ГОРОД КАК УРБАНИСТИЧЕСКАЯ СРЕДА В ПЕЙЗАЖАХ Н.Д. ГРИЦЮКА

Abstract

The article explores the urban landscape developed by a Novosibirsk artist N.D. Gritsiuk (1922–1976). The methodological tool we use is the typology of the urban landscape of the 1960s–1970s developed by researchers G.K. Cerlinca and L.I. Nekhvyadovich: the city as a historical and cultural unit; the city as a monument of architecture; the city as a sphere of human life; the city as an urbanistically industrial environment. The main part of the article analyses three thematic areas of Gritsiuk's urban landscape which include different interpretations. 1. Through analyzing the imagery, style, and semantics of the watercolors Homes Are Being Built (1960) and Novosibirsk. Kamensky Houses (1960) from the series Novosibirsk, it is established that Gritsiuk treats the city as a space in which there occur intense urbanization and industrial processes aimed both at improving the lives of townspeople and at the total displacement of the established provincial way of life (the city as an urbanistically industrial environment). 2. In the work A Moscow Tune (1966) there is a distinct harmonious interaction between gloomy, monolithic buildings and festive Kremlin based on the contrasts generated using color, texture, and collage. Thus in the landscape of a modern city, the ancient architecture and the standard modern buildings are not contrasted by the artist, but rather harmoniously interact (the city as a historical and cultural unit). 3. Gritsiuk creates a decorative, expressive urban landscape in Blue City (1962) which captures the active lives of townspeople (the city as a sphere of human life). Formal techniques acquire self-contained, meaningful value; exacerbate the decorative conventionality of the composition; and give it a distinctive, emotional, psychological quality. Dark, cold colors of the composition, cramped movement of cars and crowds, a jumble of buildings – all this underscores the dynamics of the rapid processes in the modern city. The man in this cold alienated urban environment is presented as a lonely ghostly being forced to dissolve into a meaningless chaotic movement of the big city. The article expresses the view that in Gritsiuk’s development of the image of the modern city, there are two nominal stages: 1) the romantic interpretation of the city (the late 1950s – early 1960s), conditioned on the trends in the postwar official Soviet painting; 2) the dramatic tones in the image of the city (the 1960s), revealing the downside of the industrial and urbanization processes focused on the unwitting destruction of nature and the displacement of well-established traditional way of life in the provinces. Changes in Gritsiuk’s imagery are due not only to the evolution of his artistic style, but also to external factors: political and social change in the Soviet society, new artistic trends, a general tendency towards isolation and self-absorbtion, and non-conformism.