Memories of S. Kalmykov
Man with a Fly Order 1961
This translated essay, by artist Sergei Maslov - one of the pioneers of Kazakh contemporary art, reflects on Sergei Kalmykov, an avant-garde Soviet artist who worked in Almaty from 1935 to 1967.
Sergei Maslov was born in Samara, Russia in 1952. Artist and teacher of painting at State Art College in Alma-Ata. Lives in Alma-Ata.
When I was a kid there was a transcendent artist Sergey Kalmykov in our city. He always wore bright, exotic clothes, sometimes with epaulets, talked only to children, and pounded adults with an elegant black walking stick, if they tried to express their perceptive judgments. I remember one day he was throwing white cardboard circles in front of the Central Department Store. We asked, "why?" He replied, "When aliens come and see our people, their actions and clothes, they’ll think that there is no intelligence on this planet, but when they see the circles, they will realize that there is”. After all, a circle is a symbol of reason.
At the end of the '50s, there were a lot of UFOs flying over Alma-Ata. Once there was even a glowing ball with a ring flying over our street. A neighbor, a party worker, who was reading a newspaper on the porch, said: "Ah, it's Saturn" and we believed it. We also loved Kalmykov's portrayal of Lenin. There was a granite parallelepiped in front of the Abay State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, where he worked as a chief artist, on which it was embossed that a monument to Dzhambul would be erected on that spot. Kalmykov climbed onto the pedestal, stretched his arm forward, and stood like that for two or three hours.
The real monument to Lenin, by Tomsky, was not far away, about five hundred meters, across from the House of Government. Probably someone got angry and even wrote denunciations, but fate was invariant because he was a good artist and he drew all sceneries for plays by himself, all alone. He would close the theater for a few days, but paints in buckets and painted the backdrops. Then we moved around a lot. I served in the army, went to college and one day came to visit my friend and saw a marvelous painting on the wall. Gena said that when Kalmykov died, which happened in 1967, the first to choose paintings were members of the Politburo, then the heads of Central Committee departments and divisions, then ministers. His uncle, who used to work as an administrator in the Central Committee apparatus, gave paintings to his brother, who always dreamed of becoming a painter, one is fantasy, the other is realistic. Then they called in art historians from the Directorate of Art Exhibitions. They made an inventory of the property. The paintings and drawings were given to the State Art Museum, and the manuscripts, notes, and artifacts - to the Archive; some were kept for themselves.
Sergey Kalmykov was a versatile person - he corresponded with Kandinsky and participated in the AKhR exhibition, worked as an artist in the opera theater and clown in the circus. He wrote novels and symphonies, invented cosmetic ointments, and designed submarines. Naturally, his friend could only be one person - Leonardo. Seryozha dedicated many works to him. The most grandiose was the project of Leonardo da Vinci Park. There were also drawings, paintings, and books. More often than Leonardo, Kalmykov portrayed only his ephemeral daughter - the daughter of the Great Dresser. Before the war he fell in love with the prima donna of the Almaty opera stage, a beautiful Kazakh, but did not dare to reveal his feelings to her, instead he fantasized that they had a daughter, and this imaginary daughter became the main character of his drawings and paintings. Excited by Kalmykov’s paintings that Genka owned, I began to look for his other works. They wouldn't let me into the storerooms of the State Art Museum but told me that a large exhibition of Kalmykov's works was in the State Psychiatric Hospital, in the creative museum of mentally ill... There, indeed, everything was soulful, paintings, projects, and manuscripts were neatly hung. People in white coats politely informed me that the best works were in the chief physician's office. I went to the padded door, from the other side frighteningly did not come even a hint of sound, and rang. The door was opened by an elderly man with a soft smile and a tough look - Professor Gonopolsky.
He said that Kalmykov was a genius artist, and genius always coexisted with pathology, that at the end of his life, i.e. after seventy, he began to have crises and became a patient in their hospital. In only three or four years they managed to build a splendid collection; the best part was at his home, “but there is a very good selection here too” - he said proudly and at the same time intellectually, pointing to the walls of his office, full of paintings. "But these are beautiful works, with nothing morbid in them," I said, "Why did you keep him in the asylum?" -"We hardly treated him, we just talked. He was lonely and needed companionship. But keep in mind that being an artist is a consequence of deviance; all artists are our potential clients. Kalmykov, for example, wrote letters to Mars, developed an alphabet understandable to the Martians, cut large circles out of paper and wrote on them, and when he had 100 sheets, stapled them together - he had two or three such wheels. He cut off his electricity, ate only milk, bread, and fruits, which were brought to him every day by some woman from a mountain village. He developed a style of drawing "Monster", drew rubber trees, atomic bomb reflectors, elephants listening to the cosmic tango. He drew people with Fly orders. There are no such orders, are there?"About ten years later, perestroika began.
One day I accidentally found out that a progressive school principal, nicknamed Archimedes was buying Kalmykov's works from the asylum. I had money too, so I went there. But there was only one work left in the museum by S. K. "Self-portrait in the pose of a monument to Lenin" and bare walls at the chief physician's office with a portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev. The same doctor said that Kalmykov's work is not art, but a clinical archive of the hospital, it is not ethical to show it to people, and that they did not sell anything and are not going to. Then there was a big exhibition at the State Art Museum. In 1991, an album with 1500 copies was published. In the introductory article to it, V. Buchinskaya wrote: "The art world of Kalmykov is a sphere of action of the forces trying to take the awe of life and fragility of dreams through the cold and heartlessness of everyday life, through indifference and consumerism of the reality surrounding it. His art combined fantasy and reality.” Such a sorrowful ending.