JOIN USOscar Yakovlevich Rabin, who turns 90 next year, is often called as ‘Solzhenitsyn in painting’ for his portrayal of the mood of the Russian society during the 1960s and 1970s.
Recognised as one of the most gifted and prolific painters of his generation, Rabin is also remembered as a former de facto leader of the Soviet non-conformist art.
Rabin was one of the principal organisers of an important underground exhibition in a Moscow suburb way back in September 1974. Now famously called the ‘bulldozer exhibition’, the outdoor event lasted no more than four hours by the time it was brutally brought down by the authorities who used dump trucks, bulldozers and water-spraying trucks to eject the participating Russian contemporary artists, trampling upon their paintings installed on makeshift stands.
Decades later, Rabin remembered how “the bulldozer was a symbol of an authoritarian regime just like the Soviet tanks in Prague,” and how the exhibition was prepared as a political act against the oppressive regime, rather than an artistic event. “I knew that we’d be in trouble, that we could be arrested, beaten. There could be public trials. The last two days before the event were very scary; we were anxious about our fate. Knowing that virtually anything can happen to you is frightening.”
The event was widely publicised in the Western media, much to the embarrassment of the Soviet authorities. Reporting on the event, The New York Times painted a grim picture: “Artists who protested were roughed up and at least five were arrested. An unknown number of angry spectators were taken to a nearby police station… Some of the artists, the organisers said, have had works displayed in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and Rome. But they have not been allowed to exhibit formally here… because their styles do not conform with Moscow’s art doctrine, socialist realism.”
Rabin was among the many artists who were arrested in the aftermath of the bulldozer exhibition. In 1978, he, along with his wife and son, was granted a two-way visa to visit the West and return; but on June 23, he was stripped of his citizenship by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Having been forced to leave his own country, Rabin had to adjust to the new life in Paris. The work he made in his adopted home often merged his memories of life in the USSR with the realities of living in France. “The Russia-themed pictures that I sometimes paint even now are not nostalgic. These are pictures-cum-recollections — just a memory about the past. For no matter what sort of past it was, you cannot erase it from your heart.”
Dramatic absurdity
Orphaned very early in his life, Rabin went on to develop a unique and deeply individual way of seeing the world. From the beginning of his artistic career, he employed everyday objects and scenes in his art; the barracks, fences, communal kitchens, withered snow, icons, clothes line, cats, newspapers, churches, bottles, fish, cats, crosses, teapots, road signs, icons and advertisements and, of course, a bottle of vodka frequently visited his canvas. All these objects and paraphernalia symbolically represented Soviet material life and its dramatic absurdity, which was for many years the central theme of Rabin’s creativity.
This was also in direct contrast to the heroic symbolism of the Soviet everyday life as represented by many other artists. Rabin’s art presented a different vision of reality, with an evocative combination of both squalor and splendour. His landscapes, still-lifes and interiors presented deliberately distorted perspectives and distinctly social-critical tones to highlight the unkindness of modern man’s environment and condition.
Critics have also pointed how Rabin developed an eminently personal style by tightly uniting reality and imagination; how through his emotionally saturated methods, he could interweave different genres, artistic devices, elements of collage and assemblage into his paintings; and how he could provide “a quasi-mystical dimension to his work which resonate the profundities of the human condition.”
On his part, Rabin has always been quite candid about his motives for painting. “In my painting, I experience the pleasure from the process itself, mixing and laying down the colours, enjoying their brightness and dimness, the subtle and broad brush strokes, their smell. Then, I want to express sorrow, happiness, hate, anger, love, thoughts about life and people. I want to capture life and communicate it through my own feelings. To achieve this, for symbols, I use normal objects around me. Their meaning in painting is different than in real life.”
Curiously, one of the paintings Rabin painted in 1963 was ‘Taj Mahal’ (27 x 35 7/8 in (68.7 x 91 cm). It has the typical distortions which mark his style, but also has a bottle of vodka in the foreground! The painting was auctioned by Christie’s (June 2, 2014, London) for GBP 32,500.
Late recognition
Once a leading spirit among dissident artists, and “the undisputed leader of the nonconformists and the only man capable of uniting the majority of them in times of crisis,” Rabin (and others of his ilk) found recognition in Russia and worldwide only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His Russian passport was restored to him as recently as 2006; but Rabin continues to reside in France.
In autumn 2008, the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, held an anniversary solo exhibition of Oscar Rabin, as one of a series of shows titled ‘The Return of the Master’, highlighting the work of artists who were born, educated and came to fame in the USSR, but later left the country for different reasons.
“Oscar Rabin’s works occupied a well-deserved place in the rooms of the Krymsky Val halls of the Tretyakov Gallery, where a new exhibition of 20th-century art was installed in 2007,” says a note from the famed gallery. “Rabin’s art is a part of the cultural legacy of 20th-century Russian art, a fragment without which any objective picture of the time would be incomplete.”