Nikolai Ivanovich Andronov (; 30 April 1929 – 10 November 1998) was a Soviet and Russian painter, muralist, graphic artist and teacher. He was one of the founders of the severe style (), the reformist movement in Soviet painting of the late 1950s and 1960s. His Rafters (1960–1961) is usually described as a manifesto of that movement.
Rafters was among the paintings attacked by Nikita Khrushchev at the Moscow Manege exhibition of December 1962. Andronov was expelled from the Moscow branch of the artists' union and spent several years outside the official exhibition system. From the mid-1960s he worked mainly in and around the village of Ferapontovo in Vologda Oblast. The village provided the subjects for a cycle of paintings that he continued for more than thirty years, and the mineral-bearing stones and clays that he ground into pigments. He also completed more than twenty works of monumental art, among them the mosaic on the facade of the Oktyabr cinema in Moscow (1967) and Man and the Press in the Izvestia building (1978), for which he shared the USSR State Prize in 1979. Andronov was made an Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1978 and a People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 1996, and was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts in 1997.
Life
Early years and training Andronov was born in Moscow on 30 April 1929, the son of the mathematician Ivan Kuzmich Andronov (1894–1975). During the Second World War he was sent to a village on the Sura River, his mother's birthplace. This was his first experience of the Russian countryside, which became the main subject of his art.
He attended the Moscow Secondary Art School from 1943 to 1948, where he studied under L. I. Solovyov. In 1948 he entered the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad and worked in the studio of Rudolf Frentz. In 1952 he married the painter Natalya Yegorshina, moved back to Moscow, and completed his studies at the Surikov Institute in the studio of Dmitry Mochalsky, graduating in 1954. From 1954 to 1956 he lived in Kuybyshev (now Samara) and worked in the art workshops attached to the Kuybyshev hydroelectric station, and from 1956 to 1958 he taught at the Moscow Textile Institute.
Andronov had exhibited since 1951 and joined the Union of Artists in 1958. He began working in monumental art in 1960, and in the same year travelled in Siberia. In 1961 he took part in the exhibition of the group "Nine", together with his wife and seven other painters — Lev Berlin, Boris Birger, Vladimir Weisberg, Mikhail Ivanov, Kirill Mordovin, Mikhail Nikonov and Maria Favorskaya. A reduced version of the exhibition was shown in Leningrad in 1962. He also showed with the "Group of Eight" (1962), the "Group of Seven" (1966) and the "Group of Six" (1973). Nikolay Smirnov places him among the "left-wing MOSKh", the informal tendency inside the Moscow union that sought, from the 1960s to the 1980s, to revive the art of the 1920s and 1930s that had been suppressed under Stalin.
The Manege affair Rafters was shown in public for the first time at the exhibition "30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists", held in the Manege in December 1962. Together with Pavel Nikonov's Geologists, it became one of the main targets of Khrushchev's criticism and of the press campaign that followed, in which Andronov was denounced as a formalist. On 24 December 1962 he spoke at a session of the Ideological Commission of the CPSU Central Committee. He defended the artist's professional right to judge art independently, and accused the leadership of the RSFSR Union of Artists and of the Academy of Arts of political intrigue against young artists. He was expelled from MOSKh for two years and reduced to candidate membership of the RSFSR Union of Artists. The art historian Alexander Morozov wrote that Andronov's refusal to recant kept him at the centre of the campaign and cost him his union membership. His daughter, the painter Maria Andronova, remembered that he was pressed to destroy Rafters and admit his mistake; he refused, and left for Ferapontovo. For several years afterwards he was almost entirely excluded from exhibitions. Smirnov describes the episode as the start of a four-year "internal emigration", after which Andronov's professional standing was restored in 1966.
In 1968 Andronov was among the signatories of the "Letter of 120" in defence of Alexander Ginzburg, for which he received a severe party reprimand.
Ferapontovo Andronov's subject matter changed decisively in 1963, when industrial themes were replaced by village scenes, still lifes and self-portraits. That year, according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, he also made his first visit to Ferapontovo in Kirillovsky District, Vologda Oblast. He returned regularly and bought a house in the neighbouring hamlet of Uskovo, where he spent most of each year. He also travelled to Kostroma Oblast in 1965 and, in 1966, to the Northern Dvina and the Onega. Morozov wrote that over the years Andronov came to see Ferapontovo as "his spiritual homeland", where he found not oblivion or repose but "purification by truth".
Later career and teaching Andronov's first showings abroad came in the touring exhibition "Russian Art from Ancient Times to the Present" (Paris, 1967–68; Prague and Bratislava, 1970–71), and he resumed work on public commissions from 1967. His first solo exhibition was held in 1974 at the Abramtsevo museum-estate, near which he and Yegorshina kept a dacha and a studio. From 1976 to 1988 he headed the monumental painting section of MOSKh and sat on its presidium. Morozov remembered that colleagues would ask Andronov to show censors around exhibitions that were being prepared, because he was better than anyone at blunting their vigilance and saving works that were due to be removed.
In 1992 a studio of easel painting under Andronov opened at the Surikov Institute, with Yuri Shishkov as his assistant. On his initiative a department of composition was founded, which he headed, and, contrary to the institute's usual practice, students were admitted to the studio in their first year. Teaching there was built around composition and combined daily practical work with the study of theory and of the history of art. The studio also drew criticism: its students were said to have taken over the devices of the severe style mechanically from their professors, and to have let subject matter give way to formal solutions.
Andronov died in Moscow on 10 November 1998 and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery.
Work
Severe style The critic Alexander Kamensky coined the term "severe style" for the large paintings on industrial subjects that Andronov's generation was producing; the artists themselves, Maria Andronova recalled, made fun of the label. In the late 1950s Andronov built a new pictorial language on the legacy of the Knave of Diamonds group. The flattened space and the contrasting patches of colour in still lifes and portraits such as Books and At the Round Table (both 1962) echo its manner directly. Between 1957 and 1961 he painted several works on industrial subjects: The Kuybyshev Hydroelectric Station (1957), The Assembler (, 1958) and Rafters (, 1960–1961). In these he combined the painterly force of the Knave of Diamonds with devices of the OST group (Society of Easel Painters): figures arranged like a frieze, a strong emphasis on the rhythm of the picture plane, and contrasts in scale between foreground and background.
Both The Assembler and Rafters are in the Tretyakov Gallery. The gallery describes the first as a new reading of the formal portrait — the worker stands high on scaffolding, not at work but posing for the painter — and the second, a canvas 210 by 275.5 cm, as a collective image of a generation, its young log-drivers shown full length and facing the viewer. Morozov traced Andronov's language to several sources: the monumental and decorative composition of OST and the Knave of Diamonds; the Moscow school of the early twentieth century, and Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in particular; Cubism and the "dark" easel painting of the Vkhutemas; and, above all, the monumental art of medieval Rus'.
Village cycle, interiors and self-portraits
From the mid-1960s the figures in Andronov's paintings stopped dominating the space and merged with it. The world they inhabit is closed in on itself and does not address the viewer, as in November (1964–1965) and The Lake. A Hunter's Family (1965). Colour remained active, but it was held within a single earthy range. From the late 1960s the palette grew more restrained and the paint layer denser, and the compositions became more structural. Their construction recalls medieval fresco painting and the painter's experience as a muralist: the landscape is seen from above, the horizon is almost eliminated, and the space develops in tiers from bottom to top rather than into depth — Farewell (1965–1967), Fire (1967–1973), Winter Night. Dogs (1970), Night (1987).
The theme of village conscripts being sent off to military service occupied Andronov from 1965 to 1995. Morozov saw these paintings as the symbolic high point of the drama of Russian life: a countryside that endlessly sends its young men off "for the ever-multiplying battlefields". For the critic Lev Mochalov, the Farewell paintings were the artist's considered answer to the romantic ardour of Rafters. Dmitry Sarabyanov, who wrote the first monograph on Andronov, called his manner "lyrical monumentalism" and linked it to the metaphysical concerns of post-avant-garde groups of the 1920s such as Makovets.
Andronov's method rested on a balance between depicted space and the picture plane — the flat surface of the canvas itself. This balance is clearest in his interiors, where the architecture provides the framework of the composition, while mirrors and windows break it up with reflections and blur the border between the room and the view, and between reality and its reflection — Interior with a Window. Mirrors (1968), Interior (1975), Full Moon (1993), Shadow (1995). He painted self-portraits throughout his life. Those of the 1960s are grotesque — Self-portrait with a Saw (1964), Self-portrait in the Bathhouse (1966–1967), Self-portrait with a Cockroach (1969) — and many of them include handwritten texts, a device drawn from both the lubok and the Russian avant-garde. From the 1970s he showed himself increasingly detached, in a museum or at work. Around 1967 he painted at least two self-portraits in a coffin; one of these, Self-portrait in a Coffin (1967), is in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In every self-portrait, Morozov wrote, the painter "appears to make a kind of diagnosis for himself. And for us. And for our age". Morozov compared their psychological consistency to the portraits of Perov, Kramskoy and Repin.
Materials and technique Following the example of the painter Nikolai Chernyshev, Andronov began at Ferapontovo to work with mineral pigments, known as "earths"; he used them first in works on paper and later in oil. He collected coloured stones and clays there and ground them into powders using the techniques of medieval icon painters, "in search of the natural basis of life". Sarabyanov described him laying the canvas on the floor, turning it and smearing the paint, so as to let the material speak for itself. The art historian Vitaly Manin considered Autumn Landscape with a Horse by a Shed (1970) among the finest results. Andronov had the highest regard for the frescoes that Dionisius painted in the Ferapontov Monastery. Vzdornov observed that they left no obvious trace in his painting, but that their indirect influence on it was enormous. The artist gave the material a wider meaning: "Faith in the material, the attempt to find its favour towards the artist, seem to me the most spiritual moment of our craft."
Monumental art