Monumental Painting of the Kyrgyz People
Creative Team on a Breakthrough to Kyrgyzstan
The period under consideration is a time of intense development in Kyrgyzstan of all forms of monumental art, including monumental painting, which is an essential component of new architectural and artistic ensembles, fulfilling social functions defined by Lenin's plan for monumental propaganda. It embodies the content of the multifaceted Soviet reality, labor, spiritual and moral issues, and the fundamental ideas of socialist society.
Monumental painting began to actively enter the environment of cities and villages in Kyrgyzstan in the 1960s, when Soviet architecture shifted to mass industrial urban development. At that time, the contradictions between the new rational architecture and the familiar techniques of monumental art, which had been reduced in the 1940s and 1950s to the level of superficial decorative embellishment, became sharply felt. The new direction of industrial architecture, with its unambiguous technical standard of form, immediately posed new compositional challenges for architects. In the early stages, monumental art struggled to fit into the new architectural forms: the concept of simplicity and conciseness was established in it, seemingly in line with the architecture.
This growing pain, characteristic of all monumental art in the country, also reflected on Kyrgyz monumental painting of the 1960s. The first attempts to enrich the interiors and facades of public buildings in the capital, cities, and regions of Kyrgyzstan with means of monumental-decorative art were made in the 1960s by a group of professional monumental artists who came to Frunze. These were graduates of the V. I. Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry: A. Voronin, V. Kapustin, and V. Konstantinov.
The creative team in this composition did not have the opportunity to immediately engage in large-scale comprehensive works. They considered their task to satisfy the need for new modern interiors that corresponded to the spirit of the times and new aesthetic tastes. However, they had to test their skills on old and relatively insignificant buildings in terms of their social role, which were hastily undergoing redesign and reconstruction in a modern style. These artists began to apply new materials and techniques for the art of the republic in the decoration of buildings—sgraffito, tempera painting, embossing, mosaic from ceramic tiles, and color plasticity. Alongside works of monumental-decorative nature, they created dozens of works in the decorative design direction, which also had a positive significance in accumulating the professional experience necessary for the further development of Kyrgyz monumental art.
