient rather than serious and permanent. In any case, to the average citizen, indifferent to radical experiment, the fact that the National Socialist Party began to speak of a “pure German art” and of deviant styles as “Kulturbolschewismus” or that it overpainted Oskar Schlemmer’s murals on the Bauhaus buildings and began to purge museum collections of Chagall, Klee, Kokoschka, Nolde and other “contaminants” may not have seemed especially pernicious or exclusive.  True, the “New Order” spared no-one  and  for a non-German to live and work within a German environment was fraught with danger: Zagrekov himself was forced to resign from the Gewerbeschule für Kunst und Handwerk in 1933 and, after a period of dire unemployment, found salvation as a teacher in a private art school. Throughout the 1930s he helped colleagues and friends of Jewish origin leave Germany, he was virtually denied access to public exhibitions and one of his relatives was arrested and executed in occupied Riga. In spite of such inclement conditions Zagrekov continued to paint, teach and collaborated with fellow artists, albeit in a reticent and retiring manner.

Obviously, Zagrekov cast his iconographic net widely, apprehending not only Russian, but also Western influences.  The statuary of Georg Kolbe, for example, reinforced Zagrekov’s celebration of the nude model, male and female, the objectivity of Oskar Martin Amorbach and Schlichter, in particular, coincided with his own, and, as a specific example of artistic cross-fertilization, surely, Ferdinand Hödler’s Woodcutter (1910) [Ill. 11] is the prototype for the heroic figures of the workman with anvil in Rhythm of Labor [21] – and perhaps for that matter also of Lothar Sperl’s Clearing [Ill. 12] and of [Ill. 13]. Franz Eichhorst’s double diptych Workers and Farmers

Although over time Zagrekov softened the sometimes abrasive tone of his Neue Sachlichkeit paintings, he remained committed to the figurative esthetic, producing portraits, still-lives, landscapes and flower compositions. Moreover, with former Expressionists such as Carl Hofer and Pechstein, Zagrekov played a leading role between 1938 and 1944 in the society called Inselgruppe, while managing to retain a certain distance from the monolith of Nazi culture.  A “master of survival”,[22] Zagrekov seemed to have fared rather well in those onerous years, fulfilling portrait commissions, designing and building his own, spacious house in Spandau and, after the War, helping to reconstruct the headquarters of the Verein Berliner Künstler on Lützowplatz.

In painting his innocuous landscapes and flower arrangements in the 1930s onwards, Zagrekov was able to avoid deliberate political engagement and the obligation to devote artistic practice exclusively to the service of politics. Even if some critics might have interpreted this neutrality or silence as a political position in itself, i.e., as a tacit rejection of Nazi esthetic dictates, Zagrekov was one of many painters, writers and musicians in Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia who continued to ply their trade without drastic compromise of spirit and talent. After all, many of the rank and file members of the Union of Artists of the USSR survived without undue duress or censure by painting fields and family scenes, flowers and casual portraits, while disregarding the Five Year Plans and the Party Congresses as primary subjects.

If Zagrekov’s continued commitment to the Classical tradition enabled him to avoid disastrous collision with the Nazi hierarchy of artistic values, it also appealed to the Soviet authorities, coinciding approximately with the tenets of Socialist Realism. Consequently, in 1945 Zagrekov received a series of commissions from the Soviet Command in Berlin to paint portraits of political and military leaders, including Lenin, Stalin, Molotov and Marshal Zhukov. Allegedly, Zagrekov was fulfilling private commissions from Soviet officials and not in accordance with a Party mandate, but he must have realized that, in producing these political icons, he was using his artistic means for political ends. Although, in so doing, Zagrekov may have adjusted his artistic credo, he was not alone and cultural history is full of similar episodes – whether of Michelangelo heeding ecclesiastical censorship, of Mario Sironi offering his art to Mussolini’s government or of Rodchenko photographing the White Sea Canal.

To some extent, Zagrekov’s attachment to the world of objects and especially to the human figure brings him stylistically close to some of the Nazi Realists of the 1930s – not in their laudation of the Führer and his court, but in their common emphasis on physical health, strength and monumentality.[23]  In their flexed muscles, martial artistry and unsullied flesh, some of the nudes of Zagrekov, like the nudes of Saliger and Adolf Wissel, tell of a conviction in the power of the body as a military weapon and instrument of triumph. In depicting such ideal emblems of physical strength, Zagrekov treated of his models much in the way that Deineka was doing with his Soviet athletes.

Zagrekov’s artistic activities during and after World War II have yet to be studied in detail. Although he was in close touch with the Soviet mission in Berlin and, clearly, was a persona grata, Zagrekov found himself living in West Berlin after the division of the city in 1948. Far from decelerating as the years advanced, Zagrekov continued to be energetic and creative both as painter and as vice-president of the Verein Berliner Künstler and he did much to restore and refurbish its premises. He also continued to exhibit his work at a variety of national and international venues, especially with the Verein Berliner Künstler, and between 1979 and 1991 was honored with several one-man exhibitions and accompanying catalogs.

True, the earlier works such as Double Portrait and Sportswoman are more forceful and more striking than the post-War paintings, but the portraits of, for example, Ottomar Batzel (1955), Willy Brandt (1976) and Walter Scheel (1976), come down to us as important historical documents, capturing a mood, a gesture or a facial expression which a photograph or newspaper report might not carry. In these portraits Zagrekov maintained his figurative commitment, always affirming the representational value of the medium of painting and recalling, albeit in measure, the strong traditions of 19^th century Russian and German Realism.

Deeper awareness of the tribulations of Nikolai Zagrekov not only helps restore a rich artistic legacy to the history and historiography of Russian culture. The current exhibition also reminds us that Zagrekov was not alone – and belonged to an entire generation of “Russian-German” painters, sculptors, writers and musicians who, while confronted and threatened by the diabolical machine of Fascist culture, still retained their inner freedom. Zagrekov reminds us, too, that, however incumbent a political régime, however much style is modified and content adjusted, the spirited artist will always be guided by other criteria above and beyond the dictates of ideology.

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