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 Vladimir Nikolaevich Nemukhin (born February 12, 1925)
He is one of the most renowned Russian postwar modernists, part of the so-called “Sixties generation.” In Soviet times he and his peers worked in opposition to the official style of Socialist Realism and their art came to be known as “underground art” or “Nonconformism.”
Nemukhin was born and raised in Moscow. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) he worked at a plant that produced technical instruments. In 1943, shortly after he decided to become an artist, he met the painter Petr Yefimovich Sokolov, who introduced him to the great avant-garde movements, including Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism. The young Nemukhin was very impressed by what he learned about modern art and soon started to produce more experimental works.
From 1952 to 1956 Nemukhin worked as an interior designer. In 1956 he met Oskar Rabin, another artist who played a key role in the development of the so-called “Second Russian avant-garde.” In the late 1950s a group of artists and poets emerged, whose primary meeting place was Rabin’s apartment in the barracks in the small village of Lianozovo (hence the name, “Lianozovo group”). Another beloved site was the Priluki village by the river Oka, where Nemukhin’s father was born and where the artist still has a summer house.
According to a fellow member of the Lianozovo group, the painter Lev Kropivnitsky, in the late 1950s – early 1960s Nemukhin experimented with abstract expressionism, but then went back to figuration and gradually developed his idiosyncratic style. The most well-known works by Nemukhin are undoubtedly semi-abstract still lives incorporating images of playing cards. “It is obvious that cards – either regular playing cards or the eternally mysterious and mystical cards used for divination – attract the artist not only because of their obscure, centuries-old magical appeal. Just like before, what matters the most to the painter is color.” (Lev Kropivnitsky, 1965).
In 1974 Nemukhin participated in the famous open-air exhibition of unofficial art, later called the “Bulldozer Exhibition” due to the fact that the police forces attacked the show using bulldozers. The incident provoked international condemnation and the authorities were forced to make concessions to the underground art community. Two weeks later they allowed the artists to exhibit their works in the Izmailovo Park, and the following year a number of pieces were shown in the beekeeping pavilion of the VDNKh exhibition complex. Eventually the Moscow City Committee of Graphic Artists (Gorkom Grafikov) was established, in order to provide a platform for the new avant-garde. Nemukhin was an active participant in the Gorkom’s projects. He organized multiple shows, including solo exhibitions of the seminal artists Vladimir Yakovlev, Vladimir Pyatnitsky and Anatoly Zverev.
In the late 1990s Nemukhin moved to Dusseldorf, Germany. A few years ago he returned to Moscow. In recent years he has been making sculptural homages to artists like Cezanne, Vladimir Veisberg, and Dmitry Krasnopevtsev. The forms of those sculptures reference geometric abstraction and Constructivism.
Works by Nemukhin can be found in the collections of major museums: the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Modern Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum (New York), the Ludwig Museum (Cologne) etc. About 100 pieces are included in the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art (Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey).
Bibliography:
Sergey Kuskov, Vladimir Nemukhin. 1992
K.& J. Bar-Gera, Wladimir Nemuchin. 1993.
M. Uralsky, Nemukhinskie monologi. 1999.
Information provided by Oleg Tsiselski whose source is the artist himself.
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