Victor Pivovarov

Yekaterina Dyogot, Dorothee Bienert, and Pavel Nedoma, Victor Pivovarov: Shagi mekhanika, Moscow: The State Tretyakov Gallery, 2004 (An oil painting version of this drawing is illustrated on p. 48.
Victor Pivovarov, Artist's statements, A-Ya, 1984, no. 6, pp. 18-23
Victor Pivovarov, Vliublennyi agent, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2001
Sonja and Angels, Prague: Gallery Rudolphinum, 1996

After graduating from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute in 1962, Victor Pivovarov began his artistic career as a successful illustrator and designer of children's books. Children's book illustration was an area of relative creative freedom in the Soviet Union, one that permitted artists to experiment without being constrained by the same dogmatic Socialist Realist restrictions imposed on painting as a form of "high" art. For many years, Pivovarov was the main artist of the children's magazine Veselye kartinki and also worked for the publishing house Znanie, illustrating books on popular science. Yurii Sobolev, artistic director of Znanie, introduced Pivovarov to major Soviet unofficial artists. Alongside book illustration, Pivovarov gradually started working on a conceptual series of drawings and paintings, linking his works to literary forms such as short stories, poems, diaries, and novels. The artist was particularly influenced by the group of Leningrad absurdist writers of the 1920s-1930s known as OBERIU. Pivovarov has pointed out that at the end of the 1960s the poems and stories of OBERIU's founding member, Daniil Kharms, started circulating in Moscow artistic circles in samizdat (self-published) form.

Stylistically, Pivovarov's work Body of Moscow Conceptual Art of the 1960s-1970s resembles an instruction manual and a child's drawing at the same time. The language of children's drawings was crucial to Pivovarov's creative practice. Also of great importance for the artist were the instruction manuals, billboards, and other bureaucratic or propagandistic tools that abounded in Soviet society. Pivovarov developed a type of picture incorporating the aesthetics of such forms that, as he has written, had the following characteristics: an economical, condensed, and detached way of expressing ideas; an impersonal style; and a quality of alienation, the sense of a distance between the author and his work. All of these features can be found in Pivovarov's Body of Moscow Conceptual Art. This drawing is a study for the artist's oil painting of 2002 with the same title.

In a humorous manner, Pivovarov fills in the internal parts of a human body with the names of the major Moscow artists associated with the nonconformist movement, as if to certify their permanent place in the history of Soviet unofficial art of the 1960s and 1970s. The work also serves as a commentary on Sotheby's 1988 auction in Moscow, which (in the artist's view) commercialized the previously "idealistic" unofficial art scene and established a kind of hierarchy based on its results.