The worker and the collective farmer are the author of the sculpture. "worker and collective farmer"

The sculptural group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is the main work of V.I. Mukhina. This work immortalized her name. The history of the creation of the sculptural group is especially important for understanding the artist’s creativity and worldview, the features of her talent, obvious and internal, hidden from a superficial glance, and the incentives for her work. It seems that every detail is important here and there cannot be minor moments in this story. Restoring all the events that accompanied the creation of this group is necessary for a more complete acquaintance with Mukhina’s creative biography.

The sculptural work “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” became a symbol of our country at a certain period in its history. His appearance was not only an artistic, but also a political event. In addition, it was a landmark phenomenon in the formation of Soviet culture, apparently its highest free rise in the pre-war era. In terms of meaning and power, works such as “Good!” can probably be placed on a par with it. and “At the top of my voice” by V. Mayakovsky, “Battleship Potemkin” by S. Eisenstein. However, these things were created somewhat earlier.

In the 1930s, in cinema, painting, and theater, where the pressure of Stalin’s restrictive guidelines in art was more strongly felt, nothing equal to “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” could appear. The only exceptions are “Quiet Don” and some architectural works, by the way, closely related to Mukhina’s work. Therefore, from various positions: sociocultural, psychology of art, interaction and mutual influence of its various types and genres, as well as the role and place they occupy in the public consciousness, such a phenomenon as the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is of exceptional interest. And this once again suggests that in the history of the creation of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” there cannot be minor and insignificant details.

Every episode, even a seemingly random one, from some point of view can turn out to be very important or even key. All this obliges us to pay special attention to all currently known events related to the emergence and life of this outstanding work.

ARCHITECTURAL IDEAS

It is known that the idea of ​​crowning the Soviet pavilion of the Paris World Exhibition with a paired statue of “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” made of metal belonged to the architect B.M. Iofanu. How was this idea born and what preceded it?

At the very beginning of the 1930s, serious events took place in Soviet architecture. The former sharp disagreements between constructivists and traditionalists were muted, and representatives of all previously hostile movements entered into a single Union of Soviet Architects in 1932. New trends in architecture were an indirect reflection of changes in public consciousness. In the social psychology of society, two seemingly opposite trends have emerged.

On the one hand, the ideal of asceticism and self-restraint of the first revolutionary years ceased to satisfy the masses. People seemed to be somewhat tired of the harshness of life; they wanted something more humane, understandable and comfortable. Already at the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky, through the mouths of revolutionaries sleeping in eternal sleep at the Kremlin wall, asked his contemporaries: “Aren’t you drawn by the all-powerful mud? Hasn’t officialdom created a web in your brain?” The poet clearly felt the emerging desire not so much for the “elegant life” that he hated, but simply for a calmer, more durable existence in solidly built houses among real, strong, beautiful, “pre-revolutionary” things.

On the other hand, the success of industrialization, the implementation of the first five-year plan, the launch of new factories, the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station, Magnitogorsk, Turksib, etc. generated enthusiasm and a desire to see these victories immortalized in art, including architecture.

Although the origins of these two trends were different, they, intertwining and interacting, gave rise to the desire to see a slightly different art - not purely propaganda and only calling, not ascetic and harsh, but lighter, affirming, close and understandable to everyone and to a certain extent pathos, glorifying . From this new, unprecedented art, they expected clarity and impressive, majestic power. This art should not have sharply broken with tradition like constructivism and productionism of the 1920s, but, on the contrary, should have been based in some way on the cultural heritage of past eras and on world artistic experience... It was natural: new, entering the historical and In the state arena, the class had to master the cultural wealth of the overthrown classes, and not “leap over” them.

This is exactly the architecture proposed by B.M. Iofan in the competition projects of the Palace of the Soviets and the Paris Pavilion, boldly combining it with the plastic arts, in particular with sculpture, which acquired new “architectural” qualities. Doctor of Architecture A.V. rightly writes. Ryabushin that in the prevailing socio-psychological conditions, the creative figure of Iofan turned out to be extremely historically modern. Brought up in the traditions of the classical school, he did not remain alien to the architectural trends of the period of his apprenticeship. Having carefully studied the old architecture of Italy, he at the same time had an excellent knowledge of contemporary Western practice and masterfully mastered the language of architecture of the 1920s.

Iofan's architecture is a solid and, most importantly, imaginative fusion of heterogeneous trends and origins. It was an emotional, dynamic architecture, directed forward and upward, built on fairly familiar, well-perceived proportions and combinations of masses and volumes, at the same time expressively using the straightness, clear geometricity of constructivism, and moreover, in combination with figurative plasticity and individual classic details such as profiled rods, cartouches, pylons, etc. Moreover, classical motifs were often deliberately simplified, and the laconicism and structural clarity of the whole were taken from the architecture of the 1920s. All this allowed B.M. Iofanu, according to A.V. Ryabushin, create "its own order, its own order of construction and development of architectural forms, large-scale and rich plasticity of which were combined with filigree profiling vertically directed divisions".

For our topic, Iofan’s attitude to the synthesis of architecture and sculpture is of greatest interest. Initially, in the first competition projects for the Palace of the Soviets (1931), Iofan used sculpture in the building quite traditionally - if not in the form of Atlanteans and caryatids, then, in any case, for rather decorative purposes. These were reliefs and separate groups on pylons. Actually, the meaningful sculpture, which carries the main ideological load, was installed nearby, but separately from the building, in the form of a special monument or landmark.

Thus, in the first competition project for the Palace of Soviets, it was supposed to erect two separate volumes of the main halls for meetings of the Supreme Council and various ceremonial meetings, and between them a tower was placed, topped with a sculpture of a worker holding a torch. But at the same competition, Iofan’s former teacher, Italian architect Armando Brazipi, presented a project that proposed completing the entire structure with a statue of V.I. Lenin. This idea captivated many, and a specially created council for the construction of the Palace of Soviets under the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, after holding closed competitions in the 1930s, when Iofan’s project was adopted as a basis, approved the following provision by a special resolution dated May 10, 1933; “The upper part of the Palace of Soviets should be completed with a powerful sculpture of Lenin, 50-75 m in size, so that the Palace of Soviets would look like a pedestal for the figure of Lenin.” *.

* In 1936 S.D. Merkurov in the sketch of the statue of V.I. Lenin envisaged its height to be 100 meters.

Iofan understood that such a combination of a statue with a building turns the Palace of the Soviets into simply a gigantically enlarged monument, where the structure’s own architecture becomes secondary, auxiliary to the sculpture. No matter how interesting, significant, and impressive this architecture is, by the very logic of the monumental image it is doomed to play a secondary role, because the main thing in a monument is inevitably the statue, not the pedestal. Iofan, apparently, also understood the general irrationality of the proposed solution, because if the building were increased to 415 meters in height, the 100-meter statue in the Moscow climate would, according to weather forecasters, be hidden by clouds for more than 200 days a year.

However, the enormity of the task still attracted Iofan, and he, in the end, not only “overcame himself,” but also deeply embraced the idea of ​​combining sculpture with a building. This idea entered already in the 1930s not only into mass consciousness, but also into construction practice in the form of a more generalized principle of “single-object synthesis.” If in the previous era, implementing Lenin’s plan for monumental propaganda, architects tried to achieve, relatively speaking, “spatial synthesis,” that is, an artistic connection of monuments with a square, street, square, etc. (a successful example of which is the reconstruction of the Nikitsky Gate Square with the monument to K.A. Timiryazev and Sovetskaya Square with the monument to the first Soviet Constitution in Moscow), then in the construction of the 1930s, just after the competitions for the design of the Palace of the Soviets, synthesis on a scale became widespread

In this case, the building or structure included sculptural elements, but not in the form of traditional caryatids and atlases, but as “intrinsic” meaningful works. Examples of this are many underground stations of the Moscow metro of pre-war and military construction, the sluice gates named after Moscow, the building of the State Library of the USSR named after. IN AND. Lenin, new multi-storey buildings at the beginning of Gorky Street, etc. This principle turned out to be very firmly fixed in the consciousness and continued in the late 1940s - early 1950s, including in some high-rise buildings (for example, on Vosstaniya Square, on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment), in new buildings on Smolenskaya Embankment and in a number of other places.

The project of the Palace of Soviets stood at the origins of this direction of “single-object synthesis”, and Iofan himself, ultimately, was sincerely interested in this idea. In his own work, he began to implement it quite regularly. In the pre-war version of the Palace of the Soviets, it was planned to install another 25 sculptural groups, four on each tier. And in the so-called “Sverdlovsk version” of the same project, prepared during the war, a belt of 15-meter sculptures was supposed to be in niches between the pylons at a height of 100 meters, and at the entrance it was planned to place statues of K. Marx and F. Engels organically connected with the building . The Paris pavilion of 1937 was crowned with the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman,” and the New York pavilion was crowned with a sculpture of a worker with a star.

Working sketches of the USSR pavilions at the Paris (1937) and New York (1939) exhibitions and the project of the Palace of the Soviets.

When designing the monument-ensemble “To the Heroes of Perekop” in 1940, Iofan proposed combining the sculpture “Red Armyman” with architectural elements, and even in his sketches of 1947-1948, the complex of the new building of Moscow State University was to be crowned with a sculpture. Thus, in almost all of his projects completed after 1933, Iofan introduced sculpture, and the latter served him to develop and concretize the architectural idea.

With the greatest artistic completeness and harmonious completeness, this principle was embodied in the USSR pavilion at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris (hereinafter we will call it the Paris Pavilion). It is interesting in this regard to note once again that the idea of ​​meaningfully combining sculpture with architecture after the publication of the project for the Palace of the Soviets penetrated so deeply into the consciousness of the architectural community that participants in the competition for the design of the Paris Pavilion in 1935-1936 (B.M. Iofan, V.A. Shchuko with V. G. Gelfreich, A. V. Shchusev, K. S. Alabyan with D. N. Chechulin, M. Ya. Ginzburg, K. S. Melnikov) almost all proceeded from the “single-object” combination of architecture with sculpture.

Well-known researcher of the history of Soviet architecture A.A. Strigalev notes that in the early 1930s, the technique of crowning a building with sculpture was perceived as a compositional find specific to the new direction of Soviet architecture. He, analyzing the projects of the Paris Pavilion, says that “in all projects, to varying degrees and in different ways, there was a special kind of “pictoriality” of architectural form, as a direct result of a purposeful search for visual imagery. This tendency was most fully manifested in Iofan’s project, least of all in Ginzburg’s project.”

* * *

The main French building at the exhibition was the Palais de Chaillot, built on Trocadéro Hill. Below and to the left on the banks of the Seine, on the Passy embankment, a narrow, elongated rectangular area was allocated for the USSR pavilion, and opposite it, across Warsaw Square, approximately the same rectangle for the German pavilion. From a distance, from the opposite bank of the Seine, this entire composition with the Chaillot Palace in the center and slightly above and the pavilions of the USSR and Germany on the flanks was perceived as a kind of planning reflection of the socio-political situation in Europe at that time.

Project B.M. Iofana, who won the competition, was a long building, rising with rapid ledges to a powerful head vertical, crowned with a pair of sculptural groups. The author wrote later:

“In the plan that arose in me, the Soviet pavilion was depicted as a triumphal building, reflecting in its dynamics the rapid growth of the achievements of the world’s first socialist state, the enthusiasm and cheerfulness of our great era of building socialism... This ideological orientation of the architectural plan had to be so clearly expressed that any person At the first glance at our pavilion I felt that it was the pavilion of the Soviet Union...

I was convinced that the most correct way to express this ideological determination was through a bold synthesis of architecture and sculpture.

The Soviet pavilion is presented as a building with dynamic forms, with an increasingly ledge-like front part topped with a powerful sculptural group. The sculpture seemed to me to be made of light, light metal, as if flying forward, like the unforgettable Louvre Nike - a winged victory..."

Today, several decades after the Paris Expo 37, we can probably name another reason for the persistent desire of all competition participants for “fine” architecture, moreover, dynamic and ideologically imaginative. The point was that our pavilion itself was supposed to be an exhibit, and the most impressive and powerfully affecting the imagination. It was supposed to be created from natural materials. This not only corresponded to the motto of the exhibition “Art and Technology in Modern Life”. The main thing is that behind these flashy forms of the triumphal, as Iofan put it, building, there was hidden a sufficient poverty of the exhibition.

We still had almost nothing to show except dioramas, photographs, models, and colorful panels. The last, 4th, final hall of the pavilion was completely empty: in the middle there was a large statue of Stalin, and there were flat panels on the walls. The Soviet pavilion was dominated by sculpture and painting. In particular, the following works were completed for the exhibition: L. Bruni “Moscow Sea”, P. Williams “Dances of the Peoples of the Caucasus”, A. Goncharov “Theater”, A. Deineka “March on Red Square”, P. Kuznetsov “Collective Farm Festival ", A. Labasa "Aviation", A. Pakhomova "Children", Y. Pimenova "Factory", A. Samokhvalov "Physical Education", M. Saryan "Armenia". It is natural, therefore, that the requirements for the expressiveness of the pavilion, which demonstrated very real and quite expressive achievements of Soviet architecture, which had already been fully defined by that time, increased.

B. Iofan wrote that while working on a competitive project he had “very soon an image was born... sculptures, a young man and a girl, personifying the masters of the Soviet land - the working class and the collective farm peasantry. They raise high the emblem of the Land of the Soviets - the hammer and sickle".

However, recently there have been allegations that it was not the very idea of ​​a paired sculpture with an emblem that was “Iofan’s invention” and that the “poster” hand gesture - a hand with a certain emblem, even the images of a young man and a girl with a hammer and sickle - all this has already been played out many times in Soviet art. In particular, there was a photomontage from 1930 by anti-fascist artist D. Hartfield, depicting a young guy and girl with a hammer and sickle in raised hands. A. Strigalev also claims that in the early 1930s, a paired bust sculpture was exhibited in the All-Artist Hall: a young man and a girl are holding a hammer and sickle in outstretched hands, and based on all this he concludes that Iofan is only “he decisively turned to what was “in the air” - this was precisely the strength and persuasiveness of his plan.”

Recently the memoirs of I.Yu. Eigel Secretary B.M. Iofan, in which he claims that the creation of the paired composition “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” Iofan was inspired by the idea of ​​the ancient statue “Tyrannobusters”, depicting Critias and Nesiot standing next to swords in their hands. (“Worker and Collective Farm Woman” // Sculpture and Time / Compiled by Olga Kostina. M,: Sov. Artist, 1987. P. 101.)

Critias and Nesiot.
Tyrannobusters (Harmodius and Aristogeiton).
5th century BC Bronze.
Roman copy from a Greek original.

But be that as it may, whether Iofan himself came up with the first sketch of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” and “drew” it into his project, or whether he used some source to visually formulate this idea, but his proposal to build a building with a pair of statues on the roof was accepted and subject to implementation. However, it must immediately be noted that even if we consider this drawing as one of the specific projects for the future statue, it was, perhaps, most different from what was then created in kind. It differed not in the general composition, which was actually found and set by Iofan, but in the nature of its implementation. Only I. Shadr went against this composition in his competition project. The difference between Iofan’s drawing and other projects is in the details, in the transfer of movement, in the pose, etc. But before moving on to the competition for the design of the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman,” let’s see what path V.I. took to realize this idea. Mukhina.

THE WAY OF THE SCULPTOR

In the most general form, it would be quite fair to say that all of V. Mukhina’s previous creative activity was a kind of preparation for the creation of the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman.” However, apparently, from all of Mukhina’s work before 1936, one can single out some works that are closer in theme, plot, figurative tasks, plastic approach to the solution of the sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”, and focus attention on them, without touching her work in general.

Project of the monument to I.M. Zagorsky. 1921

It seems that the decisive role for Mukhina in realizing herself as a sculptor of a predominantly monumental direction and in choosing this particular path of creativity was played by Lenin’s plan of monumental propaganda. Actively involved in its implementation, Vera Ignatievna in 1918-1923 created projects for monuments to N.I. Novikov, V.M. Zagorsky, Ya.M. Sverdlov ("Flame of the Revolution"), "Liberated Labor" and the monument to the Revolution for the city of Klin. From the point of view of our topic, the projects of the monuments “Liberated Labor” (1919) and “Flame of the Revolution” (1922-1923) are of greatest interest.

The project of the monument "Liberated Labor", the laying of which was carried out by V.I. Lenin at the site of the dismantled monument to Alexander III, described in detail M.L. Caught. It was a two-figure composition dedicated to the union of the working class and the peasantry. Rather schematically, Mukhina presented here the figures of the worker and the peasant, as if rushing towards a common single goal, which the worker points to. In this project, the internal convincingness and truthfulness of the images characteristic of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” did not yet appear and, rather, there were only correctly noticed, albeit somewhat superficial, features of the appearance of those contemporary workers and peasants whom the artist observed in the revolutionary and pre-revolutionary years. But the sculpture already embodies a certain pressure, decisiveness of movement that unites the characters. N.I. Vorkunova (Vorkunova N.I. Symbol of the New World. M,: Nauka, 1965. P. 48) also considers this group the first “distant prototype” of the famous Parisian statue.

Monument to Ya.M. Sverdlov, whose project Mukhina developed in 1922-1923, is especially interesting because the sculptor does not reproduce here a portrait image, but uses an allegorical image of a revolutionary figure, giving the statue not features of nature, but embodying the idea and meaning of Sverdlov’s life and work. The most important thing is that Mukhina solves the thematic problem with the entire figurative structure of the proposed sculpture, and therefore for her the attributes play a secondary role. She even draws several versions of this monument with a torch, with a wreath... We will see a similar approach later in the Parisian statue - it is not the emblematic attributes that determine its main content, and they are not the main thing in the composition, but the plasticity of the inspired image itself. At the same time, it is precisely this detail - “a hand with a certain emblem” - that A. Strigalev considers one of the “indirect prototypes” of Iofan’s project, directly pointing to V. Mukhina’s “Flame of Revolution”.

Flame of revolution.
Sketch of the monument to Ya.M. Sverdlov.
1922-1923.

These two works have some common features, among which the embodiment of impulse and movement is of particular interest to us. However, even more strongly than in “Liberated Labor” and “Flame of Revolution”, it is expressed in the relatively small work “Wind” (1926), which Mukhina herself considered one of her main works. This is the figure of a woman resisting a stormy wind, literally tearing her clothes and hair, forcing her to strain as much as possible in opposition to the violent impulse. Dynamism, tension, energy of overcoming - the embodiment of all these traits seems to be specially worked out by the sculptor in advance, so that later they can be realized with unprecedented power in “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman”.

Wind. 1927

And of course, even an inexperienced reader will name Mukhin’s “Peasant Woman” (1927) among the predecessors of the Parisian statue. This is a powerful personification of the fertile mother earth. Critics have different assessments of this sculpture, which enjoyed continued success both in the USSR and abroad, in particular at the 1934 Venice Biennale, where it was awarded a special award. For example, N. Vorkunova believes that “The desire to monumentalize the image led Mukhina in this case to outwardly emphasize purely material, physical strength, revealed in exaggeratedly massive volumes, in a general coarsening and a certain simplification of the human image.” However, this image seems to us to be completely truthful and not at all coarsened. Just V.I. Mukhina, not having at that time the opportunity to create truly monumental works, but experiencing an internal craving for this, went to the explicit use of allegory and monumentalization techniques in creating an easel work. Hence the installation of the sculpture “Peasant Woman” on a kind of pedestal made of sheaves, which was recommended by the commission that reviewed the sketch of the statue, and was also an expression of the general desire to solve this thing as a kind of generalization and symbol.

Only from the standpoint of easel art can one perceive “The Peasant Woman” as a kind of exaggeration and simplification, talk about “the abstractness of the artistic concept itself,” etc. It seems to us that the artist quite consciously created a monumental image according to the canons that she then adhered to. It is especially important to note with what persistence Mukhina revealed inner dignity, faith in the correctness of life, the measure of which was work, a self-confident person, as it seemed then, standing firmly and unshakably on his own land. This was the image of the mistress and nurse of Russia, as it was portrayed in the public consciousness at the end of the NEP. And mainly due to his dignity and freedom, expressed in his appearance, he is close to the “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” that followed a decade after “The Peasant Woman.”

Peasant woman. 1927

The most important virtue of this symbolic sculpture is that it glorifies free labor. Mukhina addressed this topic especially intensively in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Here one can recall the frieze for the Mezhrabpom building (1933-1935), the projects of the monumental statues “Epronovets” and “Science” (“Woman with a Book”) for the Mossovet Hotel (future “Moscow” Hotel).

Analyzing his own monumental works, most of which remained unfulfilled, as well as some monumentalized portrait items, primarily the portrait of the architect S.A. Zamkova (1934-1935), Mukhina, even before creating “Worker and Collective Farm Woman,” clearly realized and expressed the main theme of her work. And this strong ideological position, a clear understanding of the direction of the work, was, it seems to us, the decisive factor in her victory at the competition and her winning the right to create the statue for the Paris Pavilion. Back in late 1935 - early 1936, Mukhina was working on a magazine article, where she formulated her creative credo. The very title of the article is symptomatic: “I want to show a new person in my works.”

This is what Vera Ignatyevna wrote then:

“We are the creators of our lives. The image of the creator - the builder of our lives, no matter what field he works in, inspires me more than any other. One of the works that most interested me recently was a bust-portrait of the architect S. Zamkov. I called him "The Builder", since this was the main idea that I tried to express. In addition to the portrait resemblance to a person, I wanted to embody in the sculpture the synthetic image of the builder, his unyielding will, his confidence, calmness and strength. Our new man is in Basically the topic I've been working on for the last year and a half...

The desire to create art of large and majestic images is the main source of our creative power. The honorable and glorious task of a Soviet sculptor is to be the poet of our days, of our country, the singer of its growth, to inspire the people with the power of artistic images.".

Sergey Andreevich Zamkov. 1934

To finish this “prehistorical” excursion, it is necessary to say about one more important detail related to the purely plastic features of V.I. Mukhina. In the early 1930s, somewhere on the way from “Peasant Woman” to “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” in the process of working on Peshkov’s tombstone, on “Epronovets” and “Science”, Mukhina’s understanding of the tasks of monumental sculpture changed, the artist’s evolution took place: from weighted forms , from large and clearly readable main volumes, often expressed with deliberate laconicism, Mukhina moves on to great detail, and sometimes even to filigree surface finishing, to polishing more subtle forms.

B. Ternovets noted that since the early 1930s, Mukhina, instead of "large, generalized planes strive for the richness of the relief, for the plastic expressiveness of details, which the sculptor gives with complete clarity". However, the details do not become petty and do not violate the integrity of the impression. This new direction in Mukhina’s work was especially clearly reflected in her decision to design the “Fountain of Nationalities” for the square at the Kropotkin Gate in Moscow.

Uzbek woman with a jug. 1933
Figure for the unrealized Fountain of Nationalities project in Moscow.

Of course, this evolution in Mukhina’s work was generated not only by the internal “self-development” of the sculptor, but is also, to a certain extent, a reflection of the general processes taking place in Soviet art in the 1930s. This was the time of the liquidation of previously existing free artistic groups and the general unification of all artists into a single organization based on a common platform of narrowly understood realistic art, the time of the historical adoption of a very difficult resolution for art of the Central Committee of the Communist Party “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations” (April 23, 1932). ), the time of introducing the principles of uniformity in art education.

In 1934, at the First Congress of Writers A.M. Gorky formulated the features of the method of socialist realism, and a little earlier, in the summer of 1933, after visiting the exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR for 15 Years,” A.M. Gorky in his review of her said: “I am for academic, for ideal and clear form in art...”- and emphasized the need "some... idealization of Soviet reality and the new man in art"(See interview with A.M. Gorky in the newspaper "Soviet Art" dated July 20, 1933).

It was in the 1930s that works were created that became classics of socialist realism, such as “V.I. Lenin at the Direct Wire” by I. Grabar, “Trumpeters of the First Cavalry” by M. Grekov, “Interrogation of Communists” by B. Ioganson, “Collective Farm Holiday "S. Gerasimova, portraits of academician I. Pavlov and sculpture by I. Shadr, portrait of V. Chkalov by S. Lebedeva and others, where we see not only high ideology, but also a careful, sometimes even loving attitude to particulars, to details, sometimes literally to little things, which, however, not only do not reduce, but, on the contrary, enhance the intelligibility and perceptibility of the works.

It should be especially noted that in monumental sculpture and monumental portraits at this time, a number of authors showed a desire to move away from lapidary and expressiveness.

The most important thing in this evolution of creative principles is the fact that the rejection of heavy forms and formal techniques of monumentalization did not lead such sculptors as Andreev, Mukhina, Sherwood to the loss of monumentality altogether. On the contrary, Mukhina’s tombstone of Peshkov, “Woman with a Book”, “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” are innovative works, monumental internally. This is what gave her the opportunity to later say that monumentality is not a technique or a technique, but the character of the artist, the method of his thinking, the peculiarities of his worldview. Monumentalism is not generalized forms, large sizes and large masses, but first of all an idea, it is a type of thinking of the artist. Monumentalism cannot be prosaic, but it is not necessarily associated with laconism of forms, with a refusal to carefully study details. And who will say that “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is not monumental? But they even have detailed laces and welts on their shoes, which, in general, no one sees.

But the point, of course, is not only in the elaboration of forms. Mukhina abandoned the calm statuesqueness, the impressive staticism characteristic of monumental art, and the concentrated expression in monuments of one all-subordinating idea and one dominant feeling. She tried to bring naturalness into the monuments, to convey in the monuments the emotional richness and versatility of nature, that is, along with the high idea of ​​breathing spontaneity, vitality and warmth into the monuments, to even introduce some features of genre, so that they were not heroes standing above people, but individuals, who came from the people, their flesh and blood.

The beginning of a new stage in Mukhina’s work was the figure of a woman with a jug from the “Fountain of Nationalities”, the peak was “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”, and the indicator of the transition to other trends coming from easel and even genre art, but which did not have time to fully emerge, was the monument to P .AND. Tchaikovsky in front of the Moscow Conservatory and the group “We Demand Peace” ( Voronov D.V."Worker and Collective Farm Woman". Sculptor V. Mukhina. L.: Artist of the RSFSR, 1962. P. 13).

"We demand peace!" 1950-1951

IN AND. Mukhina has always strived to work in architecture, clearly understanding that this imposes some restrictions on the activities of sculptors, but at the same time gives their work a certain benefit. Back in 1934, she wrote an article “The Laws of Creativity, Conditions of Cooperation,” where she spoke about the need to connect sculpture with the architectural and constructive foundations of the structure. Sculpture “must not only be consistent with and follow from a clearly developed architectural idea. The sculptor working with the architect is not called upon to illustrate someone else’s idea, but to find the most vivid and convincing form of expression for it using his own specific artistic means.”.

Mukhina felt well that work in architecture required a decorative gift, and she possessed this gift. Back in the early 1920s, she created sketches of statues for the Red Stadium, a bas-relief for the Polytechnic Museum (1923) and completed purely architectural work - the design of the Izvestia pavilion for the 1923 Agricultural Exhibition. She worked in the decorative arts, designing clothing, glassware, exhibition interiors, etc. She was always attracted to decorative sculpture, the specifics of which she understood very well, believing that decorative sculpture must have significant content in order to be sufficiently ideologically rich. In rough notes about the specifics of art, Mukhina wrote in the 1930s that “the flexibility of decorative sculpture allows allegory to express abstract concepts, which can rarely be done by means of an everyday image. In this regard, allegory is one of the most powerful means of realistic sculptural art”.

It is understandable, therefore, that Mukhina, with her developed understanding of the tasks and features of decorative plastic, an excellent sense of material and, finally, with her experience and desire to work in architecture, was unusually fascinated by the problem of creating a statue for the Paris Pavilion, made in a new unprecedented material. This work was coordinated with the architecture of the pavilion and, moreover, undoubtedly required the search for special meaningful decorative elements. For her, in fact, these were the samples, themes and tasks that she had strived to solve all her life and, most importantly, had been prepared by her entire creative life. At the height of her talent, Mukhina began work - she began creating competition sketches. The sculptor already had almost half a century of life behind him.

CONTEST

In fact, Iofan in his sketch gave only the most general sketch of the proposed statue, defining its theme and the main direction of compositional searches. A wide variety of possibilities for plastic interpretation of the artistic ideas put forward by the architect were opened up for the competition participants. In addition to the general composition, the dimensions and approximate proportions of the sculptural group and its material were also specified.

When developing his own order, the architect in this case did not use the classical relationships between the figure and the pedestal - the so-called. "golden ratio". He accepted "a previously unused relationship between sculpture and building: the sculpture occupies about a third of the entire height of the structure" (Iofan B.M. Architectural idea and its implementation // USSR Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris. M.: VAA, 1938. P. 16.). Iofan, apparently drawing on the experience of creating the American Statue of Liberty, intended to make the sculpture from metal, but initially he thought about duralumin, because he imagined the statue in a light and light metal, but not in a shiny one.

Professor P.N. Lviv

Professor P.N. Lvov, a prominent specialist in metal and methods of its constructive use, convinced the architect to use stainless chromium-nickel steel, joined not with rivets, as was done in America, but by welding. This steel has excellent ductility and good light reflectivity. As a test, the head of the famous sculpture “David” by Michelangelo was “knocked out” of steel, and this experiment turned out to be very successful, although, as Iofan notes, all the sculptors were skeptical about steel at first. This remark is true, perhaps, in relation to all participants in the competition, except V.I. Mukhina, who immediately after the trial work believed in the new material.

One of the first sketches of the composition "Worker and Collective Farm Woman"

In the summer of 1936, a closed competition was announced. V.A. was invited to participate in it. Andreev, M.G. Manizer, V.I. Mukhina, I.D. Shadr. For direct assistance in sculpting the statue, Vera Ignatievna invited two of her former students from Vkhutemas 3.G. Ivanov and N.G. Zelenskaya. The deadline for preparing competitive projects was given a short time - about three months.

In October 1936, a review of the projects took place. The same idea was given different figurative interpretations by four sculptors in accordance with the character and attitude of each of them. What was proposed by the sculptors?

Project V.I. Mukhina

Project V.A. Andreeva

Project M.G. Manizer

Project I.D. Shadra

Stingy in conveying movement, often statically closed in his works, V.A. Andreev was true to himself here too. His composition is calm, statuary, has an emphatically expressed vertical, in it the diagonals are much less outlined, which, according to Iofan’s plan, were supposed to continue the figurative idea of ​​the architectural part of striving forward and upward. Meanwhile, these diagonals and even horizontals were very important in order to sharply contrast the sculptural group with the receding vertical of the Eiffel Tower, which dominated the exhibition.

Andreev's "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" have elongated forms, the impression of their slenderness is emphasized by the undivided lower part of the statue. The future material of the work - stainless steel - is not revealed here; the sculptor worked in the more familiar forms of stone sculpting.

At the same time, Andreev’s images are full of great inner content, although it is, perhaps, deeper and more serious than was required for the sculpture of the exhibition pavilion. Almost pressed with their shoulders to each other, raising their hammer and sickle high, Andreev’s heroes seemed to be saying that they came here through blood, grief and hardship, that they were ready to continue to stand under bullets and stones thrown at them, without lowering the banner, without losing spirit and faith in the Truth. There was some kind of internal tear in the sculpture: great truth and depth, which would be more appropriate in a monument to the fallen heroes of the surplus appropriation system of the 1920s, those who were shot at with sawn-off shotguns, and those who were hungry, barefoot and undressed in the 1930s years created the giants of the first five-year plan.

V. Andreev’s sketch was closest to Iofan’s drawing, but the architect also emphasized the horizontal lines in the draperies that wrapped around the legs of the young man and girl. Andreev refused them, and therefore his statue, as well as the project of M. Manizer, according to the correct remark of D. Arkin, "designed for a self-sufficient existence, completely independent of architecture. It is like a monument that can be placed on a pedestal and in this form form a complete sculptural whole" (Arkin D.E. Images of architecture. M.: Publishing house. Academician arch. USSR / 1941. P. 336-337.).

M. Manizer solved the same problem in a completely different way. In his composition there are closely intertwined, naked, carefully sculpted bodies, the heroic chest of a worker with all the muscles and ribs and the smiling face of a woman. The figures seem to say: look how good everything is, what prosperity is all around. Everything is wonderful, everything has been achieved, all that remains is to raise the hammer and sickle up, rejoice and rejoice.

A conscientiously sculpted sculptural group is, however, less plastically amorphous and does not have a leading line or a bright dominant movement. Despite the broad and seemingly strong gesture, it personifies the union of workers and peasants in the spirit of an academic allegory of the 19th century. One cannot but agree with D. Arkin, who, speaking about Manizer’s project, noted that it “for the sake of the cold classics of forms, the living classics of our time were brought, requiring simplicity, inner strength, ideological clarity of the image. The movement is hidden under the conditional smoothness of the form, the gesture seems frozen, the pose is tense”. The lower part of the figures is usually weighted, which further constrains the already barely intended movement and does not reveal the capabilities of the material. Most unacceptable was the cold callousness, the purely external, “exemplary” ceremonial demonstration of our achievements that was in this project.

N. Vorkunova notes that the imaginative thinking and manner of sculpting characteristic of M. Manizer impart to the group a kind of rigidity, abstractness of timeless existence, and programmatic allegory. Similar images could have been created by artists of the last century. Only the hammer and sickle in the hands of a man and a woman betray their connection with modernity. But in the hands of “allegorical” characters, they turn out to be just identifying attributes that can easily be replaced by others if the group received a different purpose. So, “if it were, for example, not to crown an exhibition pavilion, but to stand in front of the gates of a botanical garden, bouquets of roses or palm branches could be in the hands of a man and a woman, and this would have absolutely no impact on the content of the sculpture, on its artistic solution ".

In general, N. Vorkunova most sharply and often rightly criticizes M. Manizer’s project. For example, she writes that “The monotony of the linear rhythm introduces into the statue an element of dry geometricism and emphasized logic of construction.” But “geometricism”, a certain schematism, which always distinguished his work, were quite appropriate and justified precisely in combination with the emphatically “drawing”, “rectilinear”, geometricized architecture of the Iofanovsky pavilion. To some extent, this contributed to achieving the unity of style of the entire structure. That is why it does not seem to us a mistake that the sculptor translated the broken, “step-ladder” line of development of the architectural masses of the building into a diagonal line of movement of sculptural forms. The main drawback of Manizer’s project is not this, but its statuary nature, which emphasizes the “pedestal” nature of the building and imparts to the group some independence from architecture, the “self-sufficiency” of the sculptural work.

Sculpture group I.D. Shadra was distinguished by excessive expression. She rushed from the pavilion building. The figure with the sickle was almost spread out in the air. It was some kind of unnatural, theatrical movement, artificial exaltation. The deliberately emphasized bold diagonals of the sculptural composition did not fit in with the calmer architecture of the pavilion. Due to such an extremely strongly expressed movement, contrary to the architectural volumes, calmly and rhythmically, although rapidly growing, the figures had to be provided with supports, which made the lower part of the composition heavier and disrupted the visual balance, which was already difficult to achieve with the very developed and fractional overall silhouette of the group. Shadr's work was a calling symbol, made in the spirit of propaganda art of the early 1920s. The images created by Shadr called forward, to fight, to the future. The decision was bold and extremely dynamic, but it expressed only the idea of ​​conscription, and this contradicted the general design of the pavilion, where development and movement were demonstrated against the backdrop of the already defined achievements of the Land of Soviets. In Shadr's project, a worker wearing a traditional cap, quickly threw one arm forward, and the other, holding the hammer, bent at the elbow and pulled back, as if preparing to throw this weapon, like an athlete putting a shot. D. Arkin notes that the gestures were “sharply exaggerated, brought to the point of some kind of hysterical incontinence. It is absolutely clear that this unhinged, supposedly pathetic “dynamics” could least of all embody the lofty idea that lies at the basis of the artistic concept of the Soviet pavilion.” He also talks about “the isolation of the sculptural solution from the architecture... The statue abruptly breaks the rhythm of the architectural structure, goes beyond the dimensions of the pylon and therefore seems to hang over the entrance to the pavilion.”.

V. Mukhina, apparently, did not work long, but very intensely on the sketch. Several preliminary drawings have survived, indicating that she, like V. Andreev and M. Manizer, but unlike I. Shadr, accepted Iofan’s general composition: two figures taking a step forward, raising their hands with a sickle and hammer. The subjects of her intense search were the drapery and the position of the free hands of the worker and collective farmer. Consequently, she immediately came to the conclusion that it was necessary to give emphasized and expressive horizontal lines in the pair group - otherwise it would be impossible to connect it with the architecture of the pavilion. She tried to connect the free hands of a man and a woman “within” the group, and put the attributes of the worker in the right hand, and the collective farmer in the left, so that there was a rather significant spatial gap between the sickle and the hammer. She tried to move the draperies giving horizontal folds, located in Iofan’s sketch at the level of the characters’ feet, upward, depicting them in the form of a banner or banner immediately following the emblem, that is, at the level of the shoulders and heads of the worker and collective farmer. The rest of her searches are not reflected in the visual material: they probably took place directly in the process of sculpting on a clay model.

Mukhina also did not agree with Iofanov’s concept of the character of the general image of the statue and even, perhaps, the entire pavilion. B.M. Iofan conceived it as a kind of solemn, majestic structure. His opinion has already been cited that he saw the Soviet pavilion as a “triumphal building.” In this regard, if Andreev’s project was closest to Iofanov’s compositionally, then M.G. Manizer most accurately conveyed Iofan’s thoughts about the triumphalism and solemnity of the entire structure and the group that crowned it. And this, of course, is another advantage of Manizer’s work. But Mukhina embodied her own concept in the project with such impressive force that she managed to convince Iofan, and before the government commission that made the final decision, he supported her project and not Manizer’s project.

IN AND. Mukhina and B.M. Iofan (1936)

What was the difference in points of view? IN AND. Mukhina wrote while still in the process of creating the statue that, “having received the pavilion design from the architect Iofan, I immediately felt that the group should express, first of all, not the solemn character of the figures, but the dynamics of our era, that creative impulse that I see everywhere in our country and which is so dear to me.” Mukhina developed the same idea later, specifically emphasizing the difference in approach to the interpretation of the group. In an open letter to the editor of the Architectural Newspaper on February 19, 1938, she wrote that Iofan was the author of the sculptural design, "containing a two-figure composition of male and female figures, in a solemn step raising a sickle and a hammer to the top... In the order of development of the theme proposed to me, I made many changes. I turned the solemn step into an all-crushing impulse...".

This was not only plastic, but conceptual, a fundamental change in the architect’s original plan. The fact that Iofan agreed with him speaks volumes. Mukhina not only more subtly and correctly grasped the general socio-psychological mood of the then Soviet society, but also more accurately and more broadly than the architect himself, she understood the character and potential imaginative possibilities inherent in the very architecture of the pavilion. Based on this own interpretation of the images of the worker and the collective farmer. Mukhina had already solved plastic problems, all the time relying on her experience in architecture. This concerned primarily the main lines of the statue. As in the projects of Iofan himself, as well as Andreev and Manizer, she revealed the main diagonal, as if continuing a mental line, passing in silhouette through the tops of the last three ledges of the building and then going from the legs thrown back in a wide step, through the torsos and to the legs raised high up with a slight tilt of the arms forward. The main vertical, continuing the line of the façade pylon, has also been preserved and emphasized. But besides this, Mukhina sharply increased the horizontal orientation of the group and the forward movement of the statue. In fact, she did not even strengthen, but created this movement, only weakly outlined in Iofan’s project. Listing the changes she made, Vera Ignatievna herself wrote about this in the already quoted letter: “For greater strength of the mutual composition with the horizontal dynamics of the building, the horizontal movement of the entire group and most of the sculptural volumes was introduced; an essential part of the composition was a large sheet of matter flying behind the group and giving the necessary airiness of flight...”

The creation of this “flying matter” was the most significant departure from Iofan’s original sketch and at the same time one of Mukhina’s most remarkable discoveries, which gave her the opportunity to solve a number of plastic problems. However, this turned out to be difficult to achieve in modeling. Vera Ignatievna herself wrote: “A lot of talk and controversy was aroused by the piece of material I introduced into the composition, fluttering from behind, symbolizing those red banners, without which we cannot imagine any mass demonstration. This “scarf” was so necessary that without it the entire composition and the connection between the statue and the building would fall apart.”.

Initially, the scarf had another, purely service role. Since in the first competition sketch Mukhina and Manizer, in accordance with Iofan’s drawing, presented their heroes naked, both projects required draping of some parts of the body. But Mukhina immediately came to the idea that drapery should also be used for the plastic interpretation of the all-crushing movement that she sought to convey. And indeed, the scarf, together with the folded back and outstretched arms, forms in the middle part of the statue the most powerful horizontal line that holds the entire group: it lengthens the line of the arms and gives this back part of the statue that massiveness, co-scale with the torsos and rhythmic repetition of horizontal volumes that could not be achieved just fluttering pieces of clothing.

Photo by R. Napier

The scarf also provides that “airiness of flight” and openwork of the statue that Mukhina was striving for. It reveals the novelty and specific plastic qualities of an unusual sculptural material - stainless steel. Finally, the use of a scarf made it possible for Mukhina to innovatively reproduce movement and give an unusual spatial structure to the entire sculpture. Vera Ignatyevna herself noted this:

“The group had to be drawn with a clear openwork against the sky, and therefore a heavy, impenetrable silhouette was completely unacceptable here. I had to build the sculpture on a combination of volumetric and spatial relationships. Wanting to connect the horizontal movement of parts of the building with the sculpture, I considered it extremely tempting to let most of the sculptural volumes flow air flying horizontally. I don’t remember such provisions: usually the main sculptural volume (I’m talking about a round sculpture) runs either vertically or obliquely, which, of course, is dictated by materials commonly used in sculpture, such as stone, wood, cement, etc. Here, a new material - steel - allowed the sculptor a more flexible and risky composition."

Photo by R. Napier

Here it is necessary to make a small digression. The fact is that work on the costume (1923-1925), teaching at Vkhutemas, communication with “production workers”, independent work on the exhibition display, club interiors, etc. Mukhina was accustomed to a kind of “functional thinking.” Her subsequent works, executed in glass, show that the artist was by no means only a functionalist and a supporter of the constructive-functional style. At the same time, carefully studying her sculpture, you see that there was never an “empty gesture”, a meaningfully or plastically unjustified pose, or a random position of the body or any part of it in her sculptural compositions. While working on the statue for the Paris Pavilion, she, as an artist, was probably simply irritated by these “unoccupied”, meaningless “emptiness” of these arms of a man and a woman thrown back.

Manizer, in accordance with his concept, came out of this situation by turning the palms of the hands of the worker and the collective farmer outward and giving them a kind of inviting gesture: “Look how beautiful and joyful everything is in our pavilion!” - which corresponded to the smiling and triumphant faces of his heroes. But even with him this gesture, repeated twice (on the right and left sides of the statue), became somewhat intrusive and lost its sincerity. For Mukhina, it was impossible to give such an “inviting” gesture; it did not correspond to the general character of the group she created. And any other gesture that was the same for a man and a woman was, in her opinion, aesthetically inappropriate - in the group there were already enough identical gestures and positions for both figures. To create another repetition meant to transform the found expressive rhythm into a monotonous recalculation of samenesses.

Photo by R. Napier

The sculptor is again helped out by the scarf she so successfully found. The woman’s thrown back hand receives a functional and meaningful justification - it is clenched into a fist and holds the end of the fluttering cloth. The man's hand is turned down with an open palm with fingers spread. This gesture is also significant. Behind the worker’s outstretched palm, the viewer’s imagination reveals the endless expanses of the Land of the Soviets. This gesture develops into a symbol and resembles another symbolically outstretched hand, under which awakened Russia stood up and stood on end - the hand of Peter I in the monument to E. Falconet. But, using the tradition of such a gesture, Mukhina put a different content into it. Behind the hand of the steel worker stretched the huge Soviet country, behind it stood millions of working people, behind this gesture one could hear the thunder of shock construction projects and the rustle of holiday banners.

The thrown back arms, elongated in mass and increased by the volume of the scarf, gave Mukhina’s project the necessary victorious movement. But it was not only to express this movement that the sculptor needed expressive horizontal lines. At the evening dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of Vera Ignatievna, Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Arts V.S. Kemenov said:

“The task of creating a sculpture and placing it on Iofan’s pavilion was unusually difficult. The very architectural appearance of this pavilion, made of ledges, prepared the movement that was to spill out in the sculpture. But this pavilion, like other pavilions of the exhibition, was located on the river bank, not far from the Eiffel Tower. And the gigantic powerful vertical of the Eiffel Tower, especially strong in its lower part, falling into the field of view, set the task for the artist to block the impression of this strong vertical.

It was necessary to look for a way out, transferring the problem to the plane of incomparability. And Vera Ignatievna decided to look for a sculpture movement that would also be built horizontally. This was the only way to preserve the visual impression and achieve the expressiveness of this sculpture - Vera Ignatievna herself spoke about this.".

“Steel turned out to be a wonderful material of great malleability. But there were still many doubts, and the main thing was whether the sculptural volume would sound like an empty “tin”, having lost the main sculptural value - the physical sensation of volume. What followed showed that in this regard, steel was the winner.”.

In the projects of Andreev and Manizer, the bottom of the sculpture was usually weighted, which gave the groups stability and some monumentality, which Mukhina tried to avoid. This was partly prompted by Iofan’s sketch, where the bottom of the statue was also weakly dissected and massive. But let us remember that Iofan initially intended to build the statue from matte aluminum, and he, apparently, was afraid that the light, light metal would give the entire group excessive visual lightness - on the powerful central vertical of the pavilion, lined with marble, it would seem like a feather, for which it is not at all you need solid support. Out of a desire to achieve the weight of the sculpture, perhaps the architect chose not entirely successful proportional height ratios for the group and the central pylon, with which Mukhina was somewhat dissatisfied.

Here we cannot help but remember once again the kind words of P.N. Lvov, who proposed using steel for sculpture and proved the possibility of using this material. The shiny steel seemed to solve the question of the weight of the sculpture by itself. After all, the silvery, light-reflecting metal never seems heavy, even if located at a high altitude.

Let us remember that such huge golden domes, as on the Assumption Cathedral and on Ivan the Great in Moscow, on St. Isaac's Cathedral in Leningrad, do not seem visually heavy due to the bright shine of the metal. Therefore, there was no need to worry about making the sculpture heavier, which Mukhina immediately understood, saying that after she became acquainted with Iofan’s project and Lvov’s experiments, she wanted to create "a very dynamic group, extremely light and openwork."

Mukhina also considers the issue of constructing a clear and clear silhouette to be very important, which I. Shadr least of all took into account in his project. Although Vera Ignatievna does not write about this anywhere, she was probably aware of one purely plastic pattern that manifests itself in the appearance of monuments. Usually, significant difficulty is present in accurately guessing the scale of a monumental work - and not only in relation to the elements of the environment, but, so to speak, in relation to “itself”, that is, the dependence of the size of the statue on its content, plastic features, pose and gesture characters, etc.

In post-war practice, we have, unfortunately, enough examples of unjustified overestimation of the size of individual statues. It should be taken into account that even if the size of the statue is successfully found, any change in scale during the manufacture of its reproduction in the form of souvenirs, badges, prizes, labels, posters, etc. usually leads to significant visual distortions of the original image of the original.

But there is, although not easy, a fairly reliable way to avoid further distortion when reproducing the original. To do this, it is necessary to achieve not only expressive proportionality of all parts of the work, but also its clear silhouette. A clear, well-perceived and memorable silhouette makes it possible to enlarge or reduce the original with virtually no plastic or figurative distortion, not to mention the fact that it significantly increases the artistic merits of the work. In this case, since the size of the statue did not follow from its internal features, but was predetermined by the architectural design, Mukhina, of course, sought to find the most expressive, easily readable and clearly imprinted silhouette in the memory, which already largely ensured the proportionality and scale of the sculptural group in relation to the pavilion. She succeeded.

Thus, a number of the figurative and plastic qualities discussed above favorably distinguished Mukhina’s group from other projects and gave it greater artistic and figurative unity with the architecture of the pavilion than was even expressed in Iofan’s sketch. And besides, the entire structure received a slightly different and more ideologically correct and deep architectural and artistic image. Thanks to the rapid movement of the sculptural group, which does not have a statuary assertion pressing on the pedestal, the horizontal extent of the building was emphasized and the “pedestal” of the pavilion almost ceased to be felt, which, by the way, was never overcome in the project of the Palace of the Soviets. And in the sketch of the Paris Pavilion, drawn by Iofan, this “pedestal” was much stronger. As a result, in October 1936, after a competitive review, Mukhina’s project was approved and accepted for further development.

However, some alterations were required from the sculptor. Firstly, it was proposed to “dress” the steel heroes, and secondly, the scarf, as Mukhina expected, caused bewilderment. According to the recollections of one of the authors of the exhibition of the Soviet pavilion K.I. Rozhdestvensky, chairman of the government commission V.M. Molotov, who arrived to view the competition works, asked Mukhina a question:

Why this scarf? This is not a dancer, not a skater!

Although the atmosphere at the screening was very tense, Mukhina calmly answered:

This is necessary for balance.

She, of course, had in mind plastic, figurative balance and the horizontality she so needed. But the chairman, not very experienced in art, understood her “balance” in a purely physical sense and said:

Well, if it is technically necessary, then another question...

The conversation ended there; after several weeks of agonizing anticipation, the project was finally approved, but again "except for the configuration of the flying matter, which I had to change five times" Vera Ignatievna later recalled. At the same time, she worked on clothing, choosing for her heroes costumes that were least susceptible to the influence of time, that is, ageless, and also professionally characterize the heroes at first glance - overalls and a sundress with straps, leaving the shoulders and necks of the characters bare and not hiding the sculptural forms torso and legs of a woman. In addition, the folds of the low skirt, as if fluttering from the headwind, reinforced the impression of the rapid movement of the group.

After these modifications, on November 11, 1936, V. Mukhina’s project was finally approved for execution in the material.

PREPARATION FOR CONVERSION TO STEEL

Even before the final approval of the project, the metal structures department of the construction of the Palace of the Soviets in October 1936 received the task of developing the design of the sculptural group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”. It was proposed to calculate the main steel frame, and assemble the sculpture itself from separate steel sheets, which should be connected to each other and secured with an additional frame into large blocks, and then these blocks should be hung on the main frame and welded to it. This frame was manufactured by the Stalmost plant, while the details of the statue and its complete assembly were to be carried out by the experimental plant of the Central Research Institute. Mechanical Engineering and Metalworking (TsNIIMASH) directly in the workshop and in the courtyard of the plant under the guidance of one of the “steel people”, as Mukhina called them, Professor P.N. Lvov.

Pyotr Nikolaevich Lvov, who played a major role in the process of assembling the statue in Moscow and Paris, was the author of the method and special device for resistance spot electric welding of stainless steel. His welding machines had already been used in the early 1930s to build the first prototype steel aircraft. Such aircraft later replaced airplanes with light, but not strong enough aluminum skin.

To begin work at the plant, it was planned to receive a six-meter model from the sculptors and use it to enlarge it. However, there was not enough time to prepare such a model, and "at one of the very stormy meetings" as Mukhina recalled, P.N. Lvov proposed building the statue using the 15x magnification method. It was a bold and risky proposal, but it gave the sculptors the opportunity within a month to prepare the final model (with arms raised) approximately one and a half meters high. A six-meter model would require more than two months to create.

Working model of the sculpture

Tight deadlines forced us to accept P.N.’s proposal. Lvov. Some plastic shortcomings in the completed work (in particular, the lack of detail in certain places) are explained precisely by the fact that the author’s model was immediately subjected to a 15-fold increase, but the final adjustment was significantly difficult, and in some cases even impossible. Experience with the conversion of "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" into steel led Lvov to the conclusion that “The initial model should be taken as one on which all the details have been worked out. For further work of this kind, an increase of more than 5 times cannot be accepted.”

Mukhina, together with her colleagues and assistants N. Zelenskaya and Z. Ivanova, prepared a one and a half meter model. A group of engineers led by V. Nikolaev and N. Zhuravlev designed the steel frame, calculated wind loads and weight. One of the sculptors, with the help of workers from the Moscow Planetarium, found out what lighting conditions the group would be in at the pavilion. It turned out that in the morning the light would fall on her from behind, and in the evening - from the front.

General view of the frame "Worker and Collective Farm Woman"
and part of the skirt frame of a female figure.

Side plan of the sculpture and ( at the bottom) horizontal sections.

For the engineers who were entrusted with the construction of this almost 24-meter metal statue * with a shell of sheet steel, the implementation of such a structure was completely new, without examples in the history of technology. A prominent specialist in metal structures, Professor N.S., advised them. Streletsky called this design of the sculptural group “exotic.”

* According to the measurements of P.N. Lvov "the total height of the entire statue to the top of the sickle is 23.5 m, and the height of the Worker to the top of the head is 17.25 m." B. Ternovets twice cites the size of the statue - 24.5 meters. In the three-volume book "Mukhina" - "about 24 m"(M., 1960. T. 1. P. 14).

By this time, engineer N. Zhuravlev had designed a machine for taking dimensions, which was a wooden structure with retractable knitting needles that fixed points on the horizontal sections of the statue. Such sections were supposed to be made every centimeter. Using the obtained points, the contours of the sections were then drawn at 15-fold magnification, and the engineers, of course, were not interested in the plasticity of the statue, but in the highest and lowest points of the relief in order to fit the frame into the statue. Initial calculations of the frame were made from the sketch. "That's why. - wrote V.I. Mukhina, - the sculptor had to not disturb the original dynamics of the sketch. In some places we had to fight for every millimeter of thickness of the volume: the engineers demanded greater thickness for the strength of the frame, but for reasons of aesthetics of the form, I demanded less. But I must say that, since it was possible, we always met each other halfway.".

Mukhina was most concerned about the accuracy of the translation of the surface relief. She became convinced that Zhuravlev’s machine was very “I accurately translated the dimensions of volumes and their joints. But the very relief of the form suffered greatly from the slightest inaccuracy of the transfer needle”. The first translation experiments were made even before the model in soft material - the factory could not wait any longer. Therefore, without finishing the entire model, the sculptors had to separately mold the legs and send them to work at the factory. On a trial basis, the factory enlarged the sent part and knocked it out of steel. Having interrupted work, Mukhina, together with Z.G. Ivanova arrived at the plant on December 8. They were triumphantly shown the first wooden forms. Vera Ignatievna later said:

“It was a man’s foot with a boot and a leg up to the knee. The boot, in addition, was knocked out of steel. They show us a huge shoe. Everything is turned inside out, everything is wrong. You can’t even understand which foot the shoe is from.

We are frozen, silently watching.

- That's it, Pyotr Nikolaevich(Lviv - N.V. ),It’s no good at all,” Ivanova says gloomily. - Let's get the carpenters!

- For what? We've figured it all out.

- Plotnikov!

We took a plaster leg and a wooden form and, together with the carpenters, corrected the mistakes - we sewed on the welt and cut out the toe. We worked for two or three hours.

- Knock it out until tomorrow.

We arrive the next day. Petr Nikolaevich says

- But it turned out well.

So it turned out that we, sculptors, had to work at the factory and take a direct part in the work of enlarging the sculpture and converting it into steel. They gave us each a team of workers." .

(Toom L., Beck A.“Worker and Collective Farm Woman”: An excerpt from the oral memoirs of V.I. Mukhina, recorded in 1939-1940. // Art. 1957, No. 8. P. 37.)

ASSEMBLY OF THE STATUE IN MOSCOW

As N. Zhuravlev predicted, the 15x magnification method gave only relatively accurate overall dimensions, but the relief of the shape suffered greatly. An error of 1-2 millimeters led to large distortions, and the rough surface of the plaster model had many depressions and bulges larger than 1 millimeter. In general, in the process of making a life-size statue, about 200 thousand coordinate points were measured on the surface of the model, and 23 technicians and draftsmen participated in this work.

Yet, due to lack of time, it was impossible to make detailed drawings of all the shell blocks. Vera Ignatievna, together with Zhuravlev, supervised the creation of intermediate templates based on measurement data and, based on them, wooden forms the size of life-size. These were like huge “negative” impressions of the surface of the statue. Such forms for subsequent hammering began to be jokingly called “troughs.” They were very handy for welding the shell and inner frame of each block. For Mukhina, Zelenskaya and Ivanova, the final finishing and correction of these forms with reverse relief was a very difficult task - after all, it was necessary to constantly imagine the appearance of a relatively small (in relation to the total volume) section of the surface of the statue, and even in a “positive” form, increased by 15 times compared to the model. It was necessary to have unusually developed spatial thinking in order to work with these “troughs”. And there were several hundred of them, since the entire shell was divided into 60 blocks.

Installation of a sculptural group in Moscow.
Half of a man's knee.
1936-1937

The wooden shape resembled a geographical map: holes, ruts, mounds. All this had to be sorted out, compared with the plaster model, marked where to remove the wood, where to build it up and then handed it over to a team of tinsmiths who hammered out thin sheets of steel into the mold, marking the boundaries of the joints.

After this, the steel sheets were welded with special machines designed according to the designs of P.N. Lvov. Welding took place directly in wooden forms. Copper strips were placed under the layers to be connected, serving as electrodes. The welder had the second electrode. Spot-welded steel sheets were straightened into shape, finished and then joined together with a lightweight metal frame for the shell. In addition, angle iron fasteners were placed on the seams.

Vera Ignatievna and her colleagues, wearing simple padded jackets, were always among the carpenters finishing the “troughs.” The workers treated us with respect, despite the fact that Mukhina did not make any concessions and insisted on carefully finishing the “troughs,” sometimes demanding their complete remodeling, although the deadlines were very pressing. In some rare cases, alterations occurred through the fault of the sculptors. Later, Mukhina repeatedly recalled how difficult it was to work with huge negative “troughs”. For example,

“the reverse relief of the flying folds of the skirt, placed upside down (otherwise it was impossible to assemble the wooden form), was so complex that I and my two assistants, sculptors Z. Ivanova and N. Zelenskaya, had difficulty figuring out where, ultimately, there is one or the other".

“it took a lot of effort to “switch” to the sensation of reverse relief; everything that was convex became concave. It must be admitted that the flexibility of the sensations of plastic form among the workers was at its best... Many of them received the beginning of a plastic education here, and if at first it was necessary to direct each blow of the chisel, then after a month many of them could freely be entrusted with small independent sections of work with full confidence that the task would be completed and only the final straightening remained.".

The entire work was scheduled to take about four months; Mukhina recalled that when the individual blocks were fastened together and the wooden forms were taken apart, suddenly

“from under the clumsy shell, a shining human torso, head, arm, leg emerges into the light of day. Everyone is looking forward to this moment. It’s interesting what happened, because you’re seeing something positive for the first time. Everyone stands and watches. The workers are animatedly exchanging comments:

- I made this place!

- And this is me!

Everyone was enthusiastic about the work".

But there was a person at the factory who did not believe that the statue could be completed on time. It infuriated him that Mukhina sometimes demanded a complete replacement of unsuccessful “troughs,” and the workers obeyed her and started work anew, although such alterations cost them money: they were not paid twice for the same work.

This person was the director of the plant, a certain S. Tambovtsev. And to protect himself, he wrote a denunciation to the government. The statue, he argued, could not be completed on time, because Mukhina deliberately interrupted work, demanding endless corrections, and even came up with this scarf that could break the entire group in a gust of wind. To make his “signal” more convincing, he also wrote that, according to experts, in certain places of the steel shell of the frame, the profile of the “enemy of the people” L.D. allegedly appears. Trotsky.

This denunciation did not cause any special consequences at that time. But when, after the end of the Paris exhibition and the return of the statue to Moscow, the commissar of the Soviet pavilion, communist Ivan Mezhlauk, who helped a lot in Mukhina’s work, as well as several other engineers working on the statue, were arrested, they were reminded of Tambovtsev’s denunciation. They were rehabilitated after Stalin's death, Mezhlauk - posthumously.

* * *

However, let's return to the installation of the statue. For the sculptors, the most difficult thing was the heads and hands of the worker and collective farmer. An attempt to knock them out into shapes, like all other parts of the statue, was unsuccessful. Then the damaged wooden head forms were filled with clay. When the tree was removed, it turned out to be huge blanks, similar to the heads of the Egyptian sphinxes. But the right size was found. These huge heads were sculpted. Everyone was very interested in the sculpting process.

"Whoever passes, - recalls Mukhina, - stop and look. Until now, the workers have seen that we can do everything like they do: sawing, chopping, and driving nails. For this they respected us. But here we moved into the category of some outstanding people who can do something that others cannot. This is where art began.

Everyone served us in kind. A fireman passes

- Wait a little, I’ll take a look at your nose.

An engineer passes by.

- Turn around, tilt your head.".

In March 1937, assembly of the statue began in the factory yard. Vera Ignatievna corrected the final installation of the shell blocks on the main frame. According to her instructions, the volumes of the torsos of the figures were slightly changed and the position of the arms and scarf was adjusted.

There were difficulties with the scarf and during assembly.

"Repeatedly, - wrote Mukhina, - This “squiggle,” as it was called at the factory, was removed from its place, the fastenings were checked again and again and their power was increased. Mounting it and dressing it with steel were the hardest parts of the job. The deadlines were running out, work went on day and night, no one left the work site to go home.".

A small shed was built at the foot of the group. Tools were kept here. Wood was burning in an overturned old boiler, and the resting shift, settling down near the fire, fell into a short three-hour sleep, so that they could then take up the installation again.

At night, the statue glowed from the inside through the seams and joints that had not yet been sealed everywhere - the welders were welding the frame or cutting the steel with an autogenous gun. What recently frightened sculptors, engineers and workers has now become familiar: steel, which was feared and distrusted at first, has become subject to art, skill and labor. Sometimes an unsuccessful part was completely cut out using an autogenous machine and immediately, without wooden forms, by eye, “molded” from steel. Finally, the last part “sat” into place, the composition closed, the scarf flew into the air. The worker and the collective farmer seemed to move forward in a swift impulse...

The gigantic work of a close-knit team of sculptors, engineers and workers was crowned with success. The unique statue made of chromium-nickel steel was assembled in record time.

Probably, rumors still reached Stalin that either in the profile of a worker or in the folds of a collective farmer’s skirt, Trotsky’s face suddenly appeared. And when the installation was completed, Stalin arrived at the plant at night (during the day, the statue was inspected by K.E. Voroshilov, V.M. Molotov and other members of the government). His driver tried to illuminate the statue with his headlights. Then they turned on strong spotlights. Stalin stayed at the plant for a few minutes and left. The next morning, Iofan told Mukhina that the government was very pleased and the work was accepted without comment.

When everything was finished, the dimensions of the statue were specified. Its height to the end of the sickle is 23.5 meters, the length of the worker’s arm is 8.5 meters, the height of his head is more than 2 meters, the total weight of the statue is almost 75 tons, including the weight of the steel sheet shell - 9 tons.

Urgent dismantling of the statue began. It was cut into 65 pieces and packed into boxes. Meanwhile, in Paris, the construction of the pavilion had already been completed, which had been carried out under the contract by the Gorzhli company since December 1936, and the company itself developed the structures and issued working drawings, linking them with the building materials used in France. Only Gazgan marble was delivered from our country for cladding the head part of the pavilion.

INSTALLING A STATUE IN PARIS

The disassembled parts of the statue were transported in 28 carriages across all of Europe to Paris, and during the journey through Poland it turned out that some parts of the statue did not fit within the dimensions of the tunnel, and after unpacking the boxes, it was necessary to cut individual blocks with an autogenous machine. Sculptors Mukhina, Ivanova, professor Lvov, leading engineers Milovidov, Morozov, Rafael, Prikhozhan, 20 installers, mechanics, welders and tinsmiths also went to Paris. 28 French workers were hired to help them.

"On the first day of arrival, - recalled 3.G. Ivanova, - We, of course, went to the exhibition. Tall forests towered around the building of the Soviet pavilion. Before I had time to come to my senses, Mukhina found herself upstairs, on the roof of the pavilion, to the great surprise of the French present.".

Even before the installation of the statue was completed, one important episode occurred. As already mentioned, the Soviet pavilion and the German pavilion were located on the Seine embankment opposite each other. IN AND. Mukhina recalled that during the construction of exhibition structures “The Germans waited for a long time, wanting to know the height of our pavilion along with the sculptural group. When they established this, they built a tower ten meters higher than ours above their pavilion. They planted an eagle at the top. But for such a height, the eagle was small and looked rather pitiful.”.

K.I. recalled this episode somewhat differently. Christmas:

“There was a difficult situation in Paris, our pavilion stood against the German pavilion, and the question was: whose pavilion is higher? We built our pavilion, the Nazis built theirs higher. Then we stopped. Then they completed their pavilion a little more and put up a swastika. And after that We brought and installed in our pavilion a Mukhina sculpture, which was much taller. Everyone accepted it, Picasso admired how this material was found(stainless steel. - N.V.),what the band looks like against the lilac Parisian sky".

A derrick crane, brought from Moscow, was again installed near the pavilion. The peculiarity of this crane is that its main post is held not by a load at the base or by the counterweight of the boom, but by guy wires made of steel cables. One morning, when the installation of the group was already close to completion, the workers noticed that one of the tension cables had been cut and was barely holding the derrick crane stand, and it was threatening to collapse on the statue and irreparably damage it. The cable was replaced and the installation ended successfully. It was not possible to establish whose hands this sabotage was. From that day until the completion of the installation work, a night watch was organized at the pavilion for our workers and volunteers from those former Russian emigrants who were friendly to us.

The incident with the sawing of the cable reminded that not everyone likes “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” and unforeseen troubles can happen to the statue. Therefore, it was decided to complete the installation as soon as possible and remove the derrick from the pavilion. The assembly of the statue was completed in record time - in just eleven days, instead of the expected twenty-five. The main frame was strengthened right on the pavilion and the blocks of the statue were welded to it, and some of them still had to be corrected, since they were damaged during transportation, because the steel sheets were only 0.5 millimeters thick.

The hard work aroused the interest of everyone who was on the exhibition grounds. At first, these were mainly construction workers and pavilion employees, since the exhibition was not yet open. "Some, - as V.I. said. Mukhina, - we were asked how we performed this group and who did it. One of our workers, who understood the question asked in a foreign language, answered proudly:
"Who? Yes, we are the Soviet Union! And you had to see how our entire group worked to understand how fair and justified this answer was.".

Already a few days before the official opening of the exhibition, which took place on May 25, 1937, “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” towered over Paris.

"WORKER AND COLLECTIVE WOMAN" IN PARIS

An elderly cleaner of the workshop in which the sculpture was made, seeing the sculpted head of a worker, said: "Good son." In Paris, during the assembly of the statue, French, English, Italian masons, plasterers, installers who worked at the exhibition, passing by, saluted “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman.” Republican Spain issued a stamp depicting a sculptural group at the Soviet pavilion, the possession of which is still the cherished dream of thousands of philatelists in various countries.

Louis Aragon told Mukhina: "You helped us!" *

* This is how the words of L. Aragon are conveyed in the text published in the magazine “Art” (1957, No. 8). In the manuscript recording of conversations with V. Mukhina, L. Toom and A. Bek, kept by V. Zamkov and T. Vek, this phrase sounds slightly different; "You saved us!"

What was it about this work that captivated everyone - from a simple cleaning lady to world-famous poets and artists? The emblem of peaceful inspired labor - the hammer and sickle - hovered above the exhibition. They were visible from everywhere, from any distance and angle. In sculpture there is the power of movement, dynamism. But also, it has the power of affirmation. The legs of the worker and the collective farmer, pushed forward with a huge step, stand firmly, confidently, forming a single vertical with their torsos and arms raised up. From the front, the group looks extremely monopolitan, and the mirror symmetry of the figures tangibly conveys the theme of cohesion and unity of Soviet society. The group's full face figuratively embodies the pathos of what has been achieved and conquered.

But as soon as we begin to turn our gaze back from this limiting powerful vertical, a rapid, whirlwind movement is felt more and more. The theme of expressively heightened movement, a whirlwind, is generally characteristic of Mukhina’s work. Examples of this are the works of the 1920s “Flame of the Revolution”, “Wind”, the later “Borey”, etc.

The great advantage of the sculptural group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is that its noble figurative idea is expressed not literary, illustrative, but exclusively in plastic language, that is, by specific means of sculpture. If you visually remove the hammer and sickle from the hands of a worker and a collective farmer, the composition will hardly change; it will still be clear that the group symbolizes the workers’ and peasants’ country, because everything that needed to be said to the sculptor is said by the images themselves. The emblem only complements this ideological and figurative sound, being the final chord.

However, Mukhina paid exceptional attention to the reproduction of the emblem. In one of the initial sketches, the sickle was turned with the curved side forward - the sculptor thought that this would strengthen the vertical and even in some indirect form give a more “peaceful” character to the group if the sickle was directed forward not with its point, but with its blunt side. But then the sculptor probably came to the conclusion that such a solution would create some dissonance: the roundness of the sickle, directed forward, would give the viewer a feeling of unjustified suppression of movement, the sickle would attract too much attention to itself with such an unusual position, and this would force the viewer to focus on the emblem, and not in the group itself.

In the final model, Mukhina again turned the sickle point forward and also abandoned the parallel position of the hammer and sickle. This seemingly insignificant rotation of the hammer and sickle at a certain angle to each other was also one of the sculptor’s remarkable finds.

Photo by R. Napier

Firstly, now the sickle in the hand of the collective farmer and the head of the hammer in the worker were parallel to the general movement of their figures, the position of their torsos and arms thrown back. In this regard, even the small-sized details of the emblem did not contradict the general movement, but seemed to emphasize with their position these main directions of the plasticity of the figures.

Secondly, thanks to this placement at a slight angle to each other, the sickle and hammer, not only from the profile, but from almost all points of view, including the front, were perceived precisely as an emblem familiar to everyone. Even in those cases when the sickle looked like only a vertical strip in the hand of a collective farmer, the hammer was seen somewhat in profile, and vice versa. So the meaning of the image always remained revealed. From an ideological and figurative point of view, the sculptor’s discovery of such a position of the elements making up the emblem was extremely important.

It is not for nothing that Mukhina, even on the model, carefully checked all possible angles of viewing the group and carefully analyzed them, accordingly changing some places of the statue so that even from undesirable points of perception its plastic features would not be distorted or these distortions would be minimal.

And yet, working so carefully on the location and thinking in detail about the viewer’s perception of the hammer and sickle, Mukhina believed that the main thing in sculpture is not the emblem, but the very nature of the images. Two years after the creation of “Worker and Collective Farm Woman,” speaking about the proposed sculptural groups for the Palace of the Soviets and drawing on her experience, she argued that we, that is, Soviet sculptors,

“we must convey the ideals of our worldview, the image of a person of free thought and free labor; we must convey all the romanticism and creative passion of our days. Therefore, it is wrong to look for an image in jackhammers and similar accessories... There is a second point that dictates the need for a figurative solution: The higher the sculptural composition stands, the more difficult it is to read its thematic story, and it begins to act more with its plastic qualities, mass, silhouette and requires a clear image."

The sculptural group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was at the same time the most significant expression of a special direction in art that had been emerging since the first years of the revolution, the characteristic works of which were “Cobblestone - the weapon of the proletariat” by I. Shadra, “October” by A. Matveev, and early films by A. Dovzhenko ( for example, “Earth”), “Defense of Petrograd” by A. Deineka, a memorial plaque on the Senate Tower of the Kremlin by S. Konenkov and other works of the beginning and end of the 1920s. There is a certain commonality of interpretation in them: a phenomenon, fact, event is concretized in generalized and to a certain extent schematized images-symbols, endowed with external, well-recognized features that make it possible to easily and instantly recognize this phenomenon or event. Even in conveying the concrete, artists often tried to reveal diversity and individuality. uniqueness, but general symbolized ideas and the main leading feature. This is, for example, the image of V.I. Lenin in a statue for the ZAGES by I. Shadra or “Lenin - the Leader” by N. Andreev.

I.D. Shadr. Cobblestone is the weapon of the proletariat. 1927

This was a natural stage and a fruitful direction for Soviet art. Without examining its origins, it can be noted that it was largely determined by the presence of a fundamentally new viewer, a “consumer” of art. Soviet art was created for the broad masses of the people, and for masses that at that time were not yet sufficiently developed in general culture, often simply illiterate. Such a viewer often perceived only the plot and understood the work only by familiar details. In this regard, art sometimes had a propaganda character, talking to the viewer "the rough language of a poster". This art made extensive use of monumental means, created symbolic images of the worker in general, the Red Army soldier in general, and gravitated towards the embodiment of such general concepts as “revolution”, “International”, etc.

Mukhina's group was, perhaps, the highest manifestation of this trend, most fully revealing its capabilities and at the same time, thanks to this disclosure, marking the beginning of new aspirations in art. They manifested themselves in the fact that behind the external, symbolically interpreted images of a worker and a collective farmer, one could read a very large content, far from being of a purely propaganda nature (as was the case, for example, in I. Shadr’s competition project).

Therefore, the creation of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” was a great and bright victory of the new art, imbued with a life-affirming principle, capable of reflecting the most complex phenomena in concrete images.

The success enjoyed by the sculptural group in Paris was a triumph of Soviet art. "At the International Exhibition, wrote Romain Rolland, on the banks of the Seine, two young Soviet giants raise the hammer and sickle, and we hear a heroic hymn flowing from their chests, which calls the peoples to freedom, to unity and will lead them to victory.".

Speaking in Belgrade, already in the post-war years, about her group, Mukhina said:

“As an artist, I know that this work is far from perfect, but I am firmly convinced that it is needed! Why? Because the masses responded to this work with a sense of pride in their Soviet existence. It is needed for the rush into the future towards the light and the sun, for the feeling of human power and one’s need on earth!

I felt this most clearly when this group was working at the factory, where 150 coppersmiths, minters and metalworkers worked on it with real enthusiasm and proudly called themselves: “we are statue-makers.”

I felt it when foreign workers working at the Paris World's Fair made the "Rot Front" salute as they passed by, when the last postage stamp of free Spain featured this group!"

“The perception of this group against the backdrop of the Parisian sky showed how active sculpture can be, not only in the overall ensemble of the architectural landscape, but also in its psychological impact... The artist’s highest joy is to be understood.”.

“The creation of such a work was associated with the need to resolve many of the most difficult problems. Mukhina successfully coped with all the difficulties. She showed great talent. She managed to give the sculptural group dynamic strength. In modern world sculpture, this work should be considered exceptional.

Some unnecessary details in some places disrupt the harmony of the main lines. This, however, does not prevent the sculpture as a whole from leaving an impression of greatness, strength and courage, which are fully consistent with the creative creativity of the Soviet Union. This sculptural group perfectly personifies the main line of the will of the proletariat. It is now difficult in the West to find artists who are able to be inspired by the life and aspirations of the working masses and depict these aspirations in works of art. Soviet sculptor Vera Mukhina is one of the masters who are sufficiently armed with knowledge of plastic art techniques to create a work of this scale.

Personally, what pleases me most in this direction is the feeling of strength. health, youth, which creates such a wonderful counterbalance to the consumptive sculpture of Western European aesthetes.

Both heads - the worker's and the collective farm woman's - are particularly well-finished works and are of enormous value from the point of view of monumental sculpture.

The purely technical difficulties associated with such work were resolved with absolute success. We must warmly welcome everyone - from engineers to installers - who contributed to this remarkable work.

I ask you to accept these short lines as the artist’s admiration for the artist." .

Photo by R. Napier

It is worth paying attention to one more feature, predetermined by Iofan’s sketch and brilliantly implemented by Mukhina. Paired sculptural compositions, even with the ideological and figurative commonality of the characters, are usually built on plastic contrast or - such a mathematical expression - on the principle of complementarity, for example: sitting and standing figures ("Minin and Pozharsky" by I. Martos), walking and standing, falling and rising ( a number of groups by E. Buchetich in the Volgograd ensemble, a monument to the “First Soviets” in Ivanovo by D. Ryabichev and many others).

Such trivial compositional moves are being developed successfully. But Iofan and Mukhina proposed a fundamentally different composition, based on close coincidence, the identity of the internal content of the images and their plastic interpretation. As far as we know, in Soviet monumental sculpture this was the first example of what was later defined as the “choral principle” in sculpture, when the depicted characters almost completely repeat each other’s gestures and movements. The most famous example of such a “choral solution” in recent years is the group O.S. Kiryukhin and architect A.P. Ershov "Moscow Militia", located on People's Militia Street.

The “choral principle” apparently comes from ancient Russian painting, where with such an impersonal depiction, for example, of warriors, the common goals and actions of the characters, the similarity of their aspirations and destinies were emphasized. This was an expression of close cohesion, mass character, and, ultimately, the nationality of the reproduced heroes. And when we say that Mukhina’s work is deeply folk, then this impression is to some extent created by the identity of the images, the symmetrical repetition of their gestures, their common desire forward and higher, conveyed by the compositional and plastic technique of “choral sculpture”.

Of course, this is not the only thing that determines the nationality of Mukhina’s group. N. Vorkunova was right when she wrote that this work “popular because it expresses the ideals of the liberated people, their thoughts and ideas about the beauty, strength and dignity of man, about the content of his life.” All this is realized figuratively and plastically thanks to the innovative technique of constructing a pair of sculptures not based on contrast, but on the technique of similarity. B.M. Iofan, when creating his sketch, hardly attached such importance to this principle - for him, the movement of the characters in the group was justified mainly by the fact that they were holding symbols of the Soviet state in their hands, which was well understood and reproduced in their sketches by V. Andreev and M. Manizer . Mukhina significantly developed this idea and gave it a fundamentally different, much deeper and more impressive content.

This happened because there was always a big social idea behind Mukhina’s creative endeavors. If we consider "The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman" as an expression of the principles of socialist realism, which demanded "truthful, historically specific" reflection of reality, then the creation of this statue in 1937 against the background of the trials of Pyatakov, Sokolnikov, Radek, the suicide of Ordzhonikidze, the arrest and subsequent trial of Bukharin and Rykov will seem to us at least an undignified phenomenon.

What are the reasons for such a discrepancy between art and the real situation? Those who might assume that Mukhina might not know or guess about the true state of affairs in the country should be reminded that her husband, Dr. A. Zamkov, and she herself had already experienced arrest and deportation in the early 1930s and could imagine existing reality. By the way, the processes of 1937-1938, and in particular the “disappearance” of some former builders working in Paris, including the subsequent execution of I. Mezhlauk, the commissioner of our pavilion, really affected her work, in particular her competition work for the New York Exhibitions.

Mukhina in her Parisian statue did not “reflect” the historical specificity of the late 1930s, but created a symbol of the country, a sculptural personification of those truly socialist ideals in which she, a sincere and integral person, sacredly believed. Vera Ignatievna was inspired by the construction of a new society and created works that, in turn, inspired and inspired the audience. This is confirmed by her repeated statements about the new man - the ideal image of harmonious people of the near future, in whose name she created and, naturally, had to resort not so much to a truthful reflection of nature in the “forms of life itself,” but to allegory and symbol. Therefore she said: "My opinion is that allegory and personification and symbol do not go against the idea of ​​socialist realism". However, this opinion was not shared by official art. She embodied her views in her own works.

“Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is, of course, not an example of concrete historical truth, but a symbol, an ideal image constructed by a great artist. This is exactly how the sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was perceived by Louis Aragon, France Maserel, and Romain Rolland. And on the commemorative coins issued for the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, along with the silhouette of the legendary “Aurora” and the image of the satellite, the figures of “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” are minted as a symbol of the country.

This statue is an outstanding work of Russian monumental art, for it introduced into it a symbol that was diligently banished by adherents of the orthodox understanding of realism as concrete historical verisimilitude.

Like some other outstanding works of the 1930s, "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" did not fit into the Procrustean bed of the official artistic method. But if Deineka or Gerasimov could simply be excommunicated from socialist realism, Meyerhold destroyed, Filonov rot in poverty, then the author of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” was known to the whole world, and this work itself undoubtedly contributed to the establishment of the authority of the Soviet Union, and at the same time and glorification of its leader.

Therefore, in relation to Mukhina, a policy was pursued not of carrots, but of sticks - she was awarded orders, Stalin Prizes and honorary titles, allowed to go abroad, a special workshop was built for her, etc. But at the same time, a personal exhibition of her works never took place, not a single symbolic and allegorical work of hers, except for “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman,” was ever realized, she was not able to erect a single monument on a military theme, except for two trivial busts twice Heroes of the Soviet Union. To please official tastes, she had to alter the designs of monuments to Gorky and Tchaikovsky.

In addition, it is known that they constantly persecuted, and later simply ruined the work of her husband, Doctor A. Zamkov, who invented a new medicine. Such was the price for the only symbolic work, far from the barracks artistic doctrine, that she managed to realize. And she paid for the rest of her life.

ISSUES IN THE SYNTHESIS OF ARTS

Paris Pavilion B.M. Iofan with the sculptural group of V.I. Mukhina is still considered one of the most expressive and complete examples of the synthesis of arts. The first and, perhaps, most clearly said about this D.E. Arkin ( Arkin D.E.. Architectural image of the Land of Soviets: USSR Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris // Architecture and Sculpture. M.: Publishing house VAA, 1938, p. 8.), who stated that “Soviet architecture can rightfully count this purely “temporary” building among its indisputable, enduring achievements”, since “architecture and sculpture here constitute one whole in the full sense of the word”. The author notes the following qualities that, in his opinion, contribute to the implementation of this synthesis. "First and most important" he considers "the figurative richness... of the structure, its ideological usefulness." He further notes "construction of the statue" and what “she never for a moment broke her original connection with the architectural whole from which she was born.” Then it is stated "commonality" and architectural and sculptural images, "speaking in unison about the same thing - in different materials, different means and in different forms...".

The architectural composition of this entire structure suggests sculpture as something organically obligatory. “This internal obligation of cooperation between the two arts, this organic nature of their connection are the main conditions and the first signs of a true synthesis.” Analyzing the image of the pavilion as a whole, Arkin says that the commonality of the idea embodied in the architectural and sculptural parts gave rise to a commonality of movement: “Highly raised hands repeat the architectural “gesture” of the head of the building,” commonality of rhythm, commonality of composition and overall style.

Indeed, the silhouette of the building, the increasing movement of its volumes by ledges are, as it were, repeated in the sculptural group with its main diagonal, emphasized horizontals of the arms and scarf and, finally, the affirmative vertical of the legs extended forward with a mighty step and arms raised high. Bringing all these statements, relatively speaking, to a single denominator, we can state that in the building as a whole, a synthesis has been achieved on the principle of similarity of architectural and sculptural forms, masses and volumes.

Synthesis by likeness was a very well-known and even dominant method of achieving the unity of architecture and sculpture, architecture and painting, widespread in the 1930-1950s. This was one of the legacies of the classics, which was especially eagerly developed in the post-constructivist architecture of the 1930s, largely thanks to the work of B.M. Iofan. This was most clearly reflected in the design of pre-war and military-built Moscow metro stations, especially such as “Komsomolskaya”, “Mayakovskaya”, “Revolution Square”, etc.

However, synthesis by likeness is basically a hierarchical synthesis, built on the subordination of sculpture and painting to the primacy of architecture. And if the design of V. Andreev or M. Manizer had been adopted for the construction of the pavilion, then the principle of synthesis in similarity would have been quite definitely followed. However, Mukhina's sculpture was too strong and an independent work. And a paradoxical situation emerged - in fact, the sculptural group became dominant in the structure and figuratively subordinated it to itself, although at first and somewhat formal glance it seems that it only repeated the movement, rhythms and compositional principles of the pavilion. Apparently, this became somewhat discouraging for B. Iofan himself. And later, when constructing a pavilion for the New York World Exhibition, where he repeated the same basic scheme - a sculpture crowning the central pylon - the sculptor chose to implement the least interesting project of the statue “Worker” by V.A., which almost completely repeated his sketch. Andreeva.

* In addition to V. Andreev, M. Manizer, V. Mukhina, S. Merkurov and I. Shadr took part in the competition.

These concrete bas-reliefs were metallized on site in Paris. The assessment of their artistic merits in Soviet art criticism is quite contradictory. A. Chlenov writes that in these propylaea “Tchaikov for the first time shows labor as a force that transforms the life and appearance of the working people themselves. Undoubtedly, this success of the master was prepared by his persistent work on mastering the method of socialist realism and the general rise of Soviet art.” . (Chlenov A. Introductory article to the album "Joseph Moiseevich Tchaikov". M.: Sov. artist, 1952. P. 10,)

THEM. Schmidt ( Shmidt I.M. Joseph Chaikov. M.: Sov. artist, 1977. P. 30.) believes that these bas-reliefs were largely influenced by "official standards of academic naturalism" and in contrast to Tchaikov’s previous works, where “the generalized constructive foundations of sculptural forms clearly emerged and sharp typical images were created”, in the late 1930s in his work, including bas-reliefs, "created for the Soviet pavilion of the World Exhibition in Paris", begin to appear "trends of external descriptiveness and didacticism", and "features of illustrativeness in solving the topic".

The photographic material we looked at makes us rather agree with I.M. Schmidt. But now it is important to note that in terms of their artistic characteristics, these static affirmative bas-reliefs undoubtedly contrasted with the impetuous and dynamic sculpture of Mukhina, although they were related to her in color due to surface metallization. What was especially important for Iofan was that the powerful volumes of these propylae organized the approach to the pavilion and gave “its statics provide a necessary contrast to the overall dynamic solution of the structure.”

In addition, the entire space in front of the main entrance was designed in solemn and upbeat tones, which also seemed to contradict the dynamism of the sculptural group, but thereby emphasized its movement. Thanks to the high stylobate with the main staircase and powerful propylaea in front of the Soviet pavilion, an independent area was formed, somewhat isolated from the entire exhibition area. The viewer perceived it together with the central pylon of the pavilion and the colorful sculptural coat of arms made by V.A. Favorsky as a complete and complete ensemble, especially since the sculptural group from here, from the square, looked more statuesque: its vortex movement was clearly readable mainly from profile points of view.

The thoughtful use of color also contributed to the solemn design of the space in front of the pavilion. The base of the pavilion was faced with porphyry-colored marble, the stylobate with red Schroen marble, and the central entrance pylon with Gazgan marble, and the facing with this marble began with relatively dark, brown-orange tones, then turned into golden, ivory colors and ended at the top when approaching the statue bluish-smoky tones that correspond well with the silvery color of the metal of the sculpture.

The decoration of the side facades emphasized the movement, which then received final expression in the sculptural group. For example, the stepped cornices of the two tiers of the side facades had an accentuated extension towards the rear facade and were vertically cut off in front. This gave them a resemblance to certain wings and emphasized the overall dynamics of the pavilion. Silver metal was introduced into the processing of the side facades “in the form of rods on pilasters, on cornices, on window sashes, etc. This technique of processing facades with metal was intended to emphasize the architectural contours, highlighting them especially in the evening light, and also to connect the building with the statue crowning it by the unity of the material.”

All these techniques undoubtedly contributed to the synthetic solution of the entire structure, over which, in addition to B.M. Iofana worked with A.I. Baransky, D.M. Iofan, Ya.F. Popov, D.M. Tsiperovich, M.V. Andrianov, S.A. Gelfald, Yu.N. Zenkevich, V.V. Polyatsky. Contemporaries and many later researchers highly appreciated the Paris Pavilion precisely as an example of an expressive and holistic synthesis of the arts. A.A. Strigalev even considers it a synthesis "of some higher order" in which there is some "narrative" almost "plot content". He writes that "the extended silhouette of the pavilion, growing in steps, seems to depict a certain “path” - forward and upward. The sculptures crowning the pavilion, with all their visual concreteness, are symbols, and the architecture associated with them acquires the meaning of a symbolic image. The contrast of geometry and plasticity is used as a semantic one, and together with thus it is softened by the participation of both in a single plastic “narrative”. Architecture depicts a take-off run, a kind of take-off platform, sculpture - the very take-off.”

And yet, despite the obvious desire of the architect and the sculptor to work in unison, to express the same idea using different artistic means, from our point of view, they did not achieve a full synthesis of the arts. And the point here was not in individual particular shortcomings, which the authors themselves knew and spoke about. IN AND. Mukhina was not satisfied with the proportions of the sculpture in relation to the building, and considered some details not completely successful. B. Iofan directly indicated that “It was not possible to achieve complete coordination of the sculpture with the architecture. It extends beyond the dimensions of the pedestal part and therefore somewhat burdens the overall composition.”

In a structure of such scale and character as the Paris Pavilion, architecture had to be dominant. Meanwhile, a clear impression was created that the entire pavilion was erected only to be the pedestal of a sculptural group. Thus, what Iofan could not get rid of in the project of the Palace of the Soviets, although to a lesser extent, was repeated in the Paris Pavilion: the result was a gigantic enlarged monument. This is noted by objective researchers. A.A. Strigalev writes that "architectural forms submitted to sculpture" and architecture was ultimately "pedestal for sculpture" (Strigalev A.A. On the design of the Soviet pavilion for the Paris Exhibition of 1937 // Problems of the history of Soviet architecture. M.: 1983.), Having faced the side facades not with Gazgan marble, but with a composition of simentolite - a patented plaster with an admixture of natural stone chips - and by designing the main vertical volume without windows, dissected only by vertical rods, Iofan further emphasized the “pedestal” nature of this central part, her visual “service”.

However, some of our objections to the recognition of the Paris Pavilion as an example of the synthesis of arts are not based at all on a different, current understanding of synthesis. Even for the prevailing perception of it in those years as a hierarchical system based on the primacy of some parts and the subordination of others, the Paris Pavilion was an example of such a synthesis, but... with one significant caveat: the fact is that, having accepted hierarchy as a leading and mandatory principle synthesis, sanctified by thousands of years of art history, we can, however, state that the main, determining factor in this particular case was the sculptural group, and this ultimately led to a paradoxical interpretation of the synthesis: a functionally secondary element of the building, practically its decoration, became ideologically and artistically dominant . The reason for this, apparently, lay in the different understanding of the synthesis of arts by Iofan and Mukhina. Iofan was accustomed to the architectural interpretation of synthesis, in which caryatids, atlanteans, and mascarons were the decoration of the building and played only a decorative role. He agreed to endow them with ideological content, but for him they nevertheless remained accompanying, secondary elements of the structure.

In all her speeches dedicated to the synthesis of arts and the role of sculpture in architecture, Mukhina fought against such an understanding. Her own perception of the synthesis, perhaps intuitively, was clearly based on the sculptural interpretation adopted in monumental and memorial art: the figure, statue, bust are dominant in the synthesis, and the pedestal, pedestal, base are only a necessary, but not defining element of the monument . And in fact, she embodied this understanding in her group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”. Therefore, what turned out to be somewhat unexpected and to some extent even offensive for Iofan was a “synthesis in reverse” - the sculpture became the main element of the overall composition, and the pavilion - supporting, complementary, and this made possible the independent existence of the leading element - the Mukha group.

Meanwhile, there is another point of view: “The true fusion of architecture and sculpture in the Soviet Pavilion is so great that it is absolutely impossible to dismember its architectural and sculptural parts without causing irreparable damage to each of them.”(Vorkunova N.I. Symbol of the new world. M., 1965. P. 38).

Such remarks do not seem convincing. They are refuted by the entire subsequent history of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman.” We do not mean moving the statue to Moscow and installing it on an unreasonably low pedestal, but numerous reproductions of this sculpture. It has become a symbol and is repeated countless times on posters, book covers, badges, medals, screensavers of films shot by the Mosfilm studio, etc. And it is reproduced everywhere as an independent work, not connected with the exhibition pavilion. It is in this capacity that it is familiar to millions of people both in the USSR and abroad, while the features of the architectural image of the pavilion are now known only to specialists.

Indirect confirmation of these considerations in creative psychological terms are some episodes of the subsequent biography of B.M. Iofan. For him, the popularity of the Mukhina statue and the numerous enthusiastic reviews about it, regardless of the existence of the pavilion, were somewhat unexpected. Mukhina even had to write an open letter to the executive editor of the Architectural Newspaper M.O. Olshovich, where she wrote that “The name of B.M. Iofan should always be noted not only as the author of the architectural design of the pavilion, but also of the sculptural design, which contained a two-figure composition of male and female figures raising a hammer and sickle in a solemn step.”. (The letter was written on February 19, 1938 (TsGALI, f. 2326, op. 1, item 22, l. 1). Published in Architectural Newspaper No. 12, 1938)

In addition, when designing almost immediately after the Paris pavilion for the 1939 New York World's Fair, Iofan clearly took into account the experience of Paris. The New York pavilion has much calmer shapes with emphasized verticals. It is also crowned with a statue, but the proportional relationships here are completely different. The vertical pylon-pedestal is almost 4 times the size of the statue. In addition, its functional role is insignificant; it is, in fact, a decoration and emblem of the structure. The exhibition halls are located in a ring-shaped room surrounding this central pylon with the statue. And here a synthesis of the sculptural part with architecture was truly achieved, with the primacy of the latter. But unfortunately, on a more trivial level, since in this case the architecture and sculpture from the figurative and artistic side are significantly inferior to what was done in Paris. Apparently, the reasons for this lay not only in Iofan’s work, but were to some extent an indirect expression of those processes in the life of the country that occurred in 1937-1938.

For future sociologists of art, the striking ideological and artistic contrast between the Paris and New York pavilions will be of undoubted interest. While the first went down in the history of Soviet architecture and art as a landmark work, the second went virtually unnoticed and did not have any influence on the subsequent development of art. The competition project for the completion of the central pylon, made by Mukhina, was a naked figure of a man, raising a star high with one hand and as if struggling with a snaking scarf entangling him, constraining all his movements, like a new, modern Laocoön. The relief of I. Tchaikov, insincere, empty, deliberately decorative, applies to a much greater extent that negative characteristic of I. Schmidt, which is given above in relation to the Parisian propylaea. This is a clear creative decline. And only two years passed between the creation of the Parisian pavilion, full of faith and enthusiasm, and the officially affirmative, official-pathetic New York one.

However, be that as it may, those purely architectural and plastic changes that Iofan came to in New York, as it seems to us, were also caused by his dissatisfaction with the results determined in Paris. In fact, the architect and the sculptor here not only strived to work in unison, but also competed as two talented people. And Mukhina’s talent turned out to be higher. Iofan sought to accurately express time. Mukhina wanted to reflect the era.

* * * Subsequently, after the end of the exhibition, the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was dismantled (in some places it was simply cut with an autogen), transported to Moscow, where it was again almost completely restored from thicker sheets of steel (up to 2 mm) and mounted on a much lower pedestal in front of the Northern entrance to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, where it is still located. Mukhina herself has repeatedly objected to the unacceptably low height of the pedestal, which, in her opinion, distorts the sculpture and deprives it of the necessary space for movement.

The current pedestal is approximately 3 times lower than the pylon of the Paris Pavilion. The statue therefore comes very close to the viewer, which Mukhina had no intention of doing. On the contrary, she enlarged individual details and somewhat exaggerated the movement, taking into account the architecture of the pavilion, and also taking into account the visual reduction of forms and proportions when perceiving the statue from below, a consequence of this, as N. Vorkunova correctly writes, the shape of the statue “they began to seem more roughly and sharply sculpted, the hands seemed clumsy upon close examination, the folds of the material were too sharp and rigid, the faces were roughened and schematized.”

During the life of V.I. Mukhina failed to achieve a more acceptable installation of the statue. Later, in 1962, her colleagues in creating “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” - Professor P.N. Lvov, sculptors Z.G. Ivanov and N.G. Zelenskaya, in connection with the publication of an album dedicated to this sculpture (Voronov N.V. “Worker and Collective Farm Woman.” Sculptor V. Mukhina. L.: Artist of the RSFSR, 1962), again turned to the government with a proposal to move the statue. However, this issue was also not resolved. In 1975, the Presidium of the Academy of Arts approached the government with the same proposal. This time the matter was set in motion. The Moscow Council decided to move the statue and prepare a new, higher pedestal for it. The design of this pedestal, where the horizontals so important for the perception of the sculpture would be expressed, was entrusted to B.M. Iofanu. But at the beginning of 1976, already ill and continuing to work on the project of a new pedestal in Barvikha, Iofan died.

B.M. Iofan. Sculpture installation project
higher pedestal. 1976

The issue of moving the statue was again raised at the anniversary evening dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Mukhina, organized by the Academy of Arts and the Union of Artists in 1979. This was discussed at N.A.’s evening. Zhuravlev, V.A. Zamkov and other speakers. At the beginning of 1980, the statue was restored. Now, in connection with preparations for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Mukhina, Order of Lenin, the Academy of Arts again raises the issue of moving the statue “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” to a place more favorable for its perception.

And in 1987, a competition was announced to find such a place to move the famous group. The most acceptable, apparently, is the undeveloped space near the new building of the Central Exhibition Hall on the Krymskaya Embankment, opposite the Central Park of Culture and Culture named after. Gorky.

However, an authoritative expert commission spoke out against moving the statue: while its stainless steel sheet casing remains in satisfactory condition, the internal metal frame needs almost complete replacement due to corrosion. Creating a new frame is possible in principle, especially since we have found all the surviving detailed drawings and, in addition, according to the late N. Zelenskaya, the heirs of engineer A. Prikhozhan, who worked with Mukhina and miraculously escaped repression, have his design notes on how to restore statue if ever needed.

However, replacing the frame means that the statue will practically have to be made anew. The experience of restoring individual works by V. Mukhina by her students, which did not give sufficiently acceptable aesthetic results, because, as V. Mukhina’s son V. Zamkov correctly noted, “They had neither the talent nor the moral fortitude of Mukhina,” suggests that the restoration of the group “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” should be undertaken not by a restorer, but by a sculptor who, in terms of moral criteria, at least approaches the scale of Vera Ignatievna’s talent. But which of the sculptors currently working is capable of such self-sacrifice for the sake of restoring “someone else’s” work?

And yet we believe that such a sculptor will exist.

Photo: Sculpture "Worker and Collective Farm Woman"

V. I. Mukhina

Worker and collective farmer, 1937

Stainless steel. Height: about 25 m

USSR Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris (1937). Nowadays - near the Northern entrance of the All-Russian Exhibition Center

“Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is an outstanding monument of monumental art, “an ideal and symbol of the Soviet era,” representing a dynamic sculptural group of two figures with a hammer and sickle raised above their heads. Author - Vera Mukhina; concept and compositional plan of the architect Boris Iofan. The monument is made of stainless chromium-nickel steel. Height is about 25 m (height of the pavilion-pedestal is 33 m). Total weight - 185 tons.

History of sculpture

Creation

It was created for the Soviet pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1937. The ideological concept of the sculpture and the first model belonged to the architect B. M. Iofan, who won the competition for the construction of the pavilion. While working on the competition project, the architect “very soon came up with an image... of a sculpture, a young man and a girl, personifying the owners of the Soviet land - the working class and the collective farm peasantry. They raise high the emblem of the Land of the Soviets - the hammer and sickle."

The creation of “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” was inspired by Iofan, according to Iofan’s secretary I.Yu. Eigel, by the idea of ​​the ancient statue “Tyrant Fighters”, depicting Harmodius and Aristogeiton standing next to swords in their hands, and the sculpture “Nike of Samothrace”.

A competition was announced for the creation of the sculpture, which was won by sculptor V.I. Mukhina.

Work on creating a huge monument was carried out using a one and a half meter plaster model created by Mukhina at the pilot plant of the Institute of Mechanical Engineering and Metalworking under the leadership of Professor P. N. Lvov.

Damaged during transportation from Paris to Moscow. In January-August 1939, the sculpture was reconstructed and installed on a pedestal in front of the Main Entrance of the All-Russian Exhibition Center (now the Northern Entrance of the All-Russian Exhibition Center). Restored in 1979.

The sculpture was called "the standard of socialist realism" in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Reconstruction

In 2003, the monument was dismantled into 40 fragments. The sculpture was intended to be restored and returned to its place at the end of 2005, but due to problems with financing, the reconstruction was delayed and was fully completed only in November 2009. During the reconstruction, specialists from TsNIIPSK named after. Melnikov significantly strengthened the load-bearing frame of the composition; all parts of the sculpture were cleaned and treated with anti-corrosion compounds.

The sculpture was installed on a new pavilion-pedestal, specially erected for it, repeating the original Iofan pavilion of 1937, but significantly shortened in its rear part. The installation was carried out on November 28, 2009 using a special crane. The grand opening of the monument took place in Moscow on December 4, 2009.

The pedestal on which the sculpture is placed is 10 m higher than the previous one.

On September 4, 2010, the museum and exhibition center “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was opened on the pedestal of the monument. The museum presents the history of the creation of the monument in photographs, projects and models. Three more halls are exhibition halls. The exhibition area of ​​the center is approximately 3.2 thousand m².

The dismantling, storage and restoration of the legendary sculptural composition cost the budget 2.9 billion rubles.

After the completion of the reconstruction, the Worker and Collective Farm Woman International Exhibition Center became part of the museum and exhibition association "Capital", which also includes the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, the New Manege Moscow State Exhibition Hall, the Chekhov's House Exhibition Hall, and the Museum-Workshop of the People's Artist of the USSR D. A. Nalbandyan and the Vadim Sidur Museum.

Use in symbolism

It is believed that the sculpture has become a symbol of the Soviet (now Russian) film studio Mosfilm since 1947. However, “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” first appeared at the beginning of the film not in G. Alexandrov’s “Spring” (1947), but a year earlier in S. Yutkevich’s comedy “Hello, Moscow.” The image of “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” first appeared on a Soviet standard postage stamp in 1938. Subsequently, the monument was repeatedly depicted on various stamps, including on “standards” in 1961, 1976, 1988 (on stamps of the 10th, 12th and 13th standard issues, respectively). As a rule, stamps with “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” had the most popular denominations. The sculpture is depicted on the medal “Laureate of the USSR Exhibition of Economic Achievements” (since 1992 - “Laureate of the All-Russian Exhibition Center”).

Movie

Immediately after its installation in Moscow in July 1939, the sculpture was seen on movie screens by millions of Soviet viewers in the films “The Foundling” (1939) and “The Shining Path” (1940).

The sculpture is shown in the cartoon “Belka and Strelka. Star dogs." The sculpture appeared in fragments of the films “Day Watch (film)” and “Burnt by the Sun.”

Gallery

Having seen the pedestal for installing a monument in Moscow, Vera Mukhina called it a “stump.” In Bikin in 1938, a similar sculpture was erected, albeit smaller in size and made of cement. In 1998, an action was carried out to save the monument, which at that moment was in disrepair. “The worker and the collective farmer” were dressed in overalls and a sundress in the colors of the Russian flag and stood there for three days. The clothing for the size 560 monument was made by the Monolit textile association.

Boris RUDENKO. Photo by Igor Konstantinov and from the VIAM archive.

Apparently, the day when the famous creation of the sculptor Vera Mukhina rises above Moscow again is not so long. Work on the restoration of the monument has crossed the equator, a pedestal is being built for it, the new opening of the sculpture is scheduled for December 5, 2009, and there is considerable confidence that it will take place on schedule. Like any outstanding work of art, “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” has its own history. Even two - old and new, which we will now tell you.

Monument to Vera Mukhina “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”

2003 The final stage of dismantling the monument.

Each of the 5,000 elements of the sculpture had to be marked, photographed and assessed for the degree of corrosive wear.

Science and life // Illustrations

Science and life // Illustrations

Science and life // Illustrations

One of the largest fragments is a worker's hand with a hammer.

After computer processing, areas affected by corrosion “appear” in the photograph of the monument element (on the right).

The famous monument to Vera Mukhina “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was saved for history by specialists from the All-Russian Research Institute of Aviation Materials.

CREATION

If anyone is wondering why it was necessary to restore a clearly politicized symbol of the bygone Soviet era, let us immediately explain: “The Worker and the Collective Farm Woman” is indeed a symbol and indeed a highly politicized one. But at the same time, this is a great work of monumental art recognized and known throughout the civilized world, of which we have been rightfully proud for many years.

The idea of ​​the sculpture - the figures of a worker and a collective farmer, united by a single forward movement - belonged to the architect B. M. Iofan, the author of the Soviet pavilions at the World Exhibitions in Paris and New York, the famous House on the Embankment, the Udarnik cinema and the unrealized project of the Palace of the Soviets, which they intended to build on the site of the bombed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The monument was supposed to crown the USSR pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937.

In the summer of 1936, a closed competition was announced, in which four of the most famous sculptors at that time were allowed to participate: V. A. Andreeva, I. D. Shadra, M. G. Manizer and Vera Ignatievna Mukhina. Her fate is amazing. Caressed by Stalin Prizes, government awards and honorary titles, Vera Mukhina never had a personal exhibition. With the exception of monuments to Gorky and Tchaikovsky (the designs of which she had to radically remake at the request of the authorities) and two busts of twice Heroes of the Soviet Union, she failed to realize a single creative idea...

Two months later the show took place. Each of the competition participants embodied the same idea in completely different ways. In one, the figures froze in unshakable monumental calm (Andreev), in another, on the contrary, they rushed forward from the pedestal, like sprint skaters (Shadr), in the third, likened to the Olympic gods with perfect faces and bodies, they looked at the world around them with a smile (Manizer ). Apparently, each of these projects was beautiful and admirable in its own way. But only Mukhina miraculously managed to capture the moment of confident, but unfinished movement. The monument seemed to state: we have achieved a lot, we are firmly moving forward, but there are still many great things ahead...

As a result, it was Vera Mukhina’s project that was approved by the government commission headed by V. M. Molotov. N. Voronov, the author of the book “Worker and Collective Farm Woman”, published by the publishing house “Moscow Worker” in 1990, cites the story of one of the creators of the exposition of the Soviet pavilion, K. I. Rozhdestvensky:

“Molotov, who arrived to view the competition works, asked Mukhina a question:

Why this scarf? This is not a dancer, not a skater!

Although the atmosphere at the screening was very tense, Mukhina calmly answered:

This is necessary for balance.

She, of course, had in mind plastic, figurative balance and the horizontality she so needed. But the chairman, not very experienced in art, understood her “balance” in a purely physical sense and said:

Well, if it’s technically necessary, then that’s another question...”

And the scarf actually made the engineers who translated the project into metal really scratch their heads. In order to firmly and reliably attach the five-ton fragment to the monument, a special frame truss had to be designed. Nevertheless, this obstacle was successfully overcome.

In an incredibly short time, in just a matter of months, five thousand parts that made up the monument were “knocked out” from sheets of stainless chromium-nickel steel on wooden and plaster models and assembled on a frame specially designed by engineers for final approval by a high commission. For the first time in the country and, perhaps, in the world, on the advice of the outstanding Soviet metallurgist Professor
P.N. Lvov, spot welding was used during assembly. There were incidents, which had become almost common by 1937. The director of the plant where fragments of the statue were made, fearing that he would not complete the task on time, wrote a denunciation against Mukhina and her assistants, accusing them of deliberately delaying the work, and also that in certain places of the shell the profile of the worst enemy of the people, Trotsky, was visible. And although the government commission, headed by the same Molotov and K.E. Voroshilov, and then Stalin personally, who specially came at night to look at the monument, did not find the profile of the hated Trotsky, several engineers were arrested and repressed after the end of the Paris Exhibition. But then everything worked out, the monument was safely dismantled and delivered to Paris, where in 11 days it was reassembled on the roof of the USSR pavilion.

It is interesting that at this exhibition our pavilion was located exactly opposite the German one. The Germans deliberately took their time in completing their structure, watching how things were going with us. Having waited until “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was installed, they built their pavilion so that it was ten meters higher than ours, and planted an iron eagle on the roof. But in perspective, against the backdrop of the Vera Mukhina monument, the eagle looked small, well, a little larger than a sparrow. Eyewitnesses of those events said that, looking at him, visitors to the exhibition smiled, and “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was often applauded.

The exhibition ended, and the monument again went to Moscow, where it was assembled in the place where VDNKh visitors were accustomed to seeing it, and stood for almost 70 years.

The location was chosen, frankly speaking, unsuccessfully. The dimensions of the pedestal also did not correspond to the scale of the sculpture. For fifty years, B. M. Iofan, and then his students and followers, sought to transfer the great work of art to a more worthy site and foundation. This decision was made only in 1987, and they even announced a creative competition, but it was too late. An examination of the monument showed that the steel frame is corroded and is almost completely in need of replacement. And then the “dashing nineties” began, there was no time for statues, unless the question was about their overthrow. In 2003, the sculpture was divided into 40 fragments and sent for restoration (and, as it turned out, for long-term storage) to the workshop of the Central Research Institute of Steel Structures named after. V. A. Kucherenko.

REVIVAL

For six long years there was a struggle to restore the great monument. Actually, the word “struggle” doesn’t quite fit here. Rather, the routine writing of letters and going to numerous authorities. Dreary waiting in the reception rooms of high offices. Nobody objected - everyone agreed, but they didn’t give money. There was no time for that again. But the money was finally found. The credit for this to the Moscow authorities and personally to Mayor Yu. M. Luzhkov is beyond any doubt, although, according to the laws of the Russian free market, the tender for the right to reconstruct the sculpture was won by a company that had previously only been engaged in designing sewer collectors. And God bless her, no matter what she does there. The main thing is that the reconstruction of the monument has begun. The head of the team of restorers was the sculptor Vadim Tserkovnikov, who fought for six years to revive the masterpiece. The leading scientific institution of the project is the All-Russian Research Institute of Aviation Materials (VIAM). Without wanting to belittle the role of other enterprises - participants in the restoration - construction is going on as before, almost nationwide - we only state that it was impossible to do without VIAM, because we were talking about materials of high corrosion resistance that should last at least the next hundred years, and because the internal structure of the monument incredibly resembles the structure of an aircraft. The same frame ribs, stringers, ribs, designed to ensure the lightness and strength of the product, as in aircraft fuselages. Equally high corrosion resistance.

Moreover, this work was not the first for the institute. The monument to Yu. A. Gagarin on Kaluga Outpost Square, the obelisk “Conquerors of Space” near the VDNKh metro station - VIAM specialists also took part in their creation at one time.

The General Director of VIAM, Academician E. N. Kablov, considers the restoration of the monument his duty. By the way, without the slightest pathos. Simply a duty, which certainly exists for every normal person and citizen of Russia. His staff agrees. Not because Kablov is their boss. They are all like-minded people. When we sat at a large table and they told how they worked, that the veterans of the institute Vera Yakovlevna Belous and Svetlana Alekseevna Karimova (they were developing technology for cleaning surfaces and removing corrosion products), that Dmitry Sivakov was the age of my son (he figured out how to assess the degree of wear fragments) the eyes shone in exactly the same way - with the light of creators passionate about their work.

So, this is what the revived monument will look like inside and out.

The frame is restored in the image and likeness of what existed. However, due to the fact that the materials of the frame have changed, its design has also changed somewhat. This is not visible from the outside. The lower part, accessible for inspection and maintenance, is made of carbon steel. These beams are metallized with zinc and then coated with paint and varnish protection. And the top one, where you can’t even crawl, is the hands, a five-ton fluttering scarf - made of stainless steel, which should last a hundred years. Frame beams of square cross-section with a wall thickness of 16 to 30 mm are connected to one another with stainless steel bolts. The frame was calculated anew (since the previous documentation was not preserved) by specialists from the Central Research Institute of Building Metal Structures named after. N. P. Melnikova. And it is now being built and assembled at the Energomash plant in Belgorod, one of the best and most modernly equipped enterprises in the industry, which has successfully survived the shocks of economic reforms and crises.

But first it was necessary to assess the degree of wear of the monument. Because if more than 30% of a sculpture is completely renewed, then this is no longer restoration, but reconstruction. The monument ceases to be the author's work. And here, for each element, exceptional accuracy of output was required: restore or replace. Methods of “non-destructive testing” - assessing the safety factor of a metal without introducing it into its structure - have existed for a long time. For example, the product is placed in a special chamber and eddy currents are applied to it, photographing the process. Only a chamber into which huge parts of the monument could fit has not yet been built in the world (maybe they have been built somewhere, but they don’t tell us). It was necessary to come up with something else. And they came up with an idea.

We photographed every detail, and then analyzed the pictures, laying out the color spectrum on the computer. Having discovered the difference between areas affected by corrosion and untouched ones, we developed an analysis program. It is known that it is much harder and longer to restore and restore than to create for the first time. And so it was. To film and check each of the five thousand elements of the monument, it took two full months of work with gross violations of labor laws regarding the length of the working day and week. The same passion and work ethic as seventy years ago. Emergency - from morning to night. Everything as usual. Both veterans and young people “plowed” as if at the construction site of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station. Apparently, in this regard we will forever remain incorrigible...

They worked in groups. One took photographs and immediately labeled the captured elements. Another processed the pictures on a computer.

When we finished, we breathed a sigh of relief. An amazing thing: less than 500 elements had to be replaced - only about 10%! The rest were completely recoverable. So the revived “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” will definitely not fall under the category of a remake, like the Moscow Hotel.

At the same time, radiologists checked the quality of the weld spots. Selectively, of course, because there are a little less than a million of these points there. And here, too, we found a reason to admire the professionalism of our fathers and grandfathers: not a single weld break was found. But then they were just mastering the point method, and control methods did not yet exist!

To clean the elements of the statue from corrosion, we used a paste created at VIAM. This composition, by the way, received an award at the international Brussels exhibition. The paste does not contain substances harmful to humans and, accordingly, does not emit them. Allows you to process surfaces of any angle of inclination. Doesn't flow, doesn't drip, doesn't spread. Provides complete removal of corrosion products without damaging the metal base itself. That is, neither etching nor metal carryover occurs. It increases the effectiveness of the passive protective film that every stainless steel has. After treatment with this paste, corrosion resistance increases significantly. Adhesion to paint and varnish coatings increases - that is, “adhesion” to them; the paint or varnish will not peel off or come off over time. You can apply it with a sponge, brush - whatever you like, it does not affect the final result. They made a ton of pasta especially for “Worker and Collective Farm Woman.”

But before that, the statue needed to be washed thoroughly. Over 70 years, not only corrosion products have accumulated on the surface. Carbon deposits from exhaust gases, dry residue from atmospheric moisture. And pigeons often flew over the monument and even lived inside. On the lower surfaces - scarf, skirt - where moisture condensed more actively, it was as if the beginnings of stalactites were formed. A special drug from the domestic NPO Technobior coped well with the problem that arose. It is a non-volatile solvent that is extremely harmful to those who use it. The drug is so fluid that it penetrates into the smallest gaps between metal and layers, loosens dirt, allowing it to be easily removed.

In order for the monument to stand for a hundred years now, the shell, both outside and inside, must be additionally protected. At first it was assumed that a titanium coating would be applied to it. Titanium is a wonderful material; corrosion and titanium are incompatible concepts. Only for this you need a special chamber, the coating process is high-temperature. Building a huge chamber for huge fragments of the monument is incredibly expensive. In addition, in a titanium-stainless steel pair, an electrochemical process occurs in the presence of moisture. Therefore, VIAM specialists proposed the use of thin-film compounds, which are guaranteed to provide protection from any external influences for 10 years and must be periodically renewed.

This is where the problem arose: it was necessary to accurately preserve all the color shades of the sculpture. This means that the product should not only be colorless, but also not change the shades of the surface when viewed from any angle. Unfortunately, domestic protective agents, for all their excellent working qualities, are all colored and give shades. For aircraft, shades do not matter at all, but here it is a different matter. This is perhaps the only case in the work on the restoration of the monument when VIAM recommended using imported material.

At Belgorod Energomash the production of the frame is being completed. Soon he will be brought to the capital, and the final stage of restoration will begin. The pedestal for “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” will now be an outwardly exact copy of the USSR pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. Inside there are exhibition and lecture halls, and below there are car parks. The sculpture will be placed on the pedestal using a huge 750-ton crane with a hundred-meter boom, purchased abroad. It is clear that it will serve not only for this purpose - during the rise of the monument, imported equipment will simply be tested for the first time. Soon we will see all this for ourselves.

Of course, the monument is not a factory for the production of nanorobot doctors to treat stomach ulcers or high-speed motorcycles that can only be overtaken by a front-line fighter. The statue will simply stand quietly, delighting people's eyes with its perfection. But this has never been done anywhere before; she is a symbol of what we can do, whenever we want, with our bright mind and golden hands. Well, isn’t this a reason for cautious optimism?!

“Worker and Collective Farm Woman” is a truly unique monument of the Soviet era. Few people know that this world-famous monument and the most ordinary cut glass have the same creator. A worker and a collective farmer, with raised hands raising tools of labor to the sky as a symbol of the union of the proletariat and the peasantry. How much has merged in this sculptural duet for the Soviet heart. HistoryTime will try to comprehend this now lost significance together with its esteemed readers.

The idea of ​​creating the sculpture belongs to the architect Boris Iofan. “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” were supposed to personify the power of our country in the USSR pavilion at the Paris Exhibition in 1937 - they were created for this purpose. To implement the plan, a closed competition was held among the most famous sculptors of those times. The winner was Vera Mukhin’s project, in which the main figures froze in a confident movement not only forward, but also upward - as befits real Soviet symbols (remember, as in the famous Soviet song: “higher and higher and higher”).

From a distance it seems that Mukhino workers are intertwined in a single monolith. But no! The monument of monumental art consists of 5000 (!) parts. It took a couple of months to assemble, placing stainless steel sheets on a specially created frame and securing it using spot welding. This was the first experience of such a welding process in the country.

At the Paris exhibition, the Soviet pavilion was symbolically located opposite the German one - and in the middle, of course, was the Eiffel Tower. Let us remember that by that time Hitler had been in power for about four years. The Nazis deliberately designed their pavilion several meters higher than the Soviet one, and at the top they installed an iron eagle to make it even more impressive. However, the main imperial bird looked so miniature in comparison with a pair of giant Soviet workers that it was perceived almost comically. They say that the audience considered this spectacle ridiculous, and the monument “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was applauded more than once.

At the end of the exhibition, the sculpture was returned to Moscow, where it stood motionless for almost 70 years. In 1987, they decided to move the monument from the northern entrance of VDNKh, but it turned out that it needed major repairs to the frame, which had been corroded by corrosion. However, due to the crisis of the 90s, the monument was remembered only in 2003. It was disassembled and sent to the workshop of the Central Research Institute of Steel Structures named after. V.A. Kucherenko.

For six years they tried to work on the monument thoroughly, but there was not enough funding. As a result, the right to restore was given to a company that designed sewer collectors—as it turned out, they were multi-skilled craftsmen. The team and management took the task assigned to them responsibly and developed a plan in detail. The scientific director of the restorers was the sculptor Vadim Tserkovnikov, who fought for six years to restore the masterpiece.

The frame was restored according to the old model. Each of the five thousand parts was photographed and sorted on a computer along a color spectrum to determine which parts could be restored and which needed to be completely replaced. In the end, it turned out that only 500 elements had become unusable. In November 2009, the restoration of the sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Woman” was successfully completed.

On November 28 of the same year, with the help of a special crane, the monument was installed on a special pedestal, where a museum and exhibition center was later opened.

The image of the Soviet symbol could be immortalized on the screensaver of the Mosfilm film studio, postage stamps, and the USSR VDNKh Laureate medal.