Visual Arts of Kyrgyzstan in the 60s-80s.
Integration of Artistic Cultures
The international integration of artistic cultures has deepened and expanded, based on the commonality of the economic and spiritual life of the peoples of our country.
This process, which has accelerated in pace, does not eliminate the differences between nations, which, as V. I. Lenin pointed out, "will persist for a very long time even after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on a global scale." The differences, determined by centuries-old historical factors, largely define the national specificity of artistic creativity, which, nevertheless, develops in interaction with the cultures of various peoples. "The richness of each national culture, its best traditions, the aesthetic charm of the national color of each people—all of this has poured into a powerful stream of socialist realism. And this art is now being created by a new historical community in our country—the Soviet people... The Soviet people represent an international union of all the working people of our country.
But this union is not without nationality; it unites various nations and ethnicities developing in conditions of fraternal cooperation and mutual assistance.
The flourishing of culture and art of each nation would be unthinkable without such cooperation, without interaction and mutual enrichment of national cultures, national languages, and national arts. Such interaction has been an essential condition for the formation of a unified socialist artistic culture, permeated with the international doctrine—the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.”
The profound social transformations over a short historical period allow the creative intelligentsia to pay closer attention to the meaning and nature of these transformations, to evaluate the past and present of their people from Marxist-Leninist positions.
In the 1960s, the self-awareness of each nation and ethnicity that makes up the Soviet people reached a high peak. This self-awareness, developing in dialectical connection with the principles of socialist internationalism, deepened the tendencies to form national artistic schools at a new ideational and creative level. This period is characterized by a more proportional development of all types of arts in the republic; however, painting remains the leading genre in terms of themes and artistic discoveries.
At the origins of Kyrgyz visual art stood remarkable artists such as S. Chuykov, V. Obraztsov, L. Kasatkin in painting, L. Ilyina in graphics, L. Mesarosh and O. Manuilova in sculpture, Z. Shtoffer and A. Arefyev in scenography.
These artists, who underwent a remarkable professional school, aimed the first Kyrgyz artists at high professionalism.
None of the first teachers saw manifestations of national uniqueness either in the naturalistic depiction of the ethnographic features of Kyrgyz life or in the stylization of folk art means of artistic expression. From the very beginning, visual art in Kyrgyzstan developed on the principles of realism.
