Peter Belov

Thankfully, I have blog-friends out there who supply me with links and interesting factoids and jpegs and translated articles – stuff they think I would be interested in (whether it be Seamus Heaney, Elron Hubman’s evil empire, Tara Reid’s lushy boob-exposing exploits, or Stalin).

John sent me a couple of links to the work of the artist Peter Belov – a man I’d never heard of. I opened up the first one and gasped when I saw the image ( it’s the first painting below). I won’t presume to even say why I think it is a good and powerful painting – let’s just say I cannot stop looking at it. The subject matter itself, of course, endlessly fascinates me … but to see it, uhm, poeticized, dramatized like that … There’s such horror in it. The horror of the 20th century.

The second image John sent me is also below. The context is very important to get what the hell is going on in that one, although any Russian would understand immediately. The box all the little people are walking into is a box of White Sea Canal cigarettes. The building of the White Sea Canal was one of Stalin’s enormous “public works” projects – built entirely by forced labor from the massive prison system. 150,000 convicts worked on that canal and it is estimated that 100,000 of them died under the harsh working conditions. 100,000. It’s hard to even comprehend. Belov, obviously, comprehends.

His work immediately moved me. I want to see more. I want a whole book of his work.

Who is this guy? I’ve Googled him but there’s nothing there.

So then John sent me an article about Belov which he translated for me. Thanks, John!!

Check it out (I’ve put the translation below.). Personally, I love it that he was a set designer. When I found out this little fact that he was in the theatre it didn’t surprise me at all, based on the two pieces of art I’ve seen. There’s something deeply theatrical (and by that I mean mythic, archetypal, grandiose ) in those two images. He’s dramatizing something – which obviously is what so much of theatre (and set designing) is about. Sets are rarely just literal representations. They are meant to enlarge the theme of the director, they are meant to show underlying emotions or struggles. Even the most literal of sets – a kitchen, a living room – are carefully planned so as to illuminate the underlying messages, themes.

A director will say to a set designer in the first production meeting: “I really want to go for the feeling of being trapped. I want the audience to feel how suffocated these characters are.”

That’s what the set designer is told. The director will talk in emotions, will not say (at least not only say): “I want a sink here, a lamp there …” That kind of detail usually comes later. The FIRST thing the director says is: “Here is the FEELING I am going for” and it is up to the set designer to take that feeling and manifest it into some kind of a set.

Think of the transparent screens written into Glass Menagerie, where slides can show, but where you can also see through to the next rooms. The set is obviously supposed to be where the family LIVES – but it’s more than that. It’s supposed to also represent the poetic themes Tennesee Williams was going for.

These two dramatized images of Belov’s work show this sort of duality that you see in so many really good set designs. They are literal paintings, obviously – you can recognize things, objects are clear, the paintings are not impressionist, or abstract. But it’s also showing a story, and Belov’s feeling about the story.

It also amazed me that these paintings were basically just stacked up in his studio for years. He obviously couldn’t show them, or share them. But he HAD to paint them anyway.

Here’s the article about this man:

The Time Through Which We’ve Come
The Paintings and Sketches of Peter Belov.

Evg. Vasilev

Thirty-five of the fifty eight years of his life, Peter Belov devoted to the theater. After graduating in 1953 from the school / studio MAAT, he was the chief artist for a series of Moscow and other theaters. His last 14 years he spent at the Central Soviet Army Theater, where he worked on over 150 shows. The exhibition of Peter Belov’s paintings and sketches ‘The Time Through Which We’ve Come’, opening in the Literary Museum on Trubinkovsky street, is presenting pieces of his set decorations for the plays of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Rasputin [no, not that one – John], Virty, Visnevsky, Zorin, Ginsburg…

But these works constitute only a small part, and likely not the main part, of the exposition. Peter Belov was a remarkable painter and artist overall, and judging from the exhibition, it is precisely his non-theatrical paintings and drawings that were his focus. It is obvious that his paintings and drawings were not a secondary pastime, some sort of exercise for his brush technique he undertook in his spare time. The fact that the products of his easel were the most soulful, agonizing, and moral of his works is immediately apparent.

It is precisely through these works that the artist wished to describe himself, his times, and his relationship to them – stern, honest, imbued with pain and bitterness. Of course his works were never entered into the portfolio of official art, which they sharply contradicted, and therefore it is most likely that these were seldom seen during the life of the artist. They were stored in his studio, and only recently have seen by the wider world.

The works of Peter Belov shock with his strength, internal tension, visual expression and totally modern syle. The themes? They are at the core sharply social, dramatic, tragic, even when he paints “The Shroud of Nerl”, “Eternal Rest”, “Candle”, “Pasternak”, “The Consecration of Mikhail Bulgakov”, “Dandelions” , “Pleshcheev Lake”, “My Entire Life: an Auto-portrait”. Hard, confusing, and bitter was the life which he and his generation led. Even the autumn scenery seems sinister, dark, watchful.

Most particularly, this cruel, pitiless time is symbolized by several poster-like anti-Stalinist works – “Komendant of the Special Detail”, “1941”, “White Sea Canal”, “The Crows Have Come, or the April Plenum”. He did not paint Stalin — remarks Anatoly Smelyansky — but himself, his youth, all of us. The paintings of Peter Belov suddenly burst into the air of today’s culture, dissolving into it. “White Sea Canal”, or “1941”; have become divorced from the artist for many, as is befitting a beautiful poster or a folk song.

The exhibition is showing photographs, painting and printing materials — items of Peter Belov’s — from his family’s collection. They show the artist as a strong, deeply thinking, and shining personage, who, in the words of Sergei Yursky “was one of those phenomena whose existence made Perestroika and Glasnost inevitable.”