Homespun painting. Vasily Shulzhenko: paintings

Scabrous poses, ugly bodies, creepy drunken faces - this is the first impression after getting acquainted with the paintings of the Moscow artist Vasily Shulzhenko, whose work is considered very scandalous.

Conveying moments familiar to almost everyone, the author’s paintings depict life from the unsightly side, as if in opposition to the generally accepted opinion that art should inspire and evoke high, bright feelings in the viewer. From many Vasily Shulzhenko hears accusations of dislike for Russians, because instead of the obvious vices of society and depicting the extreme degree of the fall of man, he could paint great people, colorful beauties, and gorgeous nature.

About Shulzhenko's characters

The heroes of Vasily Shulzhenko’s paintings are desperate villagers who mostly entertain themselves by drinking. And there is nothing more. They have practically lost their human appearance, they do things that are quite acceptable for them, but are unacceptable and cause rejection in a person from another world.

Moreover, the evil they realize is mostly unconscious: people seem to not know what they are doing. Where does such a strange and malicious theme come from? According to the artist, the canvases depict images from his childhood years spent at the dacha near Kasimov.

Vasily Shulzhenko: paintings

The canvas “Cupid” depicts Cupid hovering over a couple of alcoholics - just like them: with dirty hair, a rumpled and worn-out face. In the conveyed moment of the upcoming act of intercourse there is neither eroticism nor pornography. Carnal intercourse is commonplace for two drunken people: a dejected, withered woman does not have the slightest sense of shame, and a man is not able to give affection. After the incident, the couple will calmly continue to engage in the main business of their lives - alcoholic libations.

The picture “Square” from the same opera: the people are a match for their own leader. Vasily Shulzhenko depicted an ordinary life scene: a disabled man lounging on a bench, an outrageously drunk man, whom either his mother or his wife was leading home. In the background is a character urinating on the same picket fence for years.

Time will pass. The heroes of the picture will go to another world, others will take their place. Nothing will change at the bust of the swollen Leader.

On the edge of existence

Sometimes heroes appear in paintings who come from a world where the line between good and evil still exists.

Some have hope of salvation, like that boy in a sailor jacket, who may still have a chance not to follow in the footsteps of his drunken grandfather and his neighing brothers.

The girl from the painting “The Potato Sellers” will apparently have to repeat the fate of her relatives; The child’s face already bears the stamp of the life waiting for her.

Shocking works of the artist

Our compatriots believe that showing the shameful underside of our national life is at least indecent. Foreign viewers react differently to the characters in the paintings written by Vasily Shulzhenko: they begin to feel sorry for them, sympathize with their existence and the harsh conditions in which they are forced to survive.

Vasily Shulzhenko is an artist whose works are exhibited at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the KISSI Museum (USA, Oklahoma City), and are in private collections in Russia and abroad, namely: Italy, USA, Finland, France, Holland. Since 1972, he has been a participant in exhibitions on a city, republican and all-Union scale. Vasily Shulzhenko lives and works in Moscow.

Visitors to his virtual exhibitions often compare the work of Vasily Shulzhenko with the work of Shukshin.

I think both Vasily would disown such comparisons...
But, nevertheless, in the opinion of their readers and viewers, both the work of the first and the work of the second, unfolds before us a certain Metaphysics of Russian life, fate and trouble, captured precisely by the Russian person, who felt something important in himself that definitely needs to be thrown out into the space of this existence.

Vasily alone, the author of "The Toilet", "Beer House" and other things, according to him, has always distanced himself from the Russianness that generously gushes from human souls living outside the Moscow Ring Road.
The other is the flesh of the Russian Spirit, but clearly not the Russian soul, in the opinion of his readers and viewers, the same people from outside the Moscow Ring Road.

And yet they are consonant.
The harmony of Russian spheres sounds in their work.
As knowledgeable artists say: if you want to reveal a topic, you have two ways.
1. Knowing nothing about the subject, follow the dictates of your soul in its composition.
2. Study the subject of description thoroughly so that it becomes fused with your soul.
As we see, ZamKADO observers of the work of the two Vasilievs put them on the same scale, placing themselves on the opposite side, balancing with their perception of these artists, their general embodiment in the soil of Russianness, in the Metaphysics of Russian Being."
(analitik_tomsk).

The work of artist Vasily Shulzhenko leaves no one indifferent. He is either loved or hated, praised for his understanding of the Russian soul and accused of hating it. Our correspondent found out what he really is.

All these creepy drunken faces, ugly bodies, obscene poses... It’s really hard to suspect you of loving the people!

I never lived among the people I portray and did not try to get into their souls.
As a child, I was a mama’s boy; I knew neither the army nor the zone.
My characters are to me like savages to Cook.
I saw enough of them as a child, when I lived in a dacha near Kasimov.
They both scared and fascinated me.
All this spilled out onto the canvases much later, with the beginning of perestroika.

- What, “bad Russian faces” sell well in the West?

I actually sell most of my paintings in America, but, you know, they just think that they are simply imbued with love for Russia!
And here even my friends tell me: “You don’t like Russians, Vasya!” But I, as a Russian, have every right to ask: “Why do you love us?”
Yes, we are the worst people in the world - evil, lazy, envious!
For example, an American will say: “My neighbor Sam is great, he’s so successful!”
And our village drunkard will hate and despise the hard-working, wealthy man.
And the myth about the broad Russian soul?
It becomes wide only for the duration of the effect of alcohol.

- Or maybe Americans just like to see Russians as such cattle?

On the contrary, looking at my paintings, they begin to feel sorry for us: “What unfortunate people!”
How our Peredvizhniki wrote about the suffering people, remember?
Or like the poet Nekrasov, who, after a sumptuous dinner and a game of poker, loved to look at the peasants from the window of his mansion and regret the woman’s bitter share.

- By the way, about women. Isn’t it a pity to disfigure us so much in paintings?

It’s a pity, that’s why I don’t write to you often.
I don't feel sorry for the men. Recently, the owner of a gallery in Chicago told me: “Vasya, in your paintings everyone drinks and smokes too much, this is not popular in America now.
Is it possible to do without these cigarettes and bottles of vodka?”
Can you really imagine my men sober, without a cigarette in their mouth?!

- Do you like to drink?

I love. Sometimes I drink while working. An artist needs this for inspiration.

- What, love doesn’t inspire? Are you married?

No, I never got married or had children, which I now regret. Although there have been countless women in my life, and still exist.

- Why don’t your heroes have sex in the paintings? This would add some flavor to them!

I remember there was a case in Kasimov - a young village guy caught and raped a grandmother of about seventy-five right in the field. This was the idea to depict.

- For shocking sake?

What a shocking thing this is! Here is the artist Kulik, who publicly piled a pile under the painting - yes. Nowadays there is only one direction in painting - to make people talk about themselves in any way. Not to become famous for centuries, but to grab more during your lifetime.

But Pushkin, depicted as a monkey, or Tolstoy, hanging on a horizontal bar - isn’t this shocking?
- Another thing surprised me - who in America knows Pushkin? And yet they bought it right away. But Tolstoy, who is famous there, still hasn’t sold out...
Anna Shin (http://www.s-info.ru/star/exclusive/1539/)

My house.

Walking with grandma along the Moscow River.

Walking with my father around Moscow at night.

Washing.

Pugachev.

Secular society in Gorky Park.

Master.

Napoleon takes over Russia.

Napoleon in Moscow on Sadovo-Karetnaya

Napoleon and Kutuzov.

Mushroom season.

Grandmother?!

Lost at the carnival.

Atlanta.

Sleeping

Chick

Family.

Dream.

Over the abyss

Evening in the city

Clown.

Gulliver.

In the stormy waves of the sea of life.

Dudochka.

Potato.

Artist.

Square

Riding a centaur.

Sailor and his girls.

Summoning

"Piglet" in Izmailovo.

A soldier's dreams.

Potato sellers.

Skater.

Lenin and the people.

Susanna and the elders.

Fallen.

Amur.

Race.

Net.

Aspiring.

Sand spit.

Leshy visiting a peasant.

Ambulance.

Faun.

Susanna.

Sede Adam is straight from Paradise...

Diogenes.

Grandmaster.

Mummers.

Artist Vasily Shulzhenko

Where I always carried my heart,
Where songs were composed along the way, -
Russia hurts me
And I can’t find a doctor.

A. Dolsky

...He preaches love
With a hostile word of denial...

N. Nekrasov

The fate of an artist who “swims against the tide”, not conforming to generally accepted tastes and opinions, is not easy: both he and his works have many enemies. Such authors include Vasily Shulzhenko.

First - a short biographical information. Vasily was born in Moscow in 1949. In 1973 he graduated from the Moscow Printing Institute. Member of the painting section of the Ministry of Agriculture since 1978. The artist defines his genre as “Figurative painting in the genre of free fantasy.” His works are in the State Tretyakov Gallery and other museum and private collections in Russia and abroad. Lives and works in Moscow.

The work of Vasily Shulzhenko does not leave anyone indifferent, but opinions about him are the most polar: they either love him or hate him, they consider him a deep connoisseur of the Russian soul and the Russian people - and they accuse him of hating this people, his country. Often the artist is branded with the now popular word “Russophobe”.

Abroad, the attitude towards Vasily’s paintings is also not entirely clear: the majority see in their heroes “Russian savages”, worthy, at best, of contemptuous pity. Against the backdrop of such savagery, it is so pleasant to be proud of the achievements of Western civilization and culture. American critics, however, blamed Vasily Shulzhenko for saying that the characters in his paintings are often depicted as smoking (!) - this contradicts the idea of a healthy lifestyle and sets a bad example (!!!) (Everything else, one must think, is a good example... And in general, it’s as if the heroes of Shulzhenko’s paintings can be imagined without a cigarette in their mouth.)

“And what kind of themes does the artist take on?! - a lover of idyllic, “correct” Russia, perhaps, will exclaim, the way they usually WANT to see it, the way it often appears on the canvases of many popular artists today. - Complete drunkenness, dirt, even obscenity, even to the point of depicting a sickening toilet in a provincial town. Ugly, grotesque faces and figures, obscene poses, sometimes even “surprise”, but, again, always with “dirty”, unsightly, unpleasant...”

But if you look closely at Shulzhenko’s paintings, into the eyes of his heroes, you will understand that the artist does not even despise or hate them and the country, flesh of which they are. He LOVES these people - he loves them, but he sees them soberly, not through rose-colored glasses, but as they are. Through the unsightly outer shell, he sees and appreciates their strength, vitality, originality and - deeply hidden INNER beauty. He CHEERS for them, wants them to live a better, more worthy life. Sometimes - only sometimes! - the artist “slides” into a kind of caricature, as you can see when the external unattractiveness “gets” too much...

Fallen

I remember a reproduction of this painting published in some magazine about 20 years ago. Then it was called “Fell...”, which, I think, more accurately conveys its meaning - a person is not “fallen”, fallen, he simply FALLED, that is, this phenomenon is temporary, accidental. A drunken Russian man fell, and stretched out in his might all over the earth, his legs across the river, his head in the forest, his huge arms spread out helplessly... It was on HIS ground that he fell, HE was her master, her son, her pain. Will he gain strength from Mother Earth, like the legendary Antaeus, will he rise for a new life, or will he lie there, looking at the sky with a senseless, drunken gaze? After all, he himself got drunk, he himself fell - no one pushed him. I would like to believe that SAM will get up and find the strength to live differently...

Once upon a time, Peredvizhniki artists, writers such as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gogol, and many other now famous figures of Russian art were accused of hatred of the Russian people, of seeking to discredit Russia. Even such luminaries as Pushkin and Tolstoy suffered from patriotic accusers. By the way, Shulzhenko is accused, in particular, of a “blasphemous” depiction of the latter two: Pushkin is presented as very similar to a monkey happily eating an orange, and Tolstoy cheerfully soars up on the horizontal bar.

Pushkin

Lev Tolstoy

But if we remember that Pushkin’s lyceum nickname was “monkey”, and Tolstoy really took care of his health, did gymnastics and delighted the children at the Yasnaya Polyana school with his ability to deftly pull himself up and spin on the horizontal bar, then... what kind of blasphemy is here? This is good humor, and nothing more, they make fun of those who are “their own”, relatives... I think if Pushkin and Tolstoy saw themselves in the image of Vasily Shulzhenko, they would understand and appreciate it, and they would laugh merrily.

Shulzhenko also gets it from fans of an idealized image of Russian history.

Napoleon takes over Russia

The very title of one of the paintings - “Napoleon takes possession of Russia” - terrifies such idealizers, what can we say about the content: Napoleon, already in “full combat readiness,” holds in his arms a limp, half-naked grandmother, Russia, clearly drunk, and resolutely gathers her “master” in that very sense...

Napoleon in Moscow on Sadovo-Karetnaya

But if you look at another picture, “Napoleon in Moscow on Sadovo-Karetnaya,” it becomes clear that this “possession” was simply a dream of the rapist emperor: he wanders confusedly along a crowded Moscow street, and the people simply do not pay attention to him, busy with their everyday life. All sorts of Napoleons and Napoleons are a temporary phenomenon, rejected by Russian life. They can dream as much as they want about “taking possession” of Russia: “dreaming is not harmful,” a Russian proverb sarcastically remarks. “The worm gnaws at the cabbage, and before that you disappear,” this is the Russian soldier Platon Karataev from Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”

Kutuzov and Napoleon

And now Napoleon humbly listens to the teachings of Kutuzov, who is completely at home and soars his bare, tired feet in the hot water. And what? he is truly at home, in Russia! The Russian beauty serving the samovar is clearly making eyes at the brave French general standing behind Napoleon. It remains to be seen who will master whom!

Crucifixion

And what a religious blasphemer he is, this Vasily Shulzhenko! Just think, he depicted a drunken Russian peasant on the cross instead of Christ!

Susanna and the elders

The biblical story about the chaste Susanna and the lustful elders was distorted and caricatured in one version of the painting, and in the other it emphasized Susanna’s beautiful body, which seemed to glow. What a mockery of the feelings of believers!

Susanna and the Elders (option)

However, there is no mockery here, if you think about it. Isn’t our Russian peasant, and each of us, crucified on the cross of our daily life and sorrows? Aren't lustful elders, even biblical ones, worthy of disgusting caricature? And doesn’t the beautiful female body shine with the light of chastity, ennobling the wretched landscape around it?

Well, okay, enough commenting, it’s time to show Vasily Shulzhenko’s paintings. At first I wanted to say about many more of them, but I thought - why would I impose my opinion? Let everyone judge for themselves.

Amur