Our Notes & References

The first concise monograph dedicated to Kazakh art produced by a local art historian: a fine example owned by one of the artists represented, a victim of Stalin’s repression and one of the most significant members of the local art scene, the artist Valentin Antoshchenko-Olenev. Described as “the oldest artist in the Republic”, Antoshchenko-Olenev’s recent works are analysed in detail and six of his linocuts are reproduced; they include a portrait of prominent Kazakh poet and writer Ilyas Zhansugurov whom Antoshchenko-Olenev knew very well, together with portraits of two foreign modernist artists, whose exhibitions took place in Moscow around that time: Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Antoshchenko-Olenev’s personal bookplate is a large linocut self-portrait with the artist’s name in Cyrillic, here boldly signed and dated by the artist.

Sarykulova’s publication is a great work revealing the condition of Kazakh culture by the end of the 1960s as well as the complex relationship between the government of the Soviet Union and the Kazakh Republic. Published by the Academy of Sciences of Kazakh SSR in a relatively small print run of 1700 copies, it presents a historical overview of Kazakh art and culture after the October Revolution up to late 1960s, with a two-fold aim: to demonstrate the originality of local Kazakh culture and to emphasise those progressive changes that had been introduced by the centralised socialist ideology.

The book is a reworked ‘kandidatskaia’ dissertation (a PhD equivalent in the Soviet Union) and is dedicated to the history of graphic art in Kazakhstan: drawings, watercolours, lithographs, etchings and linocuts. It was the first publication of its kind, with most of the research by that moment limited to magazine articles, decorative catalogues and texts on individual artists. It includes a general bibliography on Kazakh graphic art, and it appears that most of listed texts were written by Russians, who included Kazakh art into a wider context of Soviet visual culture.

The work contains over 70 black and white plates by 25 artists, including works by Abilkhan Kasteev, the founder of the national school of painting after whom the State Museum of Arts in Almaty, the largest in the country, is named; and Evgeny Sidorkin, one of the leading graphic artists in Kazakstan and the author of illustrations for folk art, legends and the history of the Kazakh people.

Most images depict traditional rural scenes, modern industrial landscapes and portraits of prominent Kazakh people. While some artists were famous all over the Soviet Union, with works in the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery for example, others were prominent locally, being members of the local Union of the Artists and National Academy of Arts. Interestingly, no distinction is made between ethnic Kazakhs and those artists who moved to Kazakhstan for various reasons – therefore demonstrating alleged Soviet indifference towards national backgrounds within cultural sphere.

Grafika Kazakhstana was published in the late 1960s, when Stalinist purges stopped and a new interest towards local histories and local cultures blossomed. The Soviet government introduced new genres of fine art, sponsored the opening of exhibition spaces and the launch of new press and imposed the canon of Socialist Realism throughout the region. Internationalism of the Soviet Union was demonstrated by numerous exhibitions of Kazakh art in Moscow – while at the same time Moscow aimed to undermine local independence by profound system of control. This was representative of the Soviet fluctuation of ‘Russiovisation’ that would help to unify Soviet population and strengthen the role of the central authority, and ‘regionalisation’ [korenizatsiia] that aimed to enhance national identities and to facilitate the union between local elites and local population.

Gul-Chara Sarykulova (born in 1925, Shaulder, Kazakhstan) became the first Kazakh art historian to receive a PhD in art history in Kazakhstan and significantly contributed to the development of art history as an academic discipline in the country. The main area of her research is indeed the graphic art of Kazakhstan, and in 1970 she was chosen to write a text for the catalogue of Antoshchenko-Olenev’s personal exhibition dedicated to his 70-year anniversary. The success of Grafika Kazakhstana led to the subsequent writing and publication of Mastera izobrazitelnogo iskusstva Kazakhstana [Masters of fine art in Kazakhstan] in 1972.

Provenance

V. Antoshchenko-Olenev (Born in 1890 in Poltava Governorate in the historical left-bank Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. In 1918-19 he studied in Vitebsk in the studio of Marс Chagall before joining the Red Army. In 1928 Antoshchenko-Olenev moved with his family to then capital of Kazakhstan Kyzyl-Orda, and a year later – to the new capital Alma-Aty. In 1938 at the pinnacle of the Stalinist terror, Antoshchenko-Olenev was prosecuted under a false pretext and sent to Kolyma’s camps; he stayed in the Gulag system until his rehabilitation in 1957. He could finally return to Kazakhstan and lived there until his death in 1984. It was in 1965, two years before the publication, that he received the title of the honoured artist of the Kazakh SSR. Bookplate to upper pastedown, with large signature and dated 19.7.67).