"Rose and Quail". Metamorphoses in the Graphics of A.V. Nikolaev (Usto Mumin) of the 1930s

Abstract

The heyday of the creative life of Uzbekistan, which fell on the 1920s - 1930s, was due not only to the lively activity of art groups, exhibitions and creative assignments, but also to the active work of artists in periodicals of various kinds. The graphic cycles published on the pages of newspapers and magazines significantly expand the established ideas about themes, plots and images in the work of the masters of Soviet Uzbekistan. Sometimes these publications remain the only documentary evidence of the existence of works that are now lost. This article is devoted to little-known graphics by A.V. Nikolaev, who worked under the name of Usto Mumin, its classification, description and establishment of links between the easel painting of the artist and graphic sheets, which he performed for such publications as “Maşala” (“Mash'ala”), “Muştum” (“Mushtum”) and “Pravda East". In the 1930s, the poetic contemplation inherent in the early painting of Usto Mumin gave way to the construction of a new social myth. At this stage, a significant role in the transformation of the artistic manner of the master was played by his departure in 1929 to Leningrad, where he devoted himself to work on book and magazine illustration. At the same time, the artist managed to find that delicate balance, which allowed, with a clear ideological component, to maintain the high artistic quality of the drawing. He filled the his works with images borrowed from earlier works. However, extracted from the mythologized context, they, as a rule, lost their semantic ambiguity, acquiring a mundane character. At the same time, the ruthless appeal of the master to such emblematic symbols for his painting of the 1920s as a rose and a quail suggests that the changes that took place in his work in the 1930s were not only external in nature, but were due to deeper reasons.