Life Has Become Better:The Lovely Lithographs of Leningrad.

"And so my child and I came to this place to meet him eye to eye and face to face. He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced. We never knew what friends we had until we came to Leningrad" - Leningrad, Billy Joel.

Billy Joel's Leningrad stands shoulder to shoulder with Sting's Russians ("the Russians love their children too") as one of the weakest and dimmest cold war songs ever written and as an anti-war anthem it's right up there with Culture Club's The War Song ("war is stupid and people are stupid and love means nothing in some strange quarters") in both its (at least well meaning) hippy sentiment and the lame doggerel that passes for a lyric.

Luckily, Billy Joel's Leningrad is not the chief cultural artefact of that city. In fact William Martin Joel was born in The Bronx in New York in 1949 and though he's shifted a few records in his time I'm willing to wager that he's probably still not a household name in either Moscow or St Petersburg (which is Leningrad's name now). Wikipedia research informs me he toured there post-glasnost in 1987 and it was meeting a clown on that tour that inspired the song but let's not let that get in the way of being rude about some of Joel's lyrics*.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari - Winter Swimming Pool:After Training (1963)

Culturally, Leningrad/St Petersburg is mostly associated with the city's vast Hermitage Museum which covers everything from Egyptian antiquities to jewellery and has paintings from a huge range of artists across a huge number of years. Titian, Giorgione, Raphael, Veronese, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Tintoretto, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Poussin, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Cezanne, Degas, Matisse, Derain, Morandi, and, of course, Picasso. They've all got work hanging in the huge complex that overlooks the Neva river.

I'd like to go and have a look round one day, I'd like to go to Russia - never been, but, for now, I'm making do with the Russian art that makes its way to London. The Calvert Foundation is the number one stop for all things Russian (as well as elsewhere in 'the new East') and last year Tate Modern put on a great Natalia Goncharova retrospective but I didn't expect Canonbury's Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art to chip in on the Eastern front. Italy not being Russia and all that.

But I was wrong. As I so often am. Last year's Lithography from Leningrad:Eric Estorick's Adventure in Soviet Art told of how the Estorick's founder, when in charge of London's Grosvenor Gallery, developed a passion for, and interest in, Soviet art that ran parallel with his love of modern Italian painting. Not one single name in the compact and bijou show was familiar to me but that didn't matter at all. There were some great works to look at.

Like Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari's Winter Swimming Pool:After Training from 1963. It's not atypical of the work on show. It's got a naive, or faux-naif, quality that lends an undeniable charm but, at the same time, its realist nature and celebration of the healthy pursuit of swimming speaks volumes about the way the Soviet Union was trying to portray itself at the time.

Boris Nikolaevich Ermolaev - Girlfriends (1962)

Propaganda takes many forms and the Soviet state was well aware of image management and its wielding of soft power may not have yielded much in the West. But as a method of keeping the USSR's own population on side it was quite masterful. These lithographs are very much at the soft end of soft power but still trains, boats, horses, honest peasant lifestyles lived in harmony with modern industry, and celebrations of health and efficiency abound.

Works like Valentin Yakovlevich Brodsky's University, Mendeleev Line remind me a little of Edward Bawden (whose show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery back in 2018 was another small gem) yet it's Edward Bawden wearing a ushanka, drinking some neat horseradish vodka, and nibbling on a sour cream blini. Cliched images of Mother Russia are never difficult for us lazy Westerners to conjure up and this show would have sated dilettantes of all things Soviet (like me) as much as it would fully fledged Russophiles.

Valentin Yakovlevich Brodsky - University, Mendeleev Line (1973)

Yuri Alekseevich Vasnetsov - Stolen Horses (1964)

Estorick visited Leningrad's Experimental Graphics Laboratory in 1960 and so taken was he with the art on show he bought a load of it. Hundreds of works. A year later, at the Grosvenor Gallery, he took charge of an exhibition called Lithographs by Twenty-seven Soviet Artists (fifteen of whom were represented at the Estorick). 

We're informed that it was "a sensation" and following years saw several more shows devoted to Soviet artists. This run of shows was the first time since the Russian Revolution that Western eyes could look upon contemporary Soviet art and, it seems, many were surprised how vital, modern, and human they were. Visitors, much like Billy Joel and Sting some decades later, seemed surprised to find out that Russians/Soviets loved their children too.

Which says a lot about the propaganda we in the West swallowed about the Russkies! When they weren't lining up to buy bread, driving around in beaten up old Ladas, and lying in the snow pissed out of their heads on vodka they were either paying extortionate prices for pairs of Levi jeans or making nefarious plans to nuke the entire West out of existence.

Irina Nikolaevna Maslennikova - Station Lights (1959)

Minei Illich Kuka - In the Study (1959)

Works like Irina Nikolaevna Maslennikova's Station Lights has something of the Japanese woodblock print about it, a touch of the Hokusai even, whereas Minei Illich Kuka's In the Study leaned more towards the European tradition. Soviet artists were looking both east and west and combining the two in much the same way as artists like Whistler and Monet had done some decades earlier. 

Some works, Aleksandra Natanovna Latash's Child with Eskimo Pie (wtf is an eskimo pie?) for example, look as if they could come from nowhere but Russia. Russia at any time in the last few hundred years too. It's almost too idyllic a portrayal. I'm not sure if Russians keep their biscuits in tins or not but if they do this is the kind of imagery you'd expect to find adorning those tins. Maybe it's from the side of a packet of frozen eskimo pie.

Aleksandra Natanovna Latash - Child with Eskimo Pie (1962)

Aleksandra Nikolaevna Yakobson - Scoreboard (1963)

Aleksandr Semenovich Vedernikov - On Makarov Embankment (1960)

Other lithographs are drenched in a light and colour that feels quite removed from the grey Moscow that once held sway over the public imagination. Latash's At the Beach manages to, once again, celebrate the human body and the benefits of both outdoor pursuits and team building while, at the same time, echoing modernist French forebears. 

Aleksandr Semenovich Vedernikov's riverine scene manages to look both functional and fun and the unusual vantage point the artist seems to have composed the image from gives it a slightly uncanny feel. Makes the viewer feel a bit of a voyeur.

Aleksandra Natanova Latash - At the Beach (1960s)

Sergei Maksimilianovich Steinberg - Leningard, Melka River (1957)

Sergei Maksimilianovich Steinberg - Barents Sea (1959)

Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari - Still Life on a Yellow Ground (1960)

Seagulls, borderline abstraction, still lifes, and further riparian reveries resonate as you rotate round the room. They're good but not as good as some of the other stuff. If this was an album you wouldn't release them as singles. But one work that really stood out for me, and I'm signing off on this one, is Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari's Nevsky Prospect Station. 

The train pulling on to the station, the couple in deep conversation on the platform, and the silhouetted workers traipsing over a footbridge across the track all add a very real feel to the scene, yet it's imbued with an almost magical quality. It's beauty found in the banal, marvel in the mundane, and, most of all, it's a love of life. Life's labours, life's loves, and life's losses. As Sting or Billy Joel could tell you those feelings aren't unique to London or New York but can, and do, happen just as regularly in Leningrad. Or St Petersburg. Or anywhere else. It's not where you are. It's where you're at. I was at the Estorick - and I was glad I was.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Skulyari - Nevsky Prospect Station (1963)

*I actually really like My Life. Sorry, Billy!