From Kharkiv to Istanbul: Creative Work of Mykola Kalmykov – Naci Kalmukoğlu

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the art of Mykola (Nikolay) Kalmykov, whose maturity and creative activity took place in historical and cultural realias of Turkey in the 1920s and 1940s. Years of artistic formation associated with Ukraine in the first decades of the 20th century are an integral part of his creative biography. A high level of academic training, knowledge of historical styles, obtained at Kharkiv Art School, on the one hand, on the other hand, admiration for the artists of the “Seven” group, of which M. Kalmykov was an active member, for applied forms of creativity, orientation towards European modernism as a space of creative freedom determined the artistic universalism of the novice. The modernist nature of Istanbul artworks of M. Kalmykov is undoubtable. At the same time, absorbing the plastic discoveries of French modernism, the artist existed in a special emotional sphere, where there was a place for aesthetic research in the art of past epochs. In this dichotomous fusion of impressionistic worldview and passeism, most of the custom-made things were solved – mise-en-scenes for murals and theatrical scenery, historical canvases and still lifes. Exclusively pictorial ambitions were embodied in depiction of nude figures, in portraits of relatives and friends, in hundreds of landscape scenarios, the main role in which was assigned to sunlight. Painting as such, attractive in itself, related M. Kalmykov to A. Grishchenko, the author of the plastic concept “color dynamos”. Construction of a pictorial plot on the ratio of color masses, structural framework of which was set by horizontal and vertical axes of free brushstrokes are its basic features. Creative biography and personality of Mykola Kalmykov are widely known to Turkish specialists, collectors and art lovers. Discovery of art of Mykola Kalmykov by their Ukrainian colleagues is still ahead.