Viktor Popkov is a painter and graphic artist, the author of talented original works, many of which are presented in the Tretyakov Gallery. Having survived a terrible war as a child, in his paintings he conveyed the harsh reality and inner courage that he observed during the difficult years for the country. He made the audience sympathize with his heroes and admire them, empathize and admire them.
Childhood
Popkov Viktor Efimovich (1932 - 1974) was born in Moscow, into a family of peasants. Father and mother, accustomed to hard work from an early age, moved from place to place in search of work.
Viktor Popkov was the second child in a large family of four children. The news of his father's death in the war arrived when the future painter was nine years old, and his youngest brother was a few months old. The mother, at the request of her beloved husband, devoted herself entirely to the children, never getting married. But she put the kids on their feet and gave everyone a proper education.
The Popkov family was friendly, but poor. The children loved their mother and, seeing her hard work, tried to listen in everything and not upset her. Realizing that they were connected by unbreakable blood ties, the guys grew up together almost without quarrels or disagreements, always ready to come to each other’s rescue and provide the necessary support.
Mother, Stepanida Ivanovna, adored her children and tried to raise them in severity, but tenderness.
This seemingly happy childhood was overshadowed by several more tragedies (in addition to the death of his father and constant poverty).
The death of his younger brother, everyone's favorite Tolya, left an indelible mark on the soul of Viktor Popkov. He couldn't even attend the baby's funeral.
The second bright, unforgettable shock occurred a little later, when a bull attacked Vitya and knocked him to the ground. The boy managed to escape thanks to timely help.
But, despite all the sorrows, Viktor Popkov grew up as a kind and friendly child, generous and sociable.
First steps on the creative path
At school the boy was distinguished by his special diligence and diligence. From an early age he developed a desire to create on paper. Vita liked to watch the development of the drawing on the then “sedilki” (transfers), on which he spent all his pocket money, and also to watch the work of his neighbor, an artist, who painted in watercolors, but whose name, unfortunately, we do not know.
Stepanida Ivanovna, who was the first to discern in her son the impulse to work with a brush, began to encourage the child’s desire to create. She took him to art school and helped him enter the Moscow Graphic School, sincerely praised him, inspired him to creative endeavors and gave thoughtful advice.
And the boy wrote everywhere and about everything. His early sketches covered a variety of objects and events - trees, houses, and people.
The art workshop teachers also recognized the talent in the gifted student and paid him extra attention. From the short sketches from the aspiring artist’s personal album, one could see that his training in the art studio had benefited him: amateurish sketches were replaced by meaningful, high-quality works, mainly landscapes and still lifes.
The formation of creativity
In 1852, Victor entered the Surikov Institute at the Faculty of Graphics. And although this did not correspond to the desires of the young man (he wanted to study at the painting department), this state of affairs had a beneficial effect on his future creative activity. The knowledge and skills acquired at the graphic arts department were reflected in his uniquely refined style as a painter.
Now Viktor Efimovich Popkov, whose biography and creativity have actively revived with his admission to a higher educational institution, begins to create energetically. He works in difficult, seemingly unfavorable conditions: in a small barracks, where five other people live with him - his mother, younger sister and older brother with his wife and child. Overcrowding, poverty, malnutrition - the master’s companions at that time.
Sometimes I had to write in an unheated corridor, wearing different felt boots, having eaten only a piece of bread and lard. But this did not affect the creative process. Viktor Popkov worked selflessly, talentedly, confidently, regularly. His magnificent talent was noticed almost instantly; the gifted student was first awarded an increased scholarship, and a little later - a Stalin scholarship, which he donated almost to the penny for the needs of his relatives.
Trips
Since 1956, Viktor Popkov has been making long creative voyages around the country, in search of original material for his works and expressive angles. He visited amazing, grandiose industrial construction sites, realized the colossal scale of the work, recorded many ordinary, routine scenes, which he later “poeticized” and glorified. Unlike his fellow students, who were looking for picturesque, bright places and images, the aspiring artist focused his vision on prosaic, ordinary compositions. This is a concrete worker pouring water into the solution, or two workers against the backdrop of huge locomotive wheels.
Victor worked energetically, animatedly, as if he was afraid of not being on time, trying to preserve on paper every episode of hard work. A student exhibition of sketches, held on one of the trips, was replete with many accurate and talented works by Vitya Popkov.
A “severe style” prevailed in his paintings, reflected in the laconicism of details, the realism of images, and the dryness of shades.
It was thanks to creative trips to construction sites that Viktor Efimovich Popkov was able to become a people's artist, depicting ordinary hard workers on his canvases during his difficult, monotonous occupation.
“Builders of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station”
After a trip to the construction of a hydroelectric power station in the city of Bratsk in 1960, a wonderful original painting “Builders of Bratsk” appeared. The young artist spent a long time thinking through every detail of the canvas - background, color, arrangement of images, angle.
It is not for nothing that the background of the picture is black; this focuses attention on the painted figures, and not on events or incidents. The main thing for the artist was to correctly present his characters and show their strength, courage, and self-confidence. The builders of Bratsk are dusty, work-weary people, but they are wonderful in their hard work and stern, restrained energy.
It is noteworthy that in its original form the canvas depicted workers with tattoos on their hands, since most of the workers at the Bratsk hydroelectric power station were prisoners. But, realizing that the management cannot release the painting for exhibition in this form, Viktor Efimovich removes the camp tattoos.
Since then, the artist has become famous. He was loved by the people and critics recognized him. And Viktor Popkov, whose paintings are bought by the Tretyakov Gallery and published by the leading newspaper, continues to work fruitfully and delight the public with new original works, living modestly and crampedly, almost poorly.
Creativity flourishes
The “work theme,” reflected in other colorful paintings by the artist, was not the only one that Viktor Efimovich Popkov turned to during his creative inspiration.
“The Brigade is Resting” and “Bridge in Arkhangelsk” are being replaced by moral and psychological plots of simple human relationships. Popkov combines different artistic styles and experiments with color effects. These are dramatic everyday episodes that are reflected in the paintings “Quarrel”, “Divorce”, “Bolotov Family”, “Two”.
“Mezen widows”
Popkov brought incredible fame to his cycle “Mezen Widows” (late 1960s - early 1970s), in which he reflected the individual character and tragic fate of a woman on each canvas. Each work amazes with its realistic originality and squat picturesqueness. And although the paintings “Waiting”, “Old Age”, “Alone” are filled with tragic pain and oppressive melancholy, they are still necessary for humanity in order to awaken in it humanity and kindness in relation to post-war women’s grief and loneliness.
The theme of historical events occupied a significant place in the artist’s work. His revealing “Chekist” and “The Doorbell” exposed the era of inexplicable bloody repressions, and “Father’s Overcoat” and others conveyed an irresistible, aching sadness for those who will never return from the distance of the front.
Tragic death
Working on historical and poetic themes, Viktor Popkov begins his legendary painting “Autumn Rain”, where he depicted the great Pushkin against the backdrop of the crying elements. The artist came to Pushkin Mountains to work on the canvas.
On November 12, while on business in the capital, Viktor Efimovich and his friends approach a parked Volga to ask the driver for a ride. But the car turned out to be a collector's car. Due to a recent high-profile robbery, the guards, who had received orders to shoot in case of danger, opened fire. The artist was mortally wounded.
At his funeral, next to his lifeless body stood the unfinished painting “Autumn Rain.”
Personal life
Popkov Viktor Efimovich was married to his classmate at the graphic school Klara, a talented artist, a true life friend. With her they went through poverty and hardship, lived in the same apartment with their mother-in-law and father-in-law, worked in the same room, and raised their son together.
Klara Ivanovna was a very bright and courageous person, she devotedly loved her husband, helped him in times of depression and despondency, and gave practical advice.
In addition to such wonderful spiritual qualities, the woman had brilliant talent and skill. She became a sought-after popular master of children's books, worked with the Malysh publishing house, and took an active part in national and international exhibitions.
"They were conceived in unbelief,
we survived in disbelief...
Negation. How to live in denial?
How to go denying yourself? How to protect, by denying You, Him, Yourself?”
It’s hard to believe, but these painful questions are heard in the diary of a man who became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR before reaching the age of thirty, who painted grandiose paintings about the harsh work of the builders of a new world without God, an artist who was welcomed by the Soviet nomenklatura and criticism. It was welcomed until the artist’s soul felt a thirst for another depth and another meaning.
Thaw illusion
Moscow artist Viktor Popkov. Photo by Evgeny Kassin and Vladimir Savostyanov /TASS Photo Chronicle/.
Viktor Popkov never managed to live “lightly” or work “lightly”. This waste of oneself went on to the maximum since childhood: at school - straight A's and in the family the nickname "big-headed", at the Surikov Institute, when classmates did three or four works as diplomas, Popkov prepared thirteen, and when he became a professional artist, even in commissioned works At work I squeezed myself to the last drop.
Popkov's childhood was a factory communal apartment in the town of Mytishchi near Moscow, not far from the Chelyuskinskaya station of the Yaroslavl railway. Parents, yesterday's residents of the village, moved here in the thirties. Difficult life, need - the mother raised the children alone: the father died at the beginning of the war. Popkov’s mother, Stepanida Ivanovna, recalled how Victor, as a boy, having first seen an artist at an easel on the street, immediately began to ask to be her student, and the mother, a simple, illiterate woman, trusting her son with her inner instinct, did not interfere with his desire, and soon they were together My friend and I entered a factory art studio. Popkov's fate is a case of a clearly expressed calling heard from childhood.
He entered art in the late fifties, during the short period of the Khrushchev thaw, when “after the long and harsh Stalinist winter” optimists expected reforms in politics - liberalization of the regime, and in art there was an influx of fresh air, a desire to go beyond the officially approved, ossified Stalinist socialist realism . Moscow Art Theater director Leonid Leonidov wrote in his diary back in the thirties: “What is realism? This is true. What is socialist realism? This is the truth we need." It would be more accurate to note - the truth that the authorities needed and which was straightforwardly affirmed through art.
The Thaw inspired the illusion that one could live and create more freely - then Stalin’s cult of personality was debunked and many artists and scientists repressed under the Stalinist regime were rehabilitated. It became possible to read Akhmatova and Yesenin, which were not published in the thirties and forties, to get acquainted with modern trends in Western European painting - in a word, it became possible to touch the cultural tradition, access to which was blocked by strict ideological control during the years of Stalin's rule.
It was a time of romantics and social optimism, when hundreds of thousands of young men and women set out to develop virgin lands, to the shock construction sites of communism, to the accompaniment of inspiring songs like “Communism is the youth of the world, and it should be built by the young.”
Popkov, together with other artists, also went to high-impact construction sites - the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station, the Bratsk hydroelectric power station, made endless studies, sketches, “looked out for life.” In the virgin lands he painted a number of paintings from the “People of the Virgin Lands” series. Popkov’s early works “Spring in the depot” (1958), “To work” (1958), the “Transport” series (1958) were fully consistent with the official ideological guidelines of the time - to announce in art the great victories of communism, to glorify working people - builders new life. There was no internal conformism for him in this, there were no intellectual or moral temptations. “The artist is called to write about the great phenomena of life” - this formula is in Popkov’s diary, then he sincerely admired the grandiose scale of construction projects, sought to “glorify” the energy of work, youth, and at that time he himself had the “wings” of youth, was enthusiastic, open new trends in society.
Bread for the flag
In 1961, Popkov painted the painting “Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station,” which became a canonical work of the so-called “severe style,” one of the founders of which was Viktor Popkov himself. Artists of the harsh style were generally included in the system of Soviet artistic “production”, but they depicted working people, everyday work more “severely”, vitally, without the pathos of socialist realism with its declarative agitation.
In the painting “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station” in the foreground, against the backdrop of a black sky, as if against a black curtain, workers stand in a row - restrained, courageous, strong-willed. The sky is a “curtain”, frontal, “iconic” figures of workers - this image can be read as “His Majesty the working class at the forefront of history,” and even then the desire of young Popkov to move away from the prosaic, everyday life of the genre scene to a semantic generalization becomes obvious, the desire not as much to draw as to “comprehend life with a brush in hand.”
The artist Eduard Bragovsky, to whom Popkov showed the “Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station,” recalled: “He was terribly upset when he saw that no one praised him, that we were indifferent. “Such a wonderful picture, but you are silent?” - Popkov was offended.” Against the backdrop of the discoveries of modern European painting, Popkov’s painting seemed outdated to some “progressive” brothers in the workshop both stylistically and thematically. Popkov's vulnerability only shows that he put much more soul into his work than is usually required for ordinary custom-made items.
The Tretyakov Gallery will buy the painting, Popkov will begin to travel to international exhibitions, and will experience the rise of fame when “he was given any agreement according to any handwriting.” Publications about him in newspapers and radio broadcasts were important to him - success gave him the necessary self-confidence and spread his wings. Popkov was not even thirty when he became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR, and soon he was invited to the Committee for Lenin and State Prizes. An early career takeoff promised great prospects. But by the mid-1960s, the “thaw” had faded away. Almost all the conquests made by Soviet culture during the short period of the thaw were subjected to serious disgrace. The retreat began. The authorities, including the orthodox and official part of the leadership of the Union of Artists, sought to nip at the roots all sorts of “meaningless creative quests.”
But Popkov could no longer live without noticing the deep contradictions in society, could not exist within the framework of a predictable, in all respects prosperous, officialdom. His thoughts at that time were sad: “Either you will draw a flag and receive a salary today, buy your mother bread, or you will not receive anything, but you will do as you want.” He did not go underground, did not become part of the artistic underground, but ceased to be a “true believer,” and the gates to the establishment of Soviet culture were half-closed for him.
What do widows talk about?
For some time he turns to lyrical themes, to chamber, psychological works - “The Bolotov Family”, “Two”, “Three Artists” - in them the private life of a simple, unremarkable person. This desire for intimacy reflects emptiness, fatigue from Soviet rhetoric and ideology, which was losing its internal filler - this is a feature of the time, many artists, filmmakers, and writers then moved away from “big themes.” However, Popkov’s nerve and energy did not allow him to stay in this niche for long. “To be free and free in design, to be a creator, a hooligan, whatever, but listen to your impulses and trust them.”
In 1966, he went on a creative trip to the North, to Mezen, and there he began the famous “Mezen Cycle”. Painting “Memories. Widows" is one of the central ones in the cycle.
While renting a room in the house of one of the old women in a village on the Mezen River, Popkov witnessed village gatherings: “One day her friends came to the landlady where I lived. They sat for a long time, remembering the past, drank mash, ate flatbread, fragrant cod, and gradually, forgetting about me, completely went back to that distant time when life was just beginning for them.” Behind the everyday, prosaic scene, Popkov discovered the very depths of the destinies of these village women: “How can this be? Why are they alone? Where are their husbands and children? Where is the happiness to which they had every right? And only I, a random person, am the only witness to their woman’s, damned, lonely lot. Their whole life, their whole youth was now floating before my eyes.” After this meeting, Popkov came up with a theme for a new painting.
The large canvas depicts five old village women; in their image there is deliberately nothing of cozy, homely grandmothers, with a curly-haired grandson nearby and a jug of milk on the table. Here the opposite is true: the silhouettes of the figures are clearly outlined, the figures seem to be carved out of wood, the folds of clothing are marked large, the lines are straight. The thin old woman in the foreground seems to have stepped off the icon board, resurrecting ancient iconographic images of holy martyrs. There are no vain details of everyday life, and the image itself rises from illustrative narrative, from the limit of existence to a poetic structure, to a symbol - Popkov was the first to introduce this level of symbol, parable, into Soviet art of the 1960s–1970s.
The painting “Widows” is a memory of the war, and these five women, like different hypostases of one soul - a tragic generalized image of a widow's lot - how many of them, lonely old women, mourned their dead husbands throughout the Russian land. Behind them is a busy life with hard everyday life, Popkov emphasizes the hands of working women, disproportionately large - they are like that for carrying cast-iron boilers and sacks. Their children were scattered around the world, and they themselves were left to live out their lives in a dreary, lonely village in the northern wilderness. The harsh, rich gray color of the room corresponds to the very way of life in the North. Each of the old women went inside herself, remembering what had ailed her and made her soul happy over the years. But it is not grief and memory of the past that sets the tone of the whole picture. Popkov raises the note of sorrow to a high affirmation of life, filling the picture with red, with all its “juices” - scarlet, crimson, fire. “In the North, the landscape and the village are very restrained in color, and if a flower or a red dress appears, then they look significant and their impact is highly expressive” (V. Popkov). And this red color in the old women’s outfits, like a flash, becomes the basis for the perception of the image, otherwise the whole theme of the picture sounds... “Joyful tragedy” is Popkov’s favorite expression. “For me, the scene that I depicted in the picture has nothing in common with whining, hopelessness, or melancholy. Widows, having mentally gone back to a young, happy time, want to gain strength from the past for today and tomorrow. This is a life affirmation, although tragic in its manifestation.”
Widows, scorched by the experience of war, separation, death - the red color unites them into a single whole, here is the spirit of sisterhood. Behind the severity and severity of these images, dissonant red sounds like the color of life, the hidden inner strength of these women is revealed, it is no coincidence that in the center of the composition is a straight, as if internally unbent, old woman who has not lost faith.
And here Popkov expressed something of the “main thing”. Intuitively, by touch, he approaches the theme of Christian humble acceptance and bearing of his cross. Humbly and with dignity accepting her widow's share, loneliness, all the hardships of everyday life that she had to endure, the soul is spiritually filled - hence the inner strength of these old women, hence the “joyful tragedy.” Let there be a portrait of Karl Marx in the corner instead of an icon - a reliable detail: “a drawing from my mistress, who left behind her husband his conviction, his purity of faith in the party, expressed in the sacredly protected and expensive portraits of Marx and Lenin in the corners of the hut” (V. Popkov .) These portraits of leaders capture a contradictory time, but the entire structure of the inner life of these village women goes back not to party Leninist norms, but to centuries-old Russian religious origins.
At that time, writing such a thing, multidimensional in meaning, with symbolic overtones, was a challenge. The film was received ambiguously; Popkov was reproached for being too gloomy and hopeless, without capturing the full depth of the concept.
For Popkov, “Widows” is a personal topic; before his eyes is the fate of his mother, who at the beginning of the war remained a widow. According to the recollections of Popkov's friends, his mother was a person who personified meekness and humility. Stepanida Ivanovna was very pious, she worked in the church as a bell ringer for many years, she was small, dry, and she instilled kindness and calm in her son. He comes to her before starting a new job: “Mom, bless me.”
"Where they sing and don't moan"
In 1970, Popkov completed the painting “Mother and Son,” where he depicts himself and his mother. In the picture there is evening, complete silence in the room, a lamp with a lampshade reflected in the window; the son lies sick and listens to his mother read the Bible in front of the icon. Many art historians have noted that in the image of the son there is a reference to the iconic image of the “Savior Not Made by Hands”; here there is a possible echo with the eternal theme of the Mother of God and Child - the theme of sacrificial maternal love and prayerful petition for the son who is destined to carry his cross. In the picture, the mother is praying, the son is listening attentively to her prayer, and the soul is accustomed to the Divine word, imbued with it. The red lampshade, the echo of red in clothes and things create the internal tension of the image - here is a concentrated comprehension of the Meaning.
Popkov was not a church person, but there was a spiritual, “root” connection with his mother, which obviously nourished him; visually in the picture, this unity is again enhanced by the color scheme - the combination of white and red in the image of mother and son. Perhaps this special closeness with his believing mother was the source of the fact that in Popkov’s work the Christian subtext begins to sound more and more fully, which, however, rather shines through than is clearly stated. But, I think, the main thing here was his own constant desire to “bite into life, learn, comprehend the basic laws of our existence.”
In his works the storyline almost disappears, a very subtle mood and listening appear. Popkov wrote that in his paintings he wanted to “express something unclear, spiritually intangible, along with the concrete.”
He writes “Silence”, “May Day”, “In the Cathedral” (1974). The latter, oddly enough, he conceived while on a trip to Germany, and finished it in Russia. In the picture, the slanting rays of the sun illuminated the temple, and everything around was in the golden transparent reflections of everything transforming heavenly gold. In the iconic self-portrait “Father’s Overcoat,” he depicts himself trying on a soldier’s overcoat, symbolically asking the question of his contemporaries: is the military feat of their fathers capable of their generation? Do you have enough inner strength, integrity, and courage? “Autumn rains. Pushkin" - Popkov worked on this absolutely amazing thing in Mikhailovsky, and it seems as if he wrote everything as it was, from life: Pushkin saw, felt these Russian distances, the space, the vastness of the fields, looked at the gray sky in which the eternal autumn sadness melts , inhaled this air when “the autumn chill breathed in.” Here is a single image - of the poet and of Russia - the land that generously fed Pushkin with poetic power.
These are not directly religious subjects, but in these themes Popkov touches on something inevitably important, “existent” in the inner life of every person.
In 1972, the “Northern Chapel” was completed. The painting endured a terrible battle with officials from the cultural department at the exhibition; they demanded that it be removed. Popkov as a whole in those years was presented as random, weak things, uncharacteristic of him; He was almost not allowed to attend republican and all-Union exhibitions. Curiosities arose: they did not want to include Popkov’s famous “Father’s Overcoat” in the exhibition at the Manege on the grounds that Popkov depicted himself there wearing imported boots. The main places where he could exhibit were small-scale autumn and spring exhibitions, and even there it took a lot of effort to keep his work on display - “Popkov got an awful lot of it. Scary. Somehow very cruel. They zealously fought against what they called formalistic art.” Popkov searched all the time, experimented, but most importantly, “he carried with him everything that was alive, caring, daring, to comprehend the secrets of the human soul,” recalled the artist Igor Obrosov.
The “Northern Chapel” was defended. In the picture there is a figure of a boy frozen in the doorway at the entrance to the chapel. He looks inside with fascination, as if a “ray from heaven” touched the soul, and she froze from the feeling of awe that overtook her before the mystery and beauty of the heavenly landscape. The viewer sees only part of the temple paintings - three angels, overshadowing everyone who enters with their cover, painted in a shining, joyful scarlet color in contrast with the silvery blue of the northern distances.
Popkov had been fascinated by ancient Russian art for a long time and in 1964 he even made a special trip to the medieval monastery of Ferapontovo, decorated with frescoes of Dionysius, to make sketches from the frescoes. It seems that from contemplating the visible image of heavenly Beauty is only a step to comprehending invisible life, to the sacred dimension, to discovering the very source of this Beauty. Popkov himself, like the boy in the painting, stood on the threshold of this discovery. Peering and listening to this mystery is already participation. The poet Nikolai Tryapkin, a contemporary of Popkov, recalling his youth, wrote:
Let me not honor the saints and, looking at the church,
not baptized
But when the vociferous copper called from the bell tower,
I went into the vestibule and stood humbly at the door,
And he looked into the depths, one-third submerged in darkness.
The soul froze, and the candle flicker trembled,
And the thundering choirs overthrew wave after wave.
And it seemed to me that I had stepped into the limit of the Universe
And that eternity itself lit fires before me.
So in tune with the mood of Popkov’s picture! It seems that in this landmark work he foresees a way out of the spiritual impasse in which his generation found itself - these are people who were formed in an atheistic era, which deprived them of faith, the mystical experience of being, they walked through life as if by touch, on the road, painfully feeling their isolation from the light: “Show me the region where there is light from the lamps, show me the place I was looking for, - Where they sing, and do not moan, where the floor does not roll,” Vladimir Vysotsky wheezed into the microphone in those years.
Like a cocked trigger
It is no coincidence that similar images are born in poetry, painting, and cinema at this time - in Vysotsky’s song: “The images in the corner are also skewed,” in Popkov’s film “Silence” - dilapidated churches with a holey dome, in Shukshin’s film “Kalina Krasnaya” " - a flooded temple. In everything there is some kind of “dislocated” life, a tragic breakdown of centuries-old foundations, abandonment of God and ... desperate longing for some other, otherworldly Truth. These voices of the era contain all the complexity of the internal self-determination of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
Most of the intelligentsia of his generation existed by inertia, under the protection of state recognition and simple laws of opportunism, but those who at least somehow thought, and besides had a talent from God, they often broke into a binge, approached the “edge”, not being able, not knowing how to preserve oneself from oneself, one’s passions and from godless time. In 1966, at the last moment, Popkov’s father-in-law pulled him out of the loop. A fit of despair. A lot happened then - quarrels with his wife because of his drinking bouts, endless embarrassment and obstacles from officials in relation to his work.
Popkov was generally a desperate, cocky person, always sharp and unexpected. “All his work was based on nerves. It was like that in life” (artist Igor Popov). Many of his friends remember his reckless behavior: “They announced boarding the train. There were no more than three minutes left. Vitya's coin falls between the platform and the carriage. He goes down, picks up a coin and climbs back,” or when “in winter, separated from a group of friends, he goes down from the bridge to the river and walks on the barely frozen ice.”
“He was always like a cocked trigger, a compressed spring, ready to be released at any moment,” recalled art critic Grigory Anisimov.
His reaction to the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968 was indicative. Popkov then cut his hair bald as a sign of protest, either seriously or as a joke. When asked to work for the KGB, he “politely” declined: “Well, I’d be glad to serve, but I drink!” He was one of the few who raised his hand and supported Solzhenitsyn's nomination for the Lenin Prize, although voting for him at that time required some courage. He always took a very independent position in relation to the most reactionary part of the leadership of the Academy of Arts and the Union of Artists. The artist Max Birshtein remembered an expressive scene: “In the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, the congress of the Union of Artists was finishing its work. Vitya and my friends and I stood in the foyer and talked. The broadcast was heard. The Chairman says that we are approaching the assessment of the activities of the previous Board. There is a proposal to recognize the work as good, and there is a proposal to recognize the work as satisfactory. When we heard this, Vitya was no longer with us. Like Gagarin, he gallops across the red carpet with his credentials raised. The Presidium is confused. Victor rises to the podium with an energetic step: “I propose that the work be considered unsatisfactory.” He was the only one who spoke about it openly. I remember his lightning-fast reaction when, from a friendly conversation, perhaps an empty one, he instantly found himself on the podium.”
Many noted that in the last year of his life there was always some kind of anxiety hanging over him, as if he had a presentiment of the approach of something tragic. Max Birshtein recalled that shortly before his death, Popkov brought a stack of records tied with a ribbon and said: “Please play this at my funeral.”
Viktor Popkov died trying to stop the car to get home. He accidentally approached a cash-in-transit vehicle, was mistaken for a robber and was shot at point-blank range. The farewell took place in the House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most. The paintings “Autumn Rains. Pushkin" and "Grandma Anisya was a good person" - Popkov’s last significant work, which he managed to complete before his death. Coincidentally or not, but in this picture is the result of the author’s thoughts about death, about the meaning of human existence. It turned out that I wrote a requiem to myself.
"Now carry it"
The picture reveals itself to the viewer gradually. At first it looks like a scene of a village funeral, but gradually the full scale of the plan is revealed: here is the greatness of the earth and the significance and greatness of every human life, albeit unknown to anyone, of the village grandmother Anisya.
A large powerful oak tree like a tree of life, among its crimson foliage green leaves suddenly shine through; the same semantic motif is repeated in the depiction of people: the group of young people is compositionally and color-wise separated from the crowd of old women in black. Here is the eternal earthly cycle of the withering of life and its new conception, in which both nature and man are included. In the foreground is a child who still cannot understand the essence of what is happening, he stands with his back to the grave and facing the viewer - life goes on. The hilly land in the foreground, illuminated by the yellow autumn sun, is strewn with crimson leaves, and this “lush decay of nature” is a movement from life to death. The theme of autumn is traditional in world art - it is a note of sadness, elegy, anticipation of parting and the time of harvest, both in the earthly and symbolically in the spiritual sense - the time to collect what has been sown. Despite the tragedy of what is happening, the color of the canvas, ringing, amber-gold, gives the whole work a certain enlightenment. Grandma Anisya was a “good person,” and that is why her life is crowned with completeness, she is fruitful. Everyday reality is recognizable in clothes, types, and cemetery monuments. The funeral takes place in a small northern village and at the same time against the widest background, in a huge world. It is no coincidence that Popkov takes a bird’s eye view and decides to paint “Granny Anisya” as a colored icon... “Faces, as in icons - ocher, modeling, spaces” - in order to switch to a fundamentally different language - the language of metaphysical concepts, which for every century , timeless.
An interesting detail: there is no rain in the picture, but people are under raincoats. “There is rain in the soul,” wrote Popkov, “the protection of the world from something negative.”
At the exhibition, “Grandma Anisya” went unnoticed, as the artists said, “did not receive the press.” This was very painful for Popkov. He was waiting for a conversation about the painting; it was important for him to be understood and heard, because in his works he always tried to talk about important, real things; tried to intuitively break through the boundary of a certain spiritual tightness of his generation, about which Vysotsky figuratively wrote: “there is ice above and below.” But the significance of Popkov’s works, for all his authority, was not entirely clear to his contemporaries.
He died on November 12, 1974. The collectors defended themselves and proved that it was an attack. When it became obvious that a murder had occurred, the artist friends who had been with Victor in the last moments of his life fled; he was still alive for some time.
Viktor Popkov’s mother, Stepanida Ivanovna, recalls: “They were buried with bells ringing. She did everything herself. Seminarians came. And they performed the funeral service like that! - The whole temple was shaking. The funeral service took two hours. And the priest spoke a sermon for a long time. And when they brought it, she went and rang the bell... Now bring it.”
I can’t help but remember again the painting “Mother and Son” - the theme of Light and Meaning, the theme of maternal love and prayerful request for a son who is destined to carry his cross. Popkov carried his cross without cowardice. “A man who seeks conscience in art,” art critic Grigory Anisimov wrote about him. Conscience is usually called the voice of God in a person, it was this voice that Popkov “sought” in life, the truth of this search spilled out onto his canvases.
No, I won't strive. No, I won't moan.
I will laugh quietly. I will cry quietly.
I will love quietly, I will pain quietly,
I will live quietly, and death will also be quiet.
If there is happiness for me, If there is my God,
I won't swing, I'll find my threshold.
I will be kind to people, I will love everyone,
I will laugh in sadness, I will laugh in sadness.
And I won't offend you. I can tolerate even meanness.
Have pity at least once in your life. Death! Will you come? I won't say anything.
Victor Popkov. About Me
Viktor Efimovich Popkov is a bright representative of the generation of the sixties. He entered the history of Russian art quickly and brightly. Immediately after graduating from the Institute. Surikov Viktor Popkov has become a notable phenomenon in the country's fine arts. Three of his works from the diploma series were purchased by the State Tretyakov Gallery, he was written about in newspapers and magazines, and filmed on television.
At the age of 33, Popkov became a member of the committee for awarding the State and Lenin Prizes; in 1966 he was awarded an honorary diploma from the Biennale at an exhibition of works by young artists in Paris for his works “Noon”, “Two”, “The Bolotov Family”.
My day. 1960
Viktor Efimovich Popkov- heir to the great tradition of Russian realism, pLike Petrov-Vodkin or Korzhev, Popkov worked in such a way as to make an everyday detail and an everyday scene a symbol of existence in general.
Viktor Efimovich’s palette is almost monochrome, he often uses iconographic techniques (gaps in the work with faces, solid colored backgrounds), his drawing is angular and sometimes hasty, but the main thing in his paintings by Popkov is that the artist has something to tell the viewer.
They managed to forget about Victor Popkov - the memory of him was obscured by endless avant-garde actions, the auction successes of rogues, the indistinguishable motley products of the “second avant-garde” - the crafts of the decorative market of the new bourgeois.
Builders of the Bratsk hydroelectric power station. 1960—1961
Popkov is a purely Soviet artist. This means that his ideal in art is what was proclaimed as a social ideal during the years of Soviet power - even though it was violated and betrayed. He believed that people love the land on which they live, are ready to die for it, remember their fathers, honor their memory, are responsible for society - that is, for the elderly and children.
With naivety and fearlessness - because sentimental statements in art are dangerous, it’s easier to be a cynic - Popkov painted old women and children; This is a rare case when an artist painted so many babies and helpless old people - at that time avant-garde artists more often painted win-win stripes and wrote “Brezhnev is a goat,” but few people dared to love. Do you know who the group "Collective Actions" or "Mushrooms" loved? They themselves didn’t know either. When drawing a child, it is easy to make a thing vulgar, and Popkov often lost his temper, but continued to draw; sometimes he produced masterpieces.
Memories. Widows. 1966
Truly educated and intelligent people were engaged in conceptualism; drawing was considered obsolete. Everywhere in intelligent groups tired young men said that painting was dead. In those years, it was believed that the real writer was Prigov, and Pasternak wrote an unsuccessful opus - Doctor Zhivago. It seemed to many secular people that the opinions of curators from New York and gallerists from Miami were critical of what art should exist and what should be lost. Through their efforts, painting was declared an anachronism. The lively young men got busy with the installations, and Popkov looked funny with his old-style brush.
Not only did he try to paint a picture, in these pictures he painted people who were of no interest to anyone - village widows, clumsy men, children from the outskirts, Soviet townspeople. It was such blatantly unfashionable creativity, shamefully sincere. Well, imagine a person who comes to an intelligent house where Kafka is being read and says that he loves his homeland, and his dad took Berlin. It's a shame, isn't it? And Popkov was talking about exactly this - and was not shy.
Father's overcoat. 1972
Some of his works (Mezen Widows, After Work, Mother and Son, Father's Overcoat) are undoubted masterpieces of painting - he did what an ordinary talent cannot do, namely: he created his hero. This is what is actually remarkable about plastic art - unlike music or, for example, philosophy - fine art has the ability to create a person, to endow an image with unique physical features. It would be difficult to reconstruct our world based on the works of the decorative avant-garde, but based on the works of Popkov, it is possible. From now on, there is a hero of Viktor Popkov in the world, just as there is a hero of Petrov-Vodkin (a worker intellectual) or a hero of Korin (a confused priest), a hero of Falk (an urban homeless intellectual) or a hero of Filonov (a proletarian world builder).
Two. 1966
Popkov's hero is a resident of the block areas of the outskirts, a husband and father with a small salary, which is enough for him - but he doesn't need anything extra - he won't know what to use it for; he is a relative of the heroes of Vladimov and Zinoviev; This is an intellectual who no longer believes in anything, but works for the sake of others and for the sake of public duty - because “the country needs fish,” in the words of the hero of “Three Minutes of Silence.”
This is a bitter fate, an uncomfortable fate, and Popkov’s paintings are sad - not decorative. The modern bourgeoisie is unlikely to appreciate his paintings. Popkov was a real artist, and his authenticity was expressed in the fact that he was an uneven artist - sometimes overly sentimental, sometimes sugary. In the best things - a great realist, in the best (there is one canvas where an old woman sits in the corner of a hut) - a great painter.
In Popkov's paintings the motif of the icon is exceptionally strong - he insists on the kinship of realistic (some would say: socialist realist) painting with icon painting. His ideas about pictorial masonry are as artless and simple as those of a provincial icon painter, and what he paints for can be expressed in exactly the same words that we describe the reason for the appearance of the icon.
Time did not help us to discern this artist. He seemed not modern enough, our toy, fake time does not like everything real - but I wanted something colorful and daring: he was forgotten for the sake of candy wrappers, just like his European contemporaries - Guttuso or Morandi - were forgotten; these artists will have to be rediscovered. The language itself has been lost - there is no art critic today who would be able to analyze a painting, a layer of paint, or the movement of fingers. Art has been dumbed down for a very long time; curators have been created instead of art critics.
Now we have to learn not only to speak again, but also to look again.
Maxim Kantor
The brigade is resting. 1965
Life—at times it seemed to Popkov—was taking on the features of an absurd farce. And if so, it was impossible to avoid the search for - not truth, no, oblivion - at the bottom of the glass. Suicide attempt. Premonition of imminent death. Two weeks before his death, he brought records to his friends: “Play music at my funeral.”
Death is also absurd. And in this absurdity and randomness one can hear the inexorable tread of fate.
He should not have been in Moscow that day at all. He was about to leave. But he didn’t leave. At 11 pm on November 12, 1974, Viktor Popkov was hailing a car on Gorky Street. The taxis didn't stop. Mistaking a cash collector's Volga for a taxi, the artist tried to stop it. The collector (as it turned out later, he was drunk) shot and left the mortally wounded man to die on the pavement. Popkov was brought to the hospital as a bandit who had committed a robbery on a cash-in-transit vehicle, and only later the circumstances of the “attack” were clarified thanks to random witnesses.
Grandma Anisya was a good person. 1973
And already at 2 o’clock in the morning the Voice of America reported that “the famous Russian artist Popkov was killed by KGB colonels.” “Provocations” were expected during the civil memorial service and funeral. But there were no provocations, except perhaps for one thing: entering the hall of the House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most, where the civil funeral service was taking place, people saw on the stage Popkov’s painting “Grandma Anisya Was a Good Person.” Several years ago, when the painting was first exhibited at the House of Artists, Popkov wanted to place it here. Then they didn’t give it. Dali now.
“Tarusa. Sunny day. I was at the grave of Vatagin, Paustovsky, Borisov-Musatov. Holy graves. The memory of them is bright. What conclusion could I draw today? They were greedy for life. They wanted to live and understood perfectly well that there would be peace. They were not prudes about life. They loved life and lived it fully, both spiritually and physically, within the limits given to each by nature.
And now I understand that in order for you to be remembered with gratitude after your death, you need to have the courage to live in pain, suffering from joy, to love joy, laughter, health, everything beautiful, strong, living and everything that moves - the body, thought, soul.
And one more thing: each age has its own beauty of both body and spirit. But the most beautiful body is in youth, and the spirit is in old age. And you need to love the body when you are young and always think about the spirit, and in old age only about the spirit. Less whining, God, give health to both body and spirit. Teach us to rejoice while we live. Forget thoughts about violence against life.”
Return. 1972
Almost 38 years have passed since the death of the artist, but scarlet carnations are still laid on the snow at his monument in Tarasovka. Many books, articles have been written about Viktor Popkov, films have been made, and television programs have been made. The paintings are stored in major museums and art galleries in Russia and abroad. Collectors consider it an honor to own Popkov's works. This is evidence of the grace that Viktor Efimovich put into his paintings during his lifetime.
Pock. 1959
Popkov Viktor Efimovich (1932-1974) - Soviet artist, painter and graphic artist.
The artist was born on March 9, 1932 in Moscow into a working-class family. The artist’s father died during the Great Patriotic War, and the artist’s mother, who became a widow, raised four children alone.
From 1948 to 1952 Viktor Efimovich studied at the Art and Graphic Pedagogical School, from 1952 to 1958 at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Popkov traveled widely throughout the country, visiting cities in Siberia and major Soviet construction projects. Popkov painted paintings based on impressions from his trips - the artist’s most famous such work is “Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station (Builders of Bratsk).”
In the mid-1960s, the artist almost completely changed his artistic style, abandoning the theme of state ideology, which then prevailed in the work of Soviet masters - instead, Viktor Efimovich focused on more complex philosophical themes.
Viktor Efimovich Popkov posthumously became a laureate of the USSR State Prize. Also, a posthumous exhibition of the artist’s works was organized at the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The artist died on November 12, 1974, shot at point-blank range by a collector. The event that took place was distorted in every possible way by interested parties: friends of the deceased artist, the defense of the collector... In addition, the Voice of America radio made a verbal “stuffing”, reporting that “Popkov was killed by KGB officers”: because of this, the civil memorial service for to the artist - security officers were afraid of possible provocations, and therefore tried to ban the holding of a public event.
So what happened on November 12, 1974? On that day, Popkov signed an agreement with. On the territory of the plant, Popkov met an artist friend who offered to celebrate the signing of the contract in a cafe. During the celebration, two more acquaintances joined the artists - the whole company sat in the cafe until late in the evening. It was already late - Popkov suggested going to his workshop located on Bryanskaya Street in order to continue the celebration in a creative atmosphere.
The drunken artists went out into the street and, under the leadership of Viktor Efimovich Popkov, immediately headed to the collection vehicle, which was parked on the opposite side of the road. It is difficult to say why Popkov decided to ask the collectors for a “ride”: it is possible that it was some kind of drunken stupor, or it could be that the artist considered himself such a significant person that the collectors should meekly obey him, not caring about their own responsibilities.
As Popkov’s contemporaries said, not burdened by the need for personal friendship with him, Viktor Efimovich was an overly pompous and self-confident person; it is possible that these two character traits influenced his death. It should also be noted that on November 10, 1974, in Crimea, a robbery was committed on a cash-in-transit vehicle: two collectors were killed on a deserted section of the highway, after which the cash-in-transit service received a special order allowing shooting without warning in a dangerous situation.
It is quite obvious that the collectors, transporting a large sum of money, were very alarmed due to the recent murder of their comrades, and then a group of drunks is breaking into the window of an official car, demanding to let them in and “give them a lift”...
In 1972-1973, Viktor Efimovich Popkov, together with his wife, a famous artist, worked at Kenozero. Among others, below are some works that were created during joint creative trips with the artist’s wife.
This week, the Academy of Watercolor and Fine Arts of Sergei Andriyaka opened a personal exhibition of works by the sixties artist Viktor Popkov, one of the leaders of the harsh style
Academy of Watercolor and Fine Arts of Sergei Andriyaka
May 15 - July 7, 2013
Moscow, st. Academician Vargi, 15
4th floor of the Academy's administrative building
This week, a personal exhibition of works by Viktor Popkov “Painting, Graphics” opened at the Academy of Watercolor and Fine Arts of Sergei Andriyaka.
No, I won't strive. No, I won't moan.
I will laugh quietly. I will cry quietly.
I will love quietly, I will pain quietly,
I will live quietly, and death will also be quiet.
If there is happiness for me, If there is my God,
I won't swing, I'll find my threshold.
I will be kind to people, I will love everyone,
I will laugh in sadness, I will laugh in sadness.
And I won't offend you. I can tolerate even meanness.
Have pity at least once in your life. Death! Will you come? I won't say anything.
Victor Popkov. About Me
In November 1974, artist Viktor Efimovich Popkov was shot by a collector when he approached a Volga car and asked the driver to give him a ride. Subsequently, the collector claimed that he acted according to instructions. The artist was buried at the Cherkizovsky cemetery.
Then this terrible, ridiculous, inexplicable story did not receive due publicity. And the Soviet government, trying to hush up the scandal, hastened to award the artist, whom they did not really like, the USSR State Prize (posthumously). Thus, at the age of 42, the life of one of the most significant Russian artists of the second half of the 20th century was cut short.
Viktor Efimovich Popkov (03/09/1932 - 11/12/1974), laureate of the USSR State Prize, was born into a working-class family. He studied at the Art and Graphic Pedagogical School (1948–1952) and the Moscow Art Institute named after V. I. Surikov (1952–1958) with E. A. Kibrik. Lived in Moscow.
Soviet artist of the sixties. One of the leaders of the harsh style. Popkov's paintings are distinguished by drama, psychologism of images and situations, a desire for philosophical reflection on life, rigor of compositions and rich color. In the period from 1956 to 1974, Popkov traveled to Baikal, Siberia, the Moscow region, Vologda region, and the North, where, based on his impressions, he created a series of works in oil, gouache, and pencil. In the West he was called a dissident. His highly social works often irritated the authorities.
From the memoirs of Viktor Popkov: “I tried to write works that, at first viewing, were perceived by some viewers as heavy, gloomy, permeated with a feeling of melancholy and depression... And when these works were scolded and accused of being gloomy, I was annoyed not for my work, but for those people, women-widows whom they did not want to see, their grief..."
But Popkov's most important work is his fate. No advanced conceptual artist has anything like it, and it’s likely that they would give a lot for such a legend. A boy from a working-class family graduates brilliantly from the Surikov Institute and is favored by the authorities for his first big painting, “Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station.” At the age of 27, very early by those standards, he joined the USSR Union of Artists, and in 1962 he went to Finland for the Festival of Youth and Students. In 1967 he received an honorary diploma from the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Paris. 30-year-old Popkov even joined the committee for awarding State and Lenin Prizes. There was great social success.
And at the same time - alcohol, a suicide attempt (his father-in-law literally pulled him out of the noose), a premonition of death. A couple of weeks before his death, Popkov brought records to his friends: “Play music at my funeral.” At the funeral, next to the coffin there was an unfinished painting by Viktor Popkov “Autumn Rains (Pushkin)”. Now it is in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery.
A distinctive feature of Viktor Popkov’s work is the parable nature of his works. Using the language of symbols, he writes a story, story, novel with the plasticity of lines, spots, colors, textures, achieving a virtuoso technique of execution. There is always mystery and mysterious appeal in his paintings. The strength of his work also lies in the fact that, using the language of painting, he was able to achieve the optimal result in his plans. The idea, color, composition, virtuoso drawing - everything is at the highest professional level.
Viktor Popkov was a deeply national artist. His patriotic things concerned all aspects of life in society and people close to him in spirit. As a director, he got used to the material and was imbued with sympathy for the characters in his paintings. Apparently this is why the emotional content of his canvases still resonates in the hearts of many viewers.
From memories of Viktor Popkov
“Popkov is one of the key figures of Russian post-war art. In just a few years, he made a leap from the social to the existential” (Ian Brook, Deputy Director of the State Tretyakov Gallery for scientific work).
“When you look at the paintings of Viktor Popkov, it is impossible to rid yourself of the memories of that shot and early death, at 42 years old. Popkov left us an eternal riddle: why?”
“Some said: the system was stifling, stagnation and creative lack of freedom were approaching. But death is such a big event that it cannot be measured or explained by political reasons. Be that as it may, life was clearly burdening him, he was looking for an opportunity to get rid of it.”
“This is fate. And Popkov’s painting, in the refraction of this fate, is perceived differently - even more significant and much more tragic.”
Rain in the artist's soul
“Someday, a Victor Popkov museum will be opened in Moscow, specially built according to a special project. In the huge bright halls his canvases will hang - all of them: both those that were awarded the State Prize, and those that have yet to be appreciated by critics and descendants,” wrote the famous journalist and writer Zhanna Grechukha.
March 9 this year would have marked the 81st birthday of artist Viktor Efimovich Popkov. There is no museum in Moscow yet, but in the Mytishchi Art Museum there has been a memorial to Victor Popkov for a long time.
The artist's name is significant in the fine arts of Russia. They still write about him, make films, and have his personal exhibitions. The State Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum have more than 150 works by the master. The attention to the artist’s personality is not accidental. Everything that concerns Russian national culture is of great interest. And Popkov’s creativity is deeply national. For him, his native land was not an empty concept. Everything concerned the artist-tribune: both the joy and the pain of society. All his program paintings are about this. “Father’s Overcoat”, “Widows”, “Northern Song”, “Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station”, “The Brigade is Resting” and many other paintings are modern now and will always be modern. Because the themes raised by the artist are so large-scale that they cannot be attributed to any specific time. For example, the canvas “Summer. July,” conceived here in Mytishchi, where he spent his childhood and youth. His native land served as an image for many of Victor’s paintings: “Two”, “Mother and Son”, “Sick Child”, “Klyazma River”, “Students in Practice”, “Waiting”. The house in which the Popkovs lived, on Silikatnaya Street, 30, is no longer there, but numerous drawings, studies, and sketches remained in the history of the city thanks to the painter. For a long time, there stood a birch tree in that place, which Victor brought from the forest in a hat and planted. But time did not spare her either.
The artist painted ordinary people in ordinary life circumstances, and the paintings forced the viewer to be involved in the social problems of society, which were visible in the pictorial plasticity. He always said: “When the soul hurts or rejoices, then a real work comes out.” Many artists ask the question: “What would Popkov paint now?” The master's creativity was sincere and responded to impressions that touched the heart, which he could not pass by without leaving a trace. I think that in our troubled times he would turn to the history of Russia, to Russian national original art, because now this is the sore point of the country. In a letter to the artist Nadya Leger, he wrote: “Of course, the artist of our time is called to write about the great phenomena of life. And I think we need to create either large thematic canvases or series about them.”
One day, after working on a sketch, he decided to swim in Klyazma not far from the Church of the Intercession in Tarasovka. When I came out of the water I saw a swear word scrawled on my landscape. Two teenagers stood nearby and laughed. The artist slapped them on the back of the head in anger, and they brought their fathers, ready to pounce on Victor. He tried to find out how they raised their children, but it was useless.
Art critic G. Anisimov once showed me an album given to him by Victor. The album contained drawings and sketches by R. Gamzatov, E. Yevtushenko, D. Shostakovich, the full Alexandrov song ensemble and others made during his work on the Committee for the Award of Lenin and State Prizes, of which he was a member in the early 60s. x years. The most vivid impression of the work in the Committee was a serious conversation with a member of the Central Committee, sculptor E. Vuchetich, after voting on awarding the prize to A. Solzhenitsyn. E. Vuchetich recommended the young artist not to bury himself and not show willfulness in voting (Popkov voted for the award). Victor tried to argue, but ran into such serious threats that he went to his mother in Mytishchi for a whole week - he was afraid that they would kill him. It was a time of thaw, when many young creative personalities believed in freedom of creativity and hoped that it would always be this way. After all, they, young actors, writers, artists, were entrusted with work on the Awards Committee. Deceived in their expectations, they did not lay down their arms and continued to fight the communist ideology that dominated creativity. V. Popkov, speaking passionately at meetings and congresses, sometimes only later realized the danger of his actions. In the painting “Sunday”, he allegorically depicted himself squeezed by grayness and dreaming of freedom. Party instructors hosting exhibitions often did not hang V. Popkov’s canvases for political reasons, and he came up with a symbolic system of images, where, through a parable, he was able to talk about what he could not help but write about. He depicted himself lying naked on a roof above the city with a bottle of wine and looking at free-flying pigeons. He explained to me the meaning of his plan like this. Naked because he is open to everyone and sincere in his creativity. He identifies with the white church, hemmed in by the gray roofs of the city, and envies the freedom of the pigeons.
Everyone who had to write about Popkov agreed that throughout his work one is struck by the purity and conscientiousness of his soul, his excited personal intonation, and direct or indirect self-portraiture. Without this there is no artist Popkov.
With his righteous nature, he could not accept the fact that a person can be slandered, slandered publicly, branded with shame when there is no reason for this. Lying was simply not acceptable to his nature.
While still a teenager in the village, he decided to butt heads with a local bull, and he hit him in the bridge of his nose with its horn. He barely survived. In fact, he butted heads with power all his life. And she did not spare him. He organically did not accept lies and injustice. In his paintings he could convey his ideas and thoughts to the viewer. In any picture he himself is invisibly present as a character. It seems that everything that was happening was happening right in front of him, to which he was a witness. The painting “My Day” is evidence of this. He depicted himself in a winter landscape behind a sketchbook. On the left is an old woman, on the right is a young girl. He saw the girl rush out of the house, having quarreled with her mother, and throw the key into the snow. The artist himself made from this event a parable about youth and old age, about loneliness, about time. He himself did not know which line to choose - he had several of them. A simple everyday scene has become overgrown with legends and speculation from critics. In response to the critics’ question, he answered that the association that you have about the picture will be correct. When I wrote “Father’s Overcoat,” I cried. I remembered my father, who died at the front. His teacher E. Kibrik once asked: “Victor, in your film “Grandma Anisya Was a Good Person” the people are covered with a raincoat, but there is no rain. Why?" “Rain in the soul,” answered Popkov. One of the painter’s most iconic paintings is “Autumn Rains. Pushkin." There were many variants of sketches after the trip to Mikhailovskoye: Pushkin was aiming a pistol at his image in the mirror, he was depicted falling, lying down. The best option took place when Victor felt like he was in the place of Alexander Sergeevich before the duel. Pushkin is pale, leaning on a column, standing with his back to the viewer, but facing eternity. Stairs down, flying autumn leaves, puddles of rain. The painting was the last one on the artist’s easel and, perhaps, the most poignant in its autobiographical nature.
“Tarusa. Sunny day. I was at the grave of Vatagin, Paustovsky, Borisov-Musatov. Holy graves. The memory of them is bright. What conclusion could I draw today? They were greedy for life. They wanted to live and understood perfectly well that there would be peace. They were not prudes about life. They loved life and lived it fully, both spiritually and physically, within the limits given to each by nature.
And now I understand that in order for you to be remembered with gratitude after your death, you need to have the courage to live in pain, suffering from joy, to love joy, laughter, health, everything beautiful, strong, living and everything that moves - the body, thought, soul.
And one more thing: each age has its own beauty of both body and spirit. But the most beautiful body is in youth, and the spirit is in old age. And you need to love the body when you are young and always think about the spirit, and in old age only about the spirit. Less whining, God, give health to both body and spirit. Teach us to rejoice while we live. Forget thoughts about violence against life.”
Almost 38 years have passed since the death of the artist, but scarlet carnations are still laid on the snow at his monument in Tarasovka. Many books, articles have been written about Viktor Popkov, films have been made, and television programs have been made. The paintings are stored in major museums and art galleries in Russia and abroad. Collectors consider it an honor to own Popkov's works. This is evidence of the grace that the artist put into his paintings during his lifetime. And the significance of this grace becomes more significant every year, because the love for the artist’s work multiplies in his works.
Yuri Popkov, artist
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