Oscar Rabin

Oscar Rabin played a central role as both an initiator and a driving force behind Moscow's unofficial art movement. Born in Moscow, Rabin studied at the Academy of Arts in Riga, Latvia, and later at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, from where he was expelled because of his unorthodox views. Although he started out as a more or less conventional painter in the realist manner and painted from nature, he soon became dissatisfied with the falsity of Soviet official art. Rather, he soon found significant inspiration in children's art. One time he took drawings by his little daughter done in crayon and enlarged them on canvas using a palette knife, trying to imitate the child's perception of form and space in his own work. He realized that the directness of vision and great expressiveness inherent in naïve children's art gave him the opportunity to express himself very vividly. Children's art influenced Rabin's angular distortions of forms and would continue to be a psychological and formal model for much of his oeuvre.

Instead of displaying officially-sanctioned images of Soviet prosperity, Rabin chose to depict the mundane and the everyday. Deemed "unofficial," the artist was not permitted to exhibit with the official Union of Artists, nor did he receive the government support available to official Socialist Realist artists. In the mid-1950s, he held a variety of jobs that had no connection to art, including working as a porter or loader of heavy construction materials from railway trucks, painting only in his spare time.

With his teacher, Evgenii Kropivnitsky, Rabin established the Lianozovo group in the late 1950s, an artistic community in a Moscow suburb that shared common ideas on art and held private exhibitions. In 1974, Rabin was one of the organizers of the infamous open-air show that came to be known as the "Bulldozer Exhibition," in which the Soviet authorities sent bulldozers and trucks to destroy the artworks.

Rabin's first solo exhibition took place in London's Grosvenor Gallery in 1965, although the artist was not permitted to attend the opening. The article "Dorogaia chechevichnaia pokhlebka" (Expensive Lentil Soup), which severely criticized Rabin for his "anti-Soviet" paintings, was published in the newspaper Soviet Culture. Always unpopular with the authorities, Rabin was arrested several times, and finally exiled from Russia in 1978. Although Rabin left Russia with his wife, fellow artist Valentina Kropivnitskaia, and their son as tourists, they were never allowed to return; after the family had been living in Paris for half a year, the Soviet consulate called them in to inform them of an edict stripping them of their Soviet citizenship.

Called the "Solzhenitsyn of Painting," Rabin depicted commonplace objects, depressing cityscapes, and religious symbols. The unflattering views of the surroundings in Rabin's paintings often served as commentary on the harshness of everyday Soviet life. Rabin borrowed various elements from Western modernist styles and forms, reprocessing them within his native context. He often imbued his works with a rich subtext of references to Soviet newspapers, bottles of vodka, and herring. Rabin continually explored these mundane subjects as a way of both undoing and invigorating moribund traditions. The result is often an ironic questioning and parodying of high art, either through the deliberate confrontation of the two aesthetic systems--Western and Soviet--within the same artwork, or through the direct substitution of "high" with "low."

Soviet mass culture of the 1960s offered a new vocabulary of image and perception that immediately distinguished Rabin from mere imitators of Western modernism. The characters, objects, and sensations of the Soviet urban environment provided cause for contemplation of the human condition. In all his stylistic diversions, Rabin was never to abandon the figure. His 1966 work Sniff the Eau de Cologne "Moscow" reconciled his modernist tendencies with his deep-seated need to derive stimulation from the observable world. In this painting, Rabin depicts a postcard with a happy-looking stereotypical Soviet couple, a kind of vulgar manifestation of Soviet mass culture, but combines it with an image of a Kremlin tower--sacred "iconic imagery" of the Soviet Union--in the background. The figures' emblematic, anonymous status, rather than their personalities, is emphasized. The reference to the consumer commodity of the Soviet home--the eau de cologne "Moscow"--adds an ironic commentary. The inscription "Bathhouse" refers to the popular public place and weekend activity of the Soviet people. Rabin contrasts the couple's happiness with their bleak surroundings. He also masterfully captures the hustle and bustle of the big city by suppressing any notion of illusionary perspective and depth, depicting a semi-abstract and almost kaleidoscopic cityscape while breaking down its faceted forms.

In the late 1960s, Rabin created a whole series of works depicting run-down cityscapes--depressing neighborhoods and the most sordid aspects of Soviet life, all represented in a grotesque manner--juxtaposed with beautiful flourishing roses hovering over a Moscow suburb. The series commented ironically on the middle-class concepts of beauty and happiness. In Rabin's words:

"In a certain sense my works would be my diary if I were a writer. In them, I transmit my impressions of life, but, of course, colored by my mood, that is to say in a very subjective way... It is simply that so-called social moments are interpreted by me in the same subjective way, they influence my mood and state of mind and, naturally, are also reflected to some extent in my pictures."

Rabin's buyers were mostly foreigners who lived in Moscow. Barrack with Newspaper (1969), an oil painting of a semi-dressed young woman seen through a fiery window, was purchased by Anatole Shub, a noted American specialist on Russia and the son of David Shub, author of a landmark biography of Lenin. In the late 1960s, Anatole Shub was a correspondent for the Washington Post in Moscow, and he purchased the work directly from Rabin in his studio on the outskirts of the city. But only weeks later, Shub was expelled by Russian authorities for unseemly behavior--although they never specified what constituted "unseemly." Forced to leave on forty-eight hours’ notice in May 1969, Shub left the Rabin (along with works by Lydia Masterkova and Vladimir Nemukhin) with the American Ambassador, Jacob Beam, who hung the "dissident" art in the official American residence, Spaso House, for all his American and Russian guests to see. When Ambassador Beam retired from Russia in 1973, he took Lady in the Window with him and had it delivered to the rightful owners, who were then living in Munich.