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.
Contemporary Problems of Art Theory and Practice
The programmatic realistic reflection of the life of the people has conditioned a high degree of personal responsibility for the truthfulness of the artistic image, which, while carrying individual specificity, embodies general socio-psychological traits born of the socialist era.
Contemporary problems of art theory and practice have concerned and continue to concern artists and subsequent generations; however, the principles of realism, which were laid down by the founders, are so strong that they test all new trends, although they underwent some changes in the 60s-70s in the works of a number of young painters who addressed the tasks of national painting primarily with new means of visual language. Besides the thematic-content aspect, the specifically professional side of art is equally important—composition building, color and coloristic solutions, attitude towards space, rhythm, etc. After all, it is precisely these features, along with the commonality of content, that allow one to easily distinguish the works of various national schools.
The departure of the younger generation from the established traditions of Kyrgyz painting, which created paintings exclusively based on sketch material, opposed two generations in a creative sense. The new compositional-spatial and painterly-coloristic solutions were initially successful, but gradually, repeating from painting to painting, they turned into a kind of stamp, especially sharply manifested in the works of imitators. The established situation forced most young artists to look anew at the achievements of Kyrgyz painting of the previous period, to compare them with qualitative changes, to critically reflect on their own achievements and mistakes, in order to make corrections without changing their established aesthetic views in the sphere of artistic form. The abstractness of the theme had to be fertilized by live observation and working from nature—that is, to take into account the most important lesson taught by the artists of the older generation.
The content of an artistic work is profoundly connected with the problem of the national, while the means of visual language were, in essence, international, as they were formed over hundreds of years among various peoples in interaction.
The elements of form that were associated with the aesthetic views of the Kyrgyz were applied exclusively in cases where the theme of the work reflected the history or the traditional, perhaps preserved for centuries, way of life of the Kyrgyz people.
The problems of the relationship between the national and the international in the content and form of a pictorial work, as well as the problem of individual creative self-expression, were harmoniously resolved by the founding artists, as they relied on professionalism in its academic understanding, which included, in addition to mastering realistic drawing and precise tonal development in painting, mandatory work from nature and studying life in a broad social aspect. Such a method of creativity revealed the full measure of the talent and social maturity of the artists, the individual character of their vision of life, and the originality of their gift. The theme of their creativity, with rare exceptions of addressing the history of the Kyrgyz people, was contemporary life from the perspective of its socialist content, as well as the life of nature, which was often resolved in unity.
All these problems remained relevant in Kyrgyz art, but in the 60s-80s they were addressed somewhat differently.
Firstly, there was a sharp increase in interest in folk art, both oral-poetic, musical, and visual; secondly, artists experienced a strong influence from Kyrgyz literature, music, and cinema, which addressed similar creative tasks in their own way.
This circumstance expanded the understanding of national cultural heritage and compelled artists to seek new themes and new means of visual language.
Ideological and Creative Tasks
The poetic contemplativeness of the image, the finest aestheticism of the artistic form, characteristic of the founders of Kyrgyz painting, began to combine with the formulation of acute social problems, striving for figurative generalization of various phenomena of the past and their connections with the contemporary life of the Kyrgyz people.
Due to the new ideological and creative tasks, which had both individual (search for their own themes and means of artistic expression) and general, historically conditioned character, various stylistic trends arose and developed simultaneously in Kyrgyz painting, sometimes interacting, connected with different formal-figurative tendencies. This diversity was primarily conditioned by the traditions of schools that passed through three generations: the generation formed in the pre-war years, when the foundations of Kyrgyz visual art were laid; the generation that received specialized education in the late 40s-early 50s, when preference was given to "neo-academism" in the theory and practice of Soviet art; and finally, those artists whose professional training took place in the late 50s-early 60s, when interest in national artistic traditions, including folk art, and Soviet art of the 20s-30s sharply increased.
Such a picture is characteristic of all Soviet visual art. In a more vivid and acute form, the peculiar "collision" of generations manifested itself in the republics where visual art had centuries-old traditions that expanded the stylistic frameworks of socialist realism. All this activated interest in national artistic heritage, even in those republics where, due to various socio-historical reasons, ornamentalism and utilitarian decorative creativity mainly developed.
Here, the process of mastering artistic traditions, associated with a broad understanding of the aesthetic experience of the people, manifested itself in thematic-content aspects to a greater extent than in the formal-plastic stylization that took place in other national schools (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian, etc.).
In Kyrgyz painting of the 60s-80s, three main lines developed with more or less clear directionality, and these tendencies influenced each other to varying degrees.
The main traditional line in the painting of the 60s was developed by the works of S. Chuykov, G. Aitiev, S. Akylbekov, A. Ignatiev, who worked exclusively on a natural basis to create images of deep democratic content. It should be emphasized the significant achievements of S. Chuykov and S. Akylbekov in the development of a tonal coloristic system—the main means of creating a poetic artistic image in their work. During these years, they created beautiful landscape works in terms of image depth and perfection of artistic form, in which they addressed the problems of compositional and painterly plasticity, musically organized rhythm of linear movement into depth and width of spatial plans, interconnected by precise color and tone brush strokes.
G. Aitiev in the 60s created alongside excellent studies in terms of execution a number of landmark landscape compositions, gradually abandoning their genre interpretation.
As for A. Ignatiev, while working within this trend, he sought to resolve figurative tasks with more candid attention to the texture of the painterly surface, the spontaneous beauty of pure color, and the rhythm of broadly applied strokes with evident brush marks.
This preference manifests itself in all his works, whether it be a portrait, landscape, or thematic composition. And while S. Chuykov, G. Aitiev, and S. Akylbekov attached great importance to a particular state of nature in their landscapes, A. Ignatiev in his works of the 40s-50s, showing interest in the state of nature as the most powerful means of conveying mood, gradually abstracted from the real reflection of the states of nature in favor of plastic-coloristic characteristics of natural realities.