Dynamics of nostalgic images: the case of Pavel Leonov

Abstract

The article examines the work of the Soviet artist Pavel Leonov, one of the most famous naive artists of the 20th century, in the context of the nostalgic perception of his works by today’s audience. The nostalgic perception of Leonov's works is associated not only with the plots and themes (i.e. idealized, utopian Soviet reality), but also with the author's artistic method itself, based on the idea of invention and construction. This "constructivist" approach of Leonov correlates with the widespread DIY practices in Soviet culture, which today are also part of nostalgic imagery. A similar nostalgic effect characterizes a number of other artistic projects in contemporary Russian art. In order to study Leonov’s artworks, it is proposed to consider naive art, to which they are usually attributed, as a discursive phenomenon, rather than as an artistic style or movement, and to study individual artistic phenomena not through the identification of their "naivety", but by focusing on a specific artistic strategy as a manifestation of the historical and cultural context. Such an approach is effective, since the diversity of stylistic features of the works of various naive artists makes it difficult to single out naive art as a proper stylistic phenomenon. The formation of the discourse of the "naive" in art and culture has a long history traced back to the aesthetics of Romanticism, which allows us to confidently point out the ideological and axiological nature of this discourse in Soviet and post-Soviet art criticism, and how it was constructed, inheriting romantic ideas about naivety as simplicity and naturalness. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identification of "construction" as an important principle of Pavel Leonov’s artistic strategy and as the driving force behind the nostalgic effect of his works, noted by contemporary viewers.