NIKOLAI NIKOGOSYAN: SCULPTING THE SOVIETS
The Moscow News, Russia
Oct 3 2013
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
by Joy Neumeyer at 03/10/2013 12:04
On leafy Bolshoi Tishinsky Pereulok, a looming gray house emerges out
of the trees. Behind the fence, sculptures are scattered around the
yard – Vladimir Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, a partially disassembled
female nude. This is the home and studio of Nikolai Nikogosyan,
a sculptor who witnessed the rise and fall of an empire.
Nikogosyan worked on the Palace of Soviets, Stalin’s triumphant,
never-realized utopian project. He created sculptures for the Seven
Sisters skyscrapers and the Moscow metro. Yury Gagarin posed for a
sculpture by him, as did Dmitry Shostakovich, with whom he was close
friends. He even painted Princess Diana’s portrait.
The other artists of his generation are all gone, their memory
preserved in the sculptures that keep watch over the city’s metro
stations and apartment buildings. But at age 95, Nikogosyan continues
to work in his studio every day.
“She was beautiful. Crazy beautiful,” Nikogosyan says of Princess
DianaInside, visitors are greeted by Nikogosyan’s wife of 30 years,
Eteri, and a small barking dog. After ascending a spiral staircase,
they are ushered into a visiting room where a table is set with tea
and biscuits.
In early self-portraits, the artist has a wild outcropping of
jet-black hair, and his eyebrows are thick and furrowed. Today, his
hair has thinned, and his imposing physique has shrunken. His voice,
a rattling bass, still has a thick Armenian accent, and little concern
for the knotty rules of Russian grammar.
Though frail, he has lost none of his charisma, admonishing a
journalist for getting out a reporter’s notebook before giving a kiss
on the cheek. One moment, he is thunderous, demanding a more original
question; the next, he is kind and tender, proffering cookies.
His hands bear flecks of paint. Nikogosyan begins work in the morning
and finishes at 3 p.m., at which point a stream of visitors begins.
Lining the room are dozens of self-portraits. Some are bright, others
subdued; some show the artist as a young man, while in others his
hair is white.
“I’ve done 1,500 self-portraits,” he boomed. “More than any other
artist!”
Nikogosyan was born in 1918 in the small Armenian village of Mets
Shagriar, the son of a cotton farmer. After Armenia became part of
the USSR, his father was denounced as a kulak. The family was stripped
of its land and moved to Yerevan.
In the capital, Nikogosyan attended ballet school and danced
with the National Opera. After his father warned him to quit his
“monkey-dancing” or get out, he packed his bags for Russia. “My father
said, ‘When you leave, don’t come back.'”
In 1937, Nikogosyan arrived in Leningrad, speaking no Russian. As
the country descended into repressions, the penniless Armenian was
primarily concerned with where his next meal would come from.
He convinced Andrei Matveyev, one of the Soviet Union’s first socialist
realist sculptors and an influential art teacher, to let him join his
classes. “He took me in and gave me boots to wear. He gave me food,
somewhere to sleep.”
In the afternoons, Nikogosyan helped restore Greek ceramics at the
Hermitage Museum.
Sculptures of Yury Gagarin, Pyotr Kapitsa and Maya Plisetskaya “Other
students looked at anatomy models to understand how the body worked,”
he said. “But since I was a dancer, I didn’t stare at the model. I
jumped around and observed my own muscles, how they moved.”
In Leningrad, he made important contacts, including with the
Shostakovich family, romancing the composer’s cousin. After being
kicked out of the Academy of Arts sculpture department for fighting
another student, Nikogosyan went back to Armenia, where his artwork
won him exemption from military service. (He finished his degree at
Moscow’s Surikov Institute after the war.)
In 1943, he was awarded a Stalin Prize for “Ne Skazhu” (“I Won’t
Tell”), a piece about a captured young partisan who refuses to give
up his comrades to the Germans. After the war, the prize secured him
a place in an Armenian exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery.
A young artist without a studio, or even a place to live, he returned
to Moscow to see 18 of his works showcased in their own hall. “I went
there every day to see who was looking at my art,” he recalled.
One day, a chance meeting there changed his life.
The woman guarding the hall motioned to him. “Comrade Nikogosyan, come
here. That little man over there who’s looking at your work? That’s the
Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs – [Vyacheslav] Molotov’s deputy.”
It was Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and
1943. Cosmopolitan and gregarious, Maisky maintained close contacts
with a variety of famous Brits, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G.
Wells and Winston Churchill.
The sculptor’s home studio in central Moscow Nikogosyan approached and
said the sculptures were his work. “He almost kissed my hands. ‘Good
job, good job!'”
The artist offered to do Maisky’s portrait, and Maisky agreed. As
he was working out of a one-room apartment where he lived with his
first wife and son, he came to the diplomat’s house.
Maisky said that his portrait had previously been done by Pablo
Picasso and modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein. “I said, ‘So what? I’m
not Epstein and I’m not Picasso. I’m Nikogosyan. I’ll do it my way.’
“In the end, Epstein did it 100 times better,” he added.
After the sitting was over, Nikogosyan asked Maisky if he’d ever
had an Armenian meal, and the latter said no. He offered to make
dolma. In a time of mass shortages, “I opened the fridge and there
were fresh tomatoes in the wintertime. There were eggplants, anything
you could think of, so much butter….” As the guests ate the dolma,
they “licked their fingers.”
Pleased, Maisky asked Nikogosyan if he’d like to work on the Palace
of Soviets, Stalin’s colossal skyscraper project on the bank of the
Moscow River. “I said, ‘Of course!'”
A new life began. “They gave me 10,000 [rubles] a month when butter
cost 17 rubles a kilogram,” Nikogosyan said.
A ZiL limosine came to drive him to the Palace of Soviets site. Not
used to riding in a car, he felt nauseous. “I told the chauffer,
‘Stop, I have business here.’
“Then I got out three kopecks and bought a metro ticket.”
When he arrived at the site, construction was already under way. “The
foundation pit was 50 meters deep. They had already laid the framework
up to the fifth floor.”
Nikogosyan suggested replacing the gargantuan Lenin that was supposed
to top the building with scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, drawing up a
series of sketches.
In the design, “One finger was a meter long,” he said.
After stalling during the war, the Palace of Soviets project was
eventually abandoned entirely. The funds and design team were
transferred to a new project – the main building of Moscow State
University. Architect Lev Rudnev appointed Nikogosyan as head sculptor.
“I made this for them,” he said, picking up a sultry white plaster
model of a reclining woman. “It’s called ‘River.’ There was also a
reclining boy, called ‘Land.'”
It didn’t go over well. “The Ministry of Culture said, ‘This project
is first rank. Nikogosyan should be farther back.'”
The sculptures guarding the university entrance were turned over to
Vera Mukhina, creator of the “Worker and Kolkhoznitsa” statue for
the 1937 World’s Fair. The stern, muscular statues she created have
little in common with Nikogosyan’s sultry figures in repose.
At the time, Nikogosyan created countless statues of peasants and
factory workers. “It was what the era required,” he said. But he
notes proudly that he never created a Stalin statue, “only Lenin” –
one for Moscow, and one for Kazakhstan.
“I didn’t make things for the Party,” he said. “I did what I wanted.”
During Stalin’s post-war crackdown on “bourgeois tendencies” in art,
Nikogosyan was denounced as a “formalist.” He participated in several
major competitions – to create Lomonosov, Tolstoy, Mayakovsky and
Gagarin statues, among others – but none of his designs were ever
chosen. Such criticism didn’t necessarily end a career, however,
and he continued working.
His design for the Gagarin competition still stands on a table in the
house. Instead of the smiling titanium figure that stands on Leninsky
Prospekt, Nikogosyan’s more poetic entry featured a falling Icarus,
the Greek mythic hero who flew too close to the sun, alongside a
soaring Gagarin ascending into space.
“Everyone went crazy over it,” he said. “But it still wasn’t picked.”
He was better-received in his native country, for which he created
monuments including a Yerevan statue of poet Mikael Nalbandian,
author of the Armenian national anthem. He went on to win the cache
of top state prizes, including People’s Artist of the USSR, as well as
influential friends such as Soviet statesman Anastas Mikoyan. He served
as head sculptor of the Stalinist skyscraper at Kudrinskaya Ploshchad,
and was awarded a lavish three-room apartment in the building.
In the 1960s, Nikogosyan turned increasingly to portraits, which
became more expressive.
“Nikogosyan seeks to avoid mild tranquility,” wrote critic Oleg Yakhont
for a 2005 exhibit of the artist’s work in Manezh. “His model is full
of creative energy, like a compressed spring.”
After creating sculptures for the Palace of Science and Culture in
Warsaw, a Polish version of MGU, Nikogosyan received a plot of land
behind the Polish Embassy, where he built a modern home-studio.
The fourth floor holds a large exhibition hall flooded with sunlight.
Despite his age, he is light on his feet, with a touch of the old
dancer’s grace. Shuffling with a cane, he pointed out some of his
sculptures: Shostakovich, ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, physicist Pyotr
Kapitsa, composer Aram Khachaturyan, Gagarin.
Before sculpting Gagarin, “I had 25 minutes [with him], and he came
with 15 people. What could I do?” he said, poking the cosmonaut’s
bronze head with his cane. “He was like a king.”
One portrait features a lithe blonde woman with a wistful smile. It
is Diana, Princess of Wales. She posed for the artist on his 1989
trip to UK on the invitation of Churchill College, Cambridge. He
gave the College a bronze sculpture of Sir John Douglas Cockroft,
the physicist who shared the Noble Prize for splitting the atom.
“She was beautiful,” he said, with a soft smile. “Crazy beautiful.”
Now, Nikogosyan mostly sticks to painting and drawing. But he remains
prolific. “I’ve already done two self-portraits this morning!” he
said. Sitting by a window in his studio, he paints with long wooden
sticks affixed to the brushes, which help him reach the canvas
without leaning.
He is weaker than he once was. “I was better then than I am now,”
he said, pointing at a painting. “Then, I worked with all of my senses.
Now, my head…” he trailed off, frowning.
Asked if he has any regrets about the past, he said he doesn’t look
back. “You have to evolve,” he said. “Every day, I draw. Every day,
I’m still a boy.”