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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN’S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE

60 Years of Research

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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN’S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE 60 Years of Research

MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN'S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE

60 Years of Research

Moscow 2023

УДК 75–03 ББК 85.1

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. 60 years of research. – M. Foundation for the Preservation and Digital Transformation of World Culture; Raduga Publishing, 2023. – 344 pp.,: illustrations (538). The book describes the history, origins, development and current and future applications of the artist Mihail Chemiakinʼs comparative research from the 1960s to the digitization of the project. ISBN 978-5-6050367-2-2

Chief editor: Sarah H. de Kay Project manager: Alexey Abakumov Executive editor: Elizaveta Tilova Technical editor, copy editor: Vera Kalmykova Compilation: Sarah H. de Kay, Olga Sazonova, Elizaveta Tilova, Alexey Abakumov Archival work: Sarah H. de Kay, Olga Sazonova, Daria Lobanova, Anna Stadnikova, Elizaveta Gubanova, Ekaterina Topler, Elizaveta Tilova. Layout and design: Vladimir Kiselev The book includes photographs by A. Abakumov (pp. 2, 187), P. Bernard (p. 17), T. Gord (p. 303), R. Iskhakov (pp. 330, 331), M. Jarnoux (p. 12), M. Kerzhentsev (p. 116), J. Levin (p. 66), A. Lvov (pp. 78, 198), S. Lyubimov (pp. 6, 120, 121, 186, 187, 340, front cover), R. Modlen (p. 64), I. Novikov-Dvinsky (p. 334), Yu. Rostochkin (p. 62), O. Sazonova (p. 317), A. Zolnikov (pp. 149, 161, 200, 201, 227, 241). Photographs and archival materials from the collections of Mihail Chemiakin, Sarah H. de Kay and the Mihail Chemiakin Centre are used in this book. The bookʼs cover and pages 1 and 3 include the logo of Mihail Chemiakinʼs «Musée Imaginaire» designed by calligrapher Sabina Aliyarova based on the handwriting of Mihail Chemiakin. © Reproduced per a license agreement with UPRAVIS ___________ © M. Chemiakin 2023 Texts © A. Abakumov, J. Audigier, M. Chemiakin, S. H. de Kay, W. Fischer, L. Gunina, J. Isaacs, V. Ivanov, L. Manovich, S. Mazurova, E. Muenk, A. Reus, S. Rukhlya, I. Samofeev, O. Sazonova, F. Suleimanova, K. Svetlyakov, E. Tilova, V. Zheltov, V. Zimakov, 2023 Translations © Margaret Wise Petrochenkov, Sarah H. de Kay, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2023

ISBN 978-5-6050367-2-2

Table of Contents Mihail Chemiakin, A Note to the Reader .................................................................................................... 7 Andrey Reus, Preface ............................................................................................................................ 8 Sarah H. de Kay, Alexey Abakumov, Elizaveta Tilova, Musées Imaginaires: The Evolution of an Idea and the Creation of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire from its Origins to Digitalization ............................................................................................................. 10 Olga Sazonova, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire as a Result of his Research Activity ..................................... 24 Lev Manovich, On Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée imaginaire ............................................................................. 32 Ilya Samofeyev, Alexey Abakumov, The Digital Transformation of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire ................ 36

60 Years of Research Early Studies, 1963–1971

First research work .............................................................................................................................. 44 Metaphysical Synthesism ....................................................................................................................... 62

Paris Period, 1971–1980

Analysis and Transformations ................................................................................................................. 66 Artists of Our Time .............................................................................................................................. 74 Wolfgang Fischer, Transformations ......................................................................................................... 76

American Period, 1981–2007

Jean Audigier, Edward Muenk, Sanctuaries of Time .................................................................................... 90 Mihail Chemiakin, Metaphysical Head .................................................................................................... 94 Spheres in Art Exhibition ..................................................................................................................... 104 Vladimir Zimakov, Forcing us to Look at Art in a New Way ........................................................................... 114 Images of Death in Art Exhibition ........................................................................................................... 122 The Hand in Art Exhibition .................................................................................................................. 136 Monsters in Art Exhibition ................................................................................................................... 150 Metaphysical Heads and Busts ............................................................................................................... 162 Blurred Images in Art Exhibition ............................................................................................................ 174

Chamousseau Period, 2007 — present

185

Shoes in Art Exhibition ........................................................................................................................ 190 Cries in Art Exhibition ........................................................................................................................ 202 Chairs in Art Exhibition....................................................................................................................... 216 Cuts in Art Exhibition ......................................................................................................................... 228 Children in Art Exhibition .................................................................................................................... 248 The Automobile in Art Exhibition ........................................................................................................... 264 Letters, Words, Text in Art Exhibition ...................................................................................................... 276 Clothing in Art Exhibition .................................................................................................................... 292 Swaddled Figures in Art Exhibition ......................................................................................................... 306 Stairs in Art Exhibition........................................................................................................................ 320

Chronology of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée imaginaire

342

Mihail Chemiakin. Château de Chamousseau, France, 2023

A Note to the Reader B

ack in the 1960s I began collecting, comparing and analyzing reproductions of works of fine and ritual art — Metaphysical Heads, Metaphysical Figures, — with the goal of synthesizing what these works by different masters had in common, understanding the essence of the image, and on that basis I hoped to create a system of “signs” in the art of the 20th century. Over the years, my research and the number of topics I explored broadened, along with the development of my own artistic work and the broadening of my analytical visual experience. It is important to emphasize that this research was and continues to be purely visual, independent of place and time. I have always been less interested in who created the work that interests me, or when it was created, than in the linear, rhythmic, compositional, coloristic and conceptual similarities of different authors, regardless of where and when they worked. In the late 1990s it became clear that my research and the material I had collected and organized might be useful and interesting to others. Scholars, first scientists, then philosophers, theologians, historians, writers, and art historians approached me with requests to work with my materials. Some of these colleagues and students needed more detailed information about the images collected in order to pursue their own work. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to obtain precise information about certain artists and their work. In recent years I have made efforts to collect and conserve information on the images in my research, and for exhibitions and publications I try to provide more historical information. But, again, I stress that exhaustive historic documentation of this or that work is not the primary goal of my research. Mikhail Bakhtin, the author of a brilliant analysis of medieval carnival culture as seen in the work of Francois Rabelais, wrote, “The image is always broader and deeper (than the historical character upon whom it is based), it is connected to tradition and has its own aesthetic logic independent of the allusion.” This method allows the reader to avoid “foolish historicity.” Bakhtinʼs phrase expresses the essence of my analytic method. In this book you will see captions and notes to the images, but at the same time I ask you not to focus on the imagesʼ “entourage,” but rather to concentrate on the visual analysis I have constructed.

Mihail Chemiakin 7

Preface I

met Mihail Chemiakin and his wife Sarah in 2015. I was amazed by the sculptural group “Children — Victims of the Sins of Adults” on the Bolotny Square in Moscow. And I decided to make this sculpture the main theme for the “Folk Dance Festival” that I organize in honor of my grandmother and mother — Natalia and Tatiana Reus. I needed the artistʼs permission, and I received it after meeting with Mihail and Sarah in the lobby of the Metropol hotel. I invited Chemiakin to this festival in April of 2016, so he and Sarah came. It became a grand event for Chelyabinsk. Aside from the festival, Mihail brought an exhibition of theatrical costumes, led many meetings and lectures, gave an interview on television, and took thousands of photographs, walking about the colorful streets of our city. So began our friendship, our meetings, conversations, my close familiarity with the works of this person about whom Vladimir Vysotsky wrote in these lines: “And my friend, a genius for all time, crazy and careless…” I fell in love immediately with Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, which I heard about from Mihail and Sarah. I wandered through it, looked and read. Once in Chemiakinʼs chateau I was thrilled to hear an exchange on the topic between him and Pavel Lungin, who had arrived as a guest at his home. The conversation lasted three hours, and I sat with them, and did not miss a single word — I listened! I discussed with Mihail the necessity of preserving the fruits of his hard labor during sixty years, and nearly forty years of this “sentence” together with Sarah. We decided to move the Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire into the digital sphere of our current era, in accordance with the logic of the Internet epoch, not only to conserve the work as an artifact for our descendants, but to create an algorithm for a continuation of this work beyond the limits of an individualʼs life. This project is grandiose, complex and not cheap. I tried to engage my closest friends for support. The first to oﬀer help was Viktor Kharitonin, and this made my plan realistic. Then I asked for help from my “accomplice” Andrey Dementiev, and he also agreed to participate; then Lesha Makin joined in. I want to thank all of them. For each person Iʼve met who has been touched by Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, an entire world has opened, and I hope that this world will help us overcome the dreadfulness surrounding us, the incursion of Shvonders and Sharikovs out of Mikhail Bulgakovʼs Heart of a Dog.

Monument to Children, Victims of the Sins of Adults. Mihail Chemiakin. Moscow, Russia. 2001. Bronze

I would like to live long enough to see the sculptural group “Children — Victims of the Sins of Adults” stop being the symbol of contemporary culture. A foundation was established with the emotive name "Foundation for the Preservation and Digital Transformation of World Culture." All have approached the project with passion: individuals, the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, which will be the legal heir to the results, the French company “Arkhênum,” and “Red Mad Robot” (red and mad, this work delivers true pleasure), and finally, to our great delight, the Tretyakov Gallery. In the history of art, you will not be likely to find anything comparable to Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire, much as there are some comparisons that could be made to Malrauxʼs Musée Imaginaire. But if Malrauxʼs Musée, for all its glory, is mostly a metaphor, a soul could dive into Chemiakinʼs project for years. Truly, I envy people who are encountering the world of Chemiakin for the first time.

Andrey Reus Doctor of Economic Sciences Ex-Deputy Minister of Manufacturing and Energy of the Russian Federation Founder, Preservation and digital transformation of the worldʼs cultural legacy

Musées Imaginaires: The Evolution of an Idea and the Creation of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée imaginaire from its origins to digitalization T

he rapid growth of industry and technology in the late 19th and early 20th century enabled publishers to mass-produce books and periodicals on art as well as photographs and reproductions. The resultant easy access to images of works of art inspired art historians to take a fresh look at the overall picture of fine art, its analysis and systematization. In the process, a seminal shift in perception took place among viewers of art, as Walter Benjamin noted in his 1937 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: the viewer is no longer looking at original works, and “its being reproducible by technological means frees the work of art, for the first time in history, from its existence as a parasite upon ritual”.1

A century of comparative analysis of works of art At the beginning of the 20th century, Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the founder of the modern iconographic school of art history, created his “Pictures atlas” (Bilderatlas) — his last completed project. This study anticipated the work of many 20th and 21st century art historians with its strictly visual approach. In the atlas, which Warburg also called Mnemosyne after the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, images are displayed with no accompanying commentary, meaning that “consideration of the atlas demands the viewerʼs associative thought process”. 2 The atlas consisted of large plywood boards to which Warburg pinned reproductions of all sorts of images and works that he sought to compare, from ancient sculptures

and archaeological artifacts to 20th century objects such as postage stamps, newspaper clippings, posters, advertisements, and pages from magazines. The choice of images was not limited by style or time frame; Warburg juxtaposed images based only on their visual similarity, without reference to historical and religious context, style or subject. “The purpose of Mnemosyne is to show visually the centuries-old migration of motifs (gestures, movements, details), while exposing primary, ʻprimitiveʼ emotional energies (aggression, sadness, ecstasy, etc.) to the viewer, and taming them. Under certain conditions, according to Warburg, these aﬀective patterns of social memory can reproduce themselves, and not always through the conscious desire of the artist — an important idea, if we remember that Warburg himself was living in an era of social and historical change of enormous proportions”.3 Warburgʼs main interest “was always visual culture, embracing ʻhigh artʼ and mass imagery, but this study was not an end in itself for him, rather a way to resolve bigger questions related to the psychology and historical self-awareness of man”.4 Simultaneous with Warburgʼs work on his Bilderatlas, artists also took advantage of the availability of reproductions and photographs to assemble works of art in non-standard groupings. The Blue Rider almanac, published in 1912 by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, among others, presented a selective panorama of world art, which provided “optical evidence for the comparability of heterogeneous works from anywhere in the world”.5 After Warburgʼs premature death in 1929 his research was rarely mentioned in professional literature and was virtually forgotten until the 1990s. All the same, throughout this period other researchers experimented with many of the same methods and ideas as Warburg had used in his Mnemosyne. Alfred Salmoni, a prominent classical scholar and antiquities curator, was also interested in the idea of systematizing art according to his own “subtle scheme”. It was Salmoni who, in 1923, demonstrated to the aspiring art critic and writer André Malraux his method of presenting a theory of art with the help of reproductions, and not text, as was customary in his time. Clara Malraux (1897–1982) later recalled their meeting: “At that time [Salmoni] was preparing an exhibition of comparative art, not at all like those we had been accustomed to up until that time, <…> [an exhibition] that used strange short cuts to bring together all the forms of art to which we might react. He leaned a briefcase against a chair, brought out a bundle of photographs <...> [and] arranged them according to a subtle scheme of his own. This was the first time I was ever confronted with a piece of Thai sculpture. Then there came the marriage of two heads, the one Han and the other romanesque.”6 Malraux actively developed this technique after the Second World War. In 1947 he published his famous essay Le Musée Imaginaire, and in 1951 The Voices of Silence. One of Malrauxʼs key premises was that existing museums provide the viewer with only a limited collection of works of art, while a “Musée Imaginaire” isnʼt limited by time or space, rather, it is formed exclusively in the human mind on the basis of images seen. It does not preserve physical works, but only the memory of them — and it is those images that are re-thought and re-worked by the imagination that are most strongly remembered. Malraux, like Warburg in Mnemosyne, compared works of diﬀerent styles, eras, and cultures, revealing non-obvious connections, conscious and unconscious quotations, and coincidences. Malrauxʼs “Musée Imaginaire” by

André Malraux working on his Musée Imaginaire. Paris, 1954

definition cannot be finite: it will continue to expand as long as the imagination that gave birth to it exists and evolves. In the 1940s the Dutch art historian Henri van de Waal, foreseeing the direction that computer technology would take decades later, translated his method of iconographic research into the language of numbers. Each topic that could relate to a particular image was assigned a unique number. All the topic numbers corresponding to a particular work were then combined into one code, which became the workʼs identifier. The Nazi regime and World War II forced a hiatus in exhibitions of modern art in Germany, which ended in 1955 when the artist Arnold Bode organized the first edition of what became the quinquennial Documenta show of contemporary art. Visitors were greeted at the entrance to the exhibition by a series of photographs designed to demonstrate commonalities between archaic works and folk art and to prepare the viewer to consider the works of contemporary artists. Thus, once again, viewers were encouraged to see common themes in the art of diﬀerent times and peoples. In 1984 this new trend to identify links between works of art of diﬀerent eras and continents became the basis of the sensational “Primitivism” exhibition organized by curators William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It presented works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Constantin Brancusi alongside more than 200 ritual objects and sculptures from Africa, Oceania and North America. The exhibition catalog contains articles by historians, artists, and art historians on the relationship between ritual art and the art of contemporary European and American artists. A few years later, in 1989, the French curator Jean-Hubert Martin (b. 1944), organized Magicians of the Earth at the Pompidou Center in Paris. This exhibition demonstrated connections between European and North American artists and their contemporaries from other continents, artists Martin discovered during years of research on the ancestral cultures of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The project challenged the preeminence of strictly historical museum exhibitions featuring well-known artists. “Following Malrauxʼs approach, Martin believed that the business of recognizing genuine art is the right and obligation of the trained, experienced, keen-eyed professional as he travels, free from the constraints of a particular socio-cultural context”.7 Martin went on to organize unorthodox exhibitions, often involving the juxtaposition of visually similar but historically diverse works of art and images, in France, the United States, and most recently, the 2021–2022 Odd Convergences exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Digitalization and “cultural analytics” With the increase in the volume and speed of data transmission at the end of the 20ᵗʰ century, modern information technologies have penetrated into all aspects of life. The cultural sphere is no exception to this trend. Archives, libraries, and museum collections began digitalizing their collections in the 2000s, and this process solved several problems at once. Digitalization helped to preserve fragile documents and rare artifacts for which a change in temperature and humidity or contact with human hands can be detrimental; and at the same time it greatly broadened access to documents and artifacts previously available only to a narrow group of scholars. Van de Waalʼs followers digitalized his project in the early 2000s and named the platform Iconclass (for “iconographic classification”). The platform collaborates with a number of archives, adding their images to the database and using artificial intelligence to sort them into van de Waalʼs categories. Iconclass continues to be actively developed and used by, among others, the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague and the Marburg Photo Archive. Lev Manovich coined the term “cultural analytics” in 2007 to describe analysis of the culture of the present and the past on the basis of rapidly expanding “big data”. Masses of digitized material have become the cultural norm: the Smithsonian Institution has over 2.8 million images and 3D models available to view and download for free, the Rijksmuseum over 700,000, the Louvre over 480,000. The latest technologies make it possible to speed up and improve the process of analyzing a large amount of data that exists in the art world, both for research purposes and for projecting commercial performance. The Artsy online platform was launched in 2009, a sort of Amazon for fine art bringing together collectors, artists, galleries, and institutions. It gradually became one of the largest digital art aggregators, and in 2012, introduced a research vector, The Art Genome Project,8 which classifies works of art according to more than 1,000 “genes” — art historical movements, subject matter, and formal qualities — thereby revealing the “genetic links” between works of diﬀerent times and peoples. The project is conducted by a team of art historians and machine learning technologies are used in the classification of the platformʼs sizable collection of images. Founded in 2011, Google Art Project presents itself as an altruistic program dedicated to making fine art universally accessible. It allows everyone to virtually explore a variety of collections of more than 2,000 museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London to the Uﬃzi Gallery in Florence to lesser-known small museums and foundations. In 2018 Artrendex launched ArtPI, which uses a neural network to analyze data and predict trends in the art world. The system collects information about works of art from all over the world, analyzes it using algorithms and issues reports with data on trends in various areas of art. In 2020, a research team at MIT together with researchers from Microsoft developed the MosAIc program, which uses neural networks to find relationships among art objects.

Iconclass website

List of museums working with the Google Art and Culture Project

Mihail Chemiakinʼs method of “systematized analysis of visual and spiritual similarity in the fine arts” The artist Mihail Chemiakin (b. 1943) began developing his own approach to the study of fine art in 1960s Leningrad. In the ensuing decades he has progressed from creative and analytical experiments in the Soviet Union — where he was unaware of the research of Warburg, Malraux, and van de Waal — to a massive and far-reaching study of the interrelationships in the culture and art of different eras and peoples. In 1956 Chemiakin entered the Leningrad high school of art then located on the top floor of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The special school brought together talented children from all over the Soviet Union and gave them a head start towards a professional art education. Students in the special school had access to the well-stocked library of the Academy of Arts. Despite the Soviet Unionʼs isolation from the world and the almost total information vacuum, this library received all the latest art publications, from catalogs of European exhibitions to books on world art, but these books were not accessible to all visitors to the library. Access to them was granted according to the visitorʼs level of “ideological preparedness”. Students were not allowed to view books with reproductions of works by non-realist 20th century artists. “No to abstractionism, formalism, surrealism and other -isms in art!” went the slogan. And that meant: “No to Picasso, Dali, Bacon.” Restrictions notwithstanding, in the evening hours when the supervisors had gone home for the night, students would cajole the library staff to let them look through and photograph “forbidden” publications, against all the rules. Chemiakin printed out the photographs at home and pasted them, along with reproductions bought or traded on the black market, on notebook paper. Studying the images helped him understand various techniques and approaches to portraiture, landscape, still life and multi-figure compositions. He would often jot down comments, sketch variations on the theme of a given sheet, or draw theoretical diagrams. In later years Chemiakin would call his Leningrad collection of photographs of works of art “pictorial samizdat.” The artist himself considers these early experiments to be the first step in his research. His collection continued to expand even after he was expelled from the special art school for showing forbidden images to his classmates. As he discovered ever more diverse cultures, gleaning what he could from academic publications from the more liberal Eastern European countries, Chemiakin identified and traced visual parallels between works of art created in different countries and different eras. He was especially interested in the pictorial canons of ancient Russian icon painting and the ritual art of Africa and Oceania, which helped give form to his metaphysical quests and experiments, his striving towards “the creation of a new icon painting”, a direction that particularly interested him in the second half of the 1960s. These efforts gave rise to a series of «metaphysical» works by Chemiakin — Metaphysical Heads, Metaphysical Busts — in which the artist strives to create a synthesis

Mihail Chemiakin, Comparative analysis. 1963

of the visual similarities between works of diﬀerent cultures. Work on these series continues to this day. Studying and analyzing a wide range of images, Chemiakin began to group visually related images on a single sheet. The artistʼs first tentative experiments in comparative paste-ups date to 1963. Later Chemiakin described these sheets as his “Comparative Opus”. In 1971 Chemiakin was expelled from the Soviet Union and settled in Paris, where, no longer limited by Soviet censorship, he could consult and acquire all kinds of art books, exhibition catalogues, and art periodicals. Whenever possible, he would buy three copies of each book: the first was put on the shelf for regular viewing and reading, the other two went “under the knife” — images on both sides of each page were used for the research. In France Chemiakin discovered André Malrauxʼs comparative studies and read several of his works, including the essay Le Musée Imaginaire. This much-misunderstood term does not translate well into other languages. Malraux defined the musée imaginaire as the whole mass of reproductions of works of art existing in the world. While he contrasted the “musée imaginaire” to “vrais musées”, or real museums, the term does not mean “the museum I would like to visit,” or “imaginary museum” with its connotations of childish fantasy. For this reason Chemiakin chose not to render the term into English, but retain Malrauxʼs term with its connotations, when he later named his research project «Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire» in honor of the French philosopher, politician and culturologist. At other times the artist has referred to his research as “The Universal Anthology of Form” and “The Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art” — in fact, each of these titles describes one of the two main directions of the project: first, a sophisticated “image bank” for Chemiakinʼs use in his artistic work; and second, a study of the deep roots of human creativity. The term “Musée Imaginaire” encompasses both parts of the whole. For many years, Chemiakinʼs research only occasionally came to the attention of the general public. One of the first reportages about the project was in a 1977 film directed by French journalist Michel Lancelot in the series Artists of Our Time. In the film, Chemiakin shows Lancelot his albums of reproductions and explains: “In these albums I try to show, without any explanatory text, certain points of similarity in the art of diﬀerent eras and peoples. I create metaphysical albums

dedicated to metaphysical or abstract-objective forms. Regardless of their diﬀering religious beliefs, one can find absolutely identical visual elements in Russian icon painting and the art of Africa, in objects and works of art, and ofte n o rdinary household objects are in no way inferior in terms of their aesthetic value to works of art”.9 The American literary critic and philosopher George Steiner observed in his 1989 essay “A Secondary City”: “The best readings of art are art < … > where (artists) incorporate, quote, distort, fragment or transform motifs, passages, representational and formal confi gurations, from another painting or sculpture into their own <… >”.9 In the late 1970s Chemiakin created his first full-fledged «Transformations» — explicit variations on a particular image, be it a work of art, a cult object, a botanical engraving, or a map. They were exhibited at the Fischer Gallery in London in a major show in 1980. The following year the artist moved to New York, bringing with him his library and “Musée Imaginaire”.

*** The process of analysis and sorting of images for Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire proceeds in stages. In the first stage Chemiakin collects the material he needs, scanning hundreds of books, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and photographs and culling print images from the morass of visual material viewed; he also culls digital images from the Internet, printing them out to add to his collection. An image is included in his research if it serves to clarify a theme, provides a link between various interpretations of a subject, or is itself a vivid example of a particular phenomenon. Chemiakin did not set out with a master plan of themes to study; new themes are added constantly, for a variety of reasons. At times the artist will collect images related to an artistic project of his own: he generally wants to be aware of what has been done before him, analyze the successes and pitfalls of his predecessors and create something new. Sometimes a particular element of a work of art — a facial expression or compositional device, for example — will catch his eye, and he will start to look for related images of, for example, figures placed against knotted cloth backgrounds. And at other times he will simply notice that there is a steady flow

Mihail Chemiakin with his Metaphysical Head triptych. Paris, 1980

of images on a particular theme passing by his eyes as he sorts reproductions, and sets them aside in a new Comparative Opus, often one that he collects more for future viewers than for himself. Next, the artist sorts the images into boxes by theme. He then lays out the images collected on a theme and identifies related works. These related works are pasted on sheets of black paper, becoming part of Chemiakinʼs “Comparative Opus”. “I am interested in tracking the visible connection between ancient art and modern art, pointing out this phenomenon, which I would call metaphysical, and creating a visual map,”10 Mihail Chemiakin remarked in a recent interview. Once prepared, the Comparative Opus sheets are sorted by theme and sub-theme and stored in cardboard boxes designed by the artist for the purpose. The boxes are stored on shelves, reminiscent of a "primitive computer" with its data modules. “Every box contains the material for a doctoral dissertation,” says the artist. Mihail Chemiakin tries to comment on his comparisons as little as possible. The only things he identifies are themes, sub-themes, and the order in which they are considered. Everything else is left to the viewer, who must draw his own conclusions from what he sees. In this way, Chemiakinʼs approach is similar to the methods of Warburg, van de Waal, Malraux, Rubin, Marten and other researchers pursuing comparative studies. But there is also a fundamental diﬀerence between Chemiakin and those art historians and curators: being an artist, he does not limit himself to scientific categories, but perceives and identifies non-obvious similarities and connections having to do with mood, emotional states, artistic techniques, and other “deep roots”. And unlike those scholars, Chemiakinʼs purpose in conducting these studies is to inform his own creative work: when addressing a particular subject in his art, he studies everything he can find that has been done on that subject in order to take it further. Chemiakin describes his research in philosophical terms. “The overarching goal of many of studies is the identification of the Jungian archetype. The purpose of some of my most extensive studies is to reveal the immense perfect form (image / archetype), partially extracted by the artist at the moments of his creative “penetration”. The high supraconscious (enlightenment / ecstasy), with the help of the analytical method of research and comparison, reveals a striking similarity in visual perception, indicating its progenitor: 1) Source; 2) Archetype. Such “ecstasy” according to Freud — the “super-ego” or super-consciousness, can be observed among saints, the exalted, the mentally unbalanced, and artists.”11 For Chemiakin, as an artist, the name of the author and even historical, biographical, and geographical is of secondary importance, as the dialogue between images takes place on a purely visual level, outside the context of a particular work. Nonetheless he suggests that psychiatrists, art historians, and other scientists can later analyze the juxtapositions he found from their point of view, thus returning to Benjaminʼs “aura”, or the historical data of the original works. It was for the benefit of these future researchers that Chemiakin began, belatedly, to record information on the reproductions in his collection.

Mihail Chemiakin, Transformed Knightʼs Helmet, 1979. Mixed media on paper

*** In 1983, art historians from the University of San Francisco visited Chemiakinʼs studio in New York City, where he showed them his Musée Imaginaire. The professors were so impressed by the scale of the research as well as the related Transformations series that shortly after their visit to the studio Chemiakin received an invitation to California to receive an honorary doctorate in art history. This was the first of five honorary doctoral degrees awarded to Chemiakin for his research. In 1984 the artist was elected a lifetime member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Since then, Chemiakin has given master classes at educational institutions around the world, including Stanford and Oxford Universities, where the artist describes his research and the role it plays in his creative work. In some cases, the artist creates works before an audience, demonstrating in practice how he transforms works by, or applies the methods of, other artists. In a 1986 master class at the University of San Francisco Chemiakin sketched a large-scale transformation of Velasquezʼ “Las Meninas” and the numerous variations on that painting by Picasso and other 20th century artists. Intrigued by what they saw, professors of art history, biology, philosophy, astronomy and even neurology began to consult the materials of Chemiakinʼs research “laboratory”. In 2000 Chemiakin opened The Museum of the Imagination, the first full-fledged exposition space of his “Musée Imaginaire”, in Hudson, NY. The purpose of the museum was to make the artistʼs research accessible to a wide audience. From 2000 to 2013, The Museum of the Imagination presented nine thematic exhibitions, among them “The Sphere in Art and Architecture”, “Out of Focus: Blurred Images in Art”, and “Seats of. Chairs in Art”. Each exposition is divided into two zones. One part introduces the viewer to the research materials. The black Comparative Opus sheets are presented in a sequence

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. Château de Chamousseau, France, 2017

that leads the viewer through Chemiakinʼs analysis of the theme. The other part of the exhibition consists of works by contemporary artists on the given theme and works and objects from Chemiakinʼs collection; in some cases the artist created installations or video and audio recordings on the theme of the exhibition. Parallel with the space in Hudson, in 2002, the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation opened an exhibition space in central St. Petersburg, Russia, which ultimately became the principal venue of the Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. The Foundation organizes thematic exhibitions with the research materials in many Russian cities: Khanty-Mansiysk, Nalchik, Maikop, Kaluga, Voronezh, Kaliningrad, Chelyabinsk, Norilsk, Lipetsk, Novosibirsk, Sochi, and Moscow. Each exhibition is complemented by the work of local artists and accompanied by academic conferences, theatrical performances, and lectures. The Russian television channel “Kultura” commissioned several seasons of filmed lectures by the artist, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, a total of 21 episodes shot in 2002–2008. These filmed lectures acquainted television viewers and, later, Internet users, with Chemiakinʼs research. Returning to France in 2007, Chemiakin brought with him more than 3,000 black boxes of material sorted into 1,000 topics and allocated an entire 800-square-meter building for his library and Musée Imaginaire on the territory of the Chateau de Chamousseau in the central region of the country. It was not long before students and scholars found their way to the chateau to work with and study the collected research materials. *** In 2012, the Haydarah Foundation funded the development of a form for a “final product” of the research. Over the course of a year research material on several themes was digitized and documented, allowing Chemiakin to publish several prototypes of books and presentations of the research, including the first monograph on the Musée Imaginaire — Chairs in Art (2013). Chemiakin often bemoans the fact that no one publishes the art books he needs for his work. He considers his pasted-up albums to be layouts of these unpublished books. In 2015 the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation launched a series of monographs

on the research of the Musée Imaginaire Each book addresses a specific theme as developed by Chemiakin, presenting images from his Comparative Opus in a sequence determined by the artist. The images are supplemented by articles on the given theme by psychiatrists, theologists, literary critics, historians, philosophers. The first monograph in the series was Letters, Words, Text in Art (2015), followed by Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art (2018), and Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art (2023). During his time as a professor at the Stieglitz Academy in St. Petersburg, Chemiakin taught his students to look closely at images and analyze them from new angles — for example, he assigned his students to make color composition diagrams for paintings, then transfer the color in the same proportions to other images. The studentsʼ dissertations were transformations of Russian icons. The “Chemiakin Method” was subsequently included in the Academyʼs permanent program, under the direction of Professor Ludmila Kirsanova in the Painting and Restoration Department. *** Over six decades of research and analysis Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire has developed from a collection of informational material for the artistʼs work to a philosophical oeuvre, from a few hundred pasted-up notebook pages to an archive consisting of three million images sorted and arranged by Chemiakin prepared for exhibition and publication. Despite the fact that Chemiakin began his research in a country largely closed oﬀ from the outside world, in many ways his project coincides with global trends in the study of visual culture, the search for new approaches to the history of art — in a manifestation of what Chemiakin refers to as “metaphysical bridges” of human consciousness. Like Warburg, who called his collection of reproductions a "picture atlas", Chemiakin sees himself as an “aviator”, who observes the whole “map” of fine art with its multiple interconnections from a birdʼs-eye view. Also like Warburg, he pays tribute to the goddess Mnemosyne by conserving the memory of forgotten masters whose work resurfaces in his Comparative Opus. Like Malraux, Rubin, Martin, Picasso, Modigliani and many other researchers and artists, at the outset Chemiakin was particularly interested of comparing European art with the art of Africa and Oceania — both as researcher and as artist. Like van de Waal, he recognized early on the parallels of his quest with developing computer technology. The artist has created, expanded and refined his own system of analysis and classification of fine art, a system which has produced one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging studies of interrelationships in art. It surpasses the archives of Warburg, Malraux and other prominent researchers and analysts of visual culture of the 20ᵗʰ century both in sheer volume and in the degree of its development. These research materials can be used in a variety of ways and in often unexpected disciplines. For art historians and curators, they constitute an extensive database of visual material sorted by theme and subtheme; for scholars in other fields, they are a resource that allows them to conduct a comparative analysis of phenomena in literature, cinema, psychiatry, and other areas, creating what Chemiakin calls “templates”. Artists can increase their level of knowledge by looking through the images collected in the archive, encounter rare and forgotten works of art, and discover new concepts for their own work.

One of the chief goals of the “Musée Imaginaire” relates to human memory and deep perception of works of art. As early as 1989, George Steiner lamented the eﬀect of technology on the functions of the human brain and consciousness: “The electronic volume and fidelity of the computerized data bank and of processes of automatic retrieval will further weaken the sinews of individual memory. Stimulus and suggestion are of an increasingly mechanical and collective quality. Encountered in easy resort to electronic media of representation, much of music and of literature remains purely external. The distinction is that between ʻconsumptionʼ and ʻingestionʼ. The danger is that the text or music will lose what physics call its ʻcritical massʼ, its implosive powers with the echo chambers of the self.”12 The technology Steiner discusses, much advanced since that writing, has made it possible to provide greatly increased access to Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. In 2022, roughly 200,000 reproductions were digitized. The scanned archive became the basis for the Digital Musée Imaginaire which allows a wide audience to discover the world of Chemiakinʼs “pictorial transformations” and “Comparative opus”. The current trend of ever-expanding data collections might suggest that it is necessary and desirable to pour more and more data into Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire by adding new images and analyzing them according to the artistʼs methodology. For many years Chemiakin planned to train analysts who would expand the work he has done. Others hoped and believed that an algorithm could be designed to replace the artistʼs participation. After numerous experiments conducted during the creation of the Digital Musée Imaginaire, it became clear to all involved that it is impossible to teach “Chemiakinʼs methodology” to either a person or a machine, primarily because his Musée Imaginaire is not a strictly scientific project. It is situated at a crossroads of creativity and analysis; it is deeply subjective in the sense that each stage of the analysis, from the decision to include an image in the archive to the definition of a theme or sub-theme, to the comparison of various images, draws on the artistʼs own experience — professional, visual, philosophical, even biographical. It is impossible to recreate all these experiences in order to continue the selection and analysis of more and more images without Chemiakinʼs direct participation.

The platform is designed to allow users to propose new images for inclusion in various themes. Where possible, Chemiakin will select images he considers appropriate from these submissions and add them to both the analog and digital Musée Imaginaire. There is also a space for a secondary digital Musée Imaginaire where art historians trained by Chemiakin will continue to expand the research under their own names. In addition, the platform will expand “horizontally”, posting “templates” by scholars in other disciplines; articles, videos, audio recordings on the themes of the research; and works by contemporary artists from the Musée Imaginaireʼs exhibitions. The archive is, on the one hand, a model for a creative and intellectual path; on the other hand, it is a collection organized for maximum “ingestion”, in Steinerʼs term, by a human viewer who considers the interrelationships of images; and it is a resource for other scholars to use for “template” studies in their own disciplines. The platform is designed to enable viewers to see the whole picture created by Chemiakin the “aviator” and share their conclusions, as well as to encourage them to “take flight” themselves.

Sarah H. de Kay Writer, translator, editor, Participant in Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire since 1983

Alexey Abakumov Art historian, producer, Director of the Digital Musée Imaginaire project

Elizaveta Tilova Art historian, teacher, Archivist of the Digital Musée Imaginaire project

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Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by J.A. Underwood, 2008, Penguin Books, pp. 11–12. Fokeeva V.P., Atlas ʻMnemosynaʼ Aby Warburga: pamyatʼ obrazov (Aby Warburgʼs “Mnemosyne” Atlas: the memory of images), Vestnik MSLU. 2015. Issue #13 (724), p.183. (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). Ibid., p. 184. Mazur, N.N., Issledovaniya vizualʼnoi kulʼturi (A Study of Visual Culture), Iskusstvoznanie, 2018, No. 1. pp 31–32 (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). Grasskamp, W. The Book on the Floor: André Malraux and the Musee Imaginaire, trans. by F. Elliot. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016. p. 92. Ibid., p. 46. Erofeev A., Jean-Hubert Martin: istoriya odnogo kuratora (Jean-Hubert Martin: The story of a curator), The Art Newspaper Russia. URL : https :// www . theartnewspaper . ru / posts /20220413- ytfh /? ysclid = lg 7 znsgj 8 l 211545672 (accessed 04/13/2023) (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). Ivanov V.V., Chemiakin M.M., Metafizicheski sintetism (Metaphysical Synthetism), Manifesto, 1967. (First published in Apollon-77, Paris, 1977) (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). Steiner, G., Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, 1991 (first publication 1989), p. 17. Abakumov, A., Interview with Mihail Chemiakin, audio recording, 2017 (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). Mihail Chemiakin, manuscript note, 2023 (English translation by Sarah H. de Kay). George Steiner, Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, 1991 (first publication 1989), p. 10.

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire as a Result of his Research Activity

nterest in comparative analysis began for Mihail Chemiakin when he was in the Special High School for Art; he was influenced by the very building of the Academy of Artists* and its unique library, where young artists could spend their evenings soaking up knowledge about art history, and even reading books from the restricted section: “We made friends with the librarians in order to get access to the literature. They were forbidden to give readers any books on contemporary art. These were marked with different symbols, including “especially dangerous,” and “very dangerous.” Each type of restriction was assigned its own geometric figure — a triangle, a circle, a square. It was these books that we photographed with primitive cameras somewhere in the dark corners of the Academy around midnight or one in the morning. We made copies and established our own Samizdat of images...”1, recalls the author. It was Evgeny Semeoshenkov, who gutted books, cutting out and regluing the reproductions on gray cardboard, who suggested to Chemiakin how to systematize knowledge, and taught him to analyze the pictures, looking not at what is being depicted, but how. Presumably, his experience dealing with images became the prototype of the future “operating room”** in the research laboratory of the artist. The third source that convinced him of the need to collect and internalize the universal anthology of forms, was of course the Hermitageʼs collection that served as a museum-university for Chemiakin, where the exposition is organized in such a way that advancing from room to room, from floor to floor, one can compare styles and epochs, and become acquainted with the culture and art of the most diverse chronological strata. While working on the maintenance staff of the museum, Chemiakin was able to formulate the most important questions of his research: to follow the migration of images, myths, and forms from prehistoric times to the present, and to regard the art of different cultures and epochs as a unified whole. For example, on one collage of Comparative Opus for the Metaphysical Head, we see Egyptian papyruses compared to ballet sketches by V. Kandinsky, and with this juxtaposition emerges true feelings of concurrence. When looking at the first comparative opus on the topic of the “Hand in Art,” we notice that at the beginning of the 1960s, the young artist was especially interested in the epoch of Western European and Russian Middle Ages, the early Renaissance, and the art of African and Oceanic aborigines. In these cultural strata he sought

* **

Until 1971, the Special High School for Art was located on the third floor of the Academy of Arts building at Universitetskaya nab. 17. A room in the artistʼs library where books are prepared and analyzed so that the images in them can find their place in the Comparative Opus.

rhythmic — both in line and color — fragments, and he drew parallels, fixing them on a single sheet. In the process of these searches the field of his research broadened and Chemiakin began to trace the visual aspects of forms in other cultures as well, including contemporary art, to which the artist paid more and more attention, identifying the most significant, in his view, themes and methods, and seeking for their sources in the art of the past. This can be considered fully proper as post-modern culture is an “enormous interpretive field”2 that gives birth to new ideas; however, “thoughts donʼt appear from nowhere, they are always the kernel of a dialogue between the Person and the Other.”3 In this never-ending dialogue can be seen the artistʼs quest for analogies and links in the metaphysical art and culture of diﬀerent peoples and eras. For art, just like truth, is dialogic in its essence: the author of the artistic work always addresses an Other.4 This concept to some degree has been put forward by K.-G. Jung in his theory about the unquestionable role of archetypes for the artist: “The person pronouncing these images speaks with a thousand voices, he binds and subjugates, he lifts what is described by him out of singular experience and time into a sphere of eternity, he elevates an individual fate into the fate of all humanity...”5 A similar thought may be expressed in a simple formula “art is

Mihail Chemiakin, Early comparative analysis: Hands in art. 1963. Paper, ink, collage

The Resurrection of Lazarus. Russian icon, Novgorod School, c. 1497

anti-fate,”6 and A. Malrauxʼs idea was the foundation of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. All three of the 20th century thinkers cited above, with their quite diﬀerent doctrines, in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural analysis, influenced Chemiakinʼs concept of the Musée Imaginaire, in which archetypes transform images in the language of the objects of the external world, which concept is at the heart of his creative process. However, we must here note that long before his familiarity with Malrauxʼs ideas of metamorphosis into art (“metamorphosis — is not accidental; quite the contrary, it is a rule, leading life into works of art…”, “a museum is the neighbor of metamorphosis,”7) the artist conducted a carefully planned research project in accordance with these basic human myths and images. The project was linked with the ideas he developed together with V. Ivanov on the theory of “metaphysical synthetism,” at the base of which rests spiritual knowledge, based not on emotional, but on intellectual contemplation. In the text of metaphysical synthetism: “The artist consciously takes upon himself the responsibility for his selection. Not a single form originates in his work, if it does not enter through metaphysical synthetism. Thanks to this metamorphosis, the artist can synthesize styles that could not be integrated before.”8 Thus, what is now known as Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire was born in the 1960s and was directly linked with the artistʼs creative methods in the area of transforming artistic forms. However, in a short time these searches no longer limited themselves to artistic methods for the expression of oneʼs own ideas and became an independent view of artistic-analytic activity, taking form when the artist lived in France. His acquaintance with Malrauxʼs work and Malrauxʼs acquaintance with Chemiakinʼs art further stimulated his research. Before this, he had viewed the research as a process for self-development and the authorʼs method in work. From that moment, they became a “continuation of work on the great French body of art, philosophy, and thinking.”9 The artist more and more often addresses themes that are not, strictly speaking, connected with his artistic work, but appear in relation to phenomena in contemporary art; he traces their connection with ancient culture. Calling upon the psychology of the unconscious, Chemiakin to this day studies the first images of the ancient world; he is convinced that the forms live their own metaphysical lives and are capable of changing their forms under the influence of diﬀerent styles. Let us assume that for Chemiakin, every theme of his research is a single whole, while

participants in the “Dialogue” regard it in many ways, and his goal is to unite this polyphony around two or three original sources. In the theme “Swaddled, bandaged, wrapped figures and objects in art” we see both an ancient Egyptian mummy and the Christian iconography of St. Lazarus; in theme of “Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art” we see the ancient Egyptian pyramids and Jacobʼs ladder, and so on. In this way, the diﬀerent but non-conflicting characteristics unite within the framework of the central idea about the birth of archetypical images. The search for parallels in art, which occurs only through visual perception and not in consideration of philosophical or other aspects, shows that his approach is not that of a theorist, but of a practicing artist. Chemiakin understands this, on one hand, as a means of self-cognition, and on the other as a future point for experimentation in creative work: “...and to me, when using my method, since I am constantly analyzing, I need to know what has been done, so that later I can extract some necessary lessons and really create something of my own.”10 Studying the great breadth of themes in the project, you see that some problems that have fallen into Mihail Chemiakinʼs field of vision have been examined profoundly in various social and humanitarian disciplines (“Image of Death in Art,” “Children in Art,” “Spheres in Art”), but others (“Meta-life. Carnival,” “Metaphysical Fragments”) require further development in description and analysis on the basis of existing art-historical systems and the conceptual apparatus. In this regard, one might ask about Chemiakinʼs attempt to unify radically diﬀerent forms of thought in art within a common anthology on the basis of theories about archetypes of the collective unconscious, cultural and social memories, and the language of culture. In contrast to history, which tries to be objective, the memory is always emotionally colored, and allows the research to include in its analysis personal aspects of lived experience. On one hand, the subjective glance is reflected in the choice of images to be included in the research, and on the other, it instigates further dialogue. In Chemiakinʼs Comparative Opus visual typological rows organize conceptual constructions, forming independent static objects in the quality of fixed thoughts, which carry out the ontological function in the research. However, there is also another function — discussion based: objects develop dynamically and are subject not only to contemplation, but also to continuation, thus becoming instruments to construct new thoughts. The archive of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire contains millions of items, among which are images collected from rare books, albums, auction catalogues, and other sources. The immensity, depth, and time-span (more than half a century) of research cannot be compared with other imaginary museums created by artists,

Jacob's dream. Catacombs of Via Latina. Rome. 3rd – 4th century. Fresco

Mihail Chemiakin. Comparative opus: Metaphysical head. 2007. Paper, collage

such as the “Museum of Mice of Claes Oldenberg” or “Museum of Contemporary Art. Department of Eagles” by Marcel Broodthears, or by curators, as in the “Anti-Museum of J. Cladders” or the “Museum of Obsessions of X. Seeman.” But in accordance with their principles,11 art scholars compare the searches in the 20th and 21st centuries in the area of visual art, beginning from the analysis of the transformation in the forms and works of A. Focillon,12 and continuing with contemporary theorists of art (for example D. Freedberg),13 and have proposed a reassessment in the history of images and all their views, proposing that classical art study should become “the history of images.”14 Perhaps, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is best compared to Aby Warburgʼs project “Bildatlas” — in its immersion in the history of culture and reference to its centuries of practice; the application of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the processes of cultural memory; the weightiness of those questions that concern contemporary art criticism and which the artist understands. In both projects the study of the influence of classical antiquity on all aspects of European civilization is conducted on the basis of libraries with idiosyncratic inner logic.15 Chemiakinʼs research pose the question of imagined societies of art and non-art, criteria of evaluation in contemporary culture, the national identity of artists in a globalized world, the obsolescence and disappearance of certain texts from the field of ideas, and much more. But there are principal diﬀerences: while Warburg established reciprocities within the centuries-long migration of images, traveling from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, around the “formula of pathos” 16 (motif of the gestures of the hands and the placement of the body), then the thematic amplitude of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is much broader and continues to grow. This witnesses its academic perspectives.*** Before us we see a living project, and the author does not propose that it come to its conclusion. And in fact, in the history of art there are an infinite number of themes, the motifs and images, through whose prism art can be viewed, aﬃrming the use of the dialogic conception in the analysis of the “museum”: “The person in dialogue with the Other experiences his inner incompleteness, and understands his ability to do the wrong thing with complete certainty.”17 Chemiakin

***

Abi Warburg. Mnemosyne Atlas. 1925– 1927. Paper, collage

For his research, Chemiakin was accorded an Honorary Doctoral Degree in Art History from several universities, including the University of San Francisco (1984), the European Academy of Art (1987), and was decorated as a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in France (1994).

has managed to fashion his creative work like a “large dialogue,” to create a system, ready at any moment to begin a dialogue — from without and within. Today presentations of the research take the form of lecture series, exhibition projects, and monographs,**** and each similar addition to the overall continuous analytic process — is the result of Chemiakinʼs experience, to a certain extent built into an “intellectual still life” that demonstrates to the world his own and also an epochal representation on physics, and most importantly, on metaphysics: “Research on the general characteristics of the structure of the world and our methods to delve more deeply into this structure.”18 Through his utilization of cultural memory, in search of the archetypical kernel in works of the past, separated from us by centuries, Chemiakin is connecting it with works being born today, right now. This visual formula, breaking into the consciousness of every individual, will become an instrument of acquiring self-knowledge, individuality, and cultural self-identity.*****

Olga Sazonova General Director of the Mihail Chemiakin Center Since 2010, Participant in the Project Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire

****

M. Chemiakin. Letters, Words, Text in Art. St. Petersburg: Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2015, 398 pp.; M. Chemiakin. Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped figures and Objects in Art. St. Petersburg: Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2018, 396 pp.; M. Chemiakin. Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art. 2 vol. St. Petersburg: Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2019/23, 420 pp. ***** The article is based on an earlier publication by the author: Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musee Imaginaire — A Creative Method or a Tool for Increasing Knowledge in Art Studies // Scientific Works. Issue 48: Problems in the Development of Patriotic Literature: Coll. / Scientific Ed. / V. A. Lenyashin; Comp. O. A. Reznitskaya, A. E. Shamankova. St. Petersburg: Repin Institute, 2019, pp. 212–233.

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Kustikova, A., Mihail Chemiakin: “Estʼ oschuschenie, chto bes osedlyal umy pravitelei I pogonyaet imi” (Mihail Chemiakin: “One had the feeling that a demon had saddled the minds of the authorities and put spurs to them”), interview, “Novaya gazeta”, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 17, 2014 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Podshibyakin, A. M., Tekst, znachenie, smysl: postmodernisv kak igra (Text, Meaning, Thought: Postmodernism as a Game), Filosfii dvadtsatogo veka: sholy I kontseptsii (Philosophy of the Twentieth Century: Schools and Conceptions), Conference marking 60 years of the Philosophy Department at St. Petersburg State University, November 21, 2001, p. 194 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Ibid. Bakhtin, M. M., Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (The Poetics of Dostoevsky), Third edition. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, Moscow, 1972, p. 135 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Jung, С-G. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature /Translated from the German by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press, 1978 (Fourth printing), p. 83. Malraux, A., Le Miroir des Limbes, Gallimard, Paris, 1974. Malraux, A., The Voices of Silence / Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. Princeton University Press, 1978, pp 68–69. Chemiakin, M. and Ivanov, V.V. Metaphysical Synthetism / Translated from the Russian by Sarah H. de Kay. URL: http://jjgueron.free.fr/CHEMIAKIN-SYNTHE-FR-TEXTE-2.htm (Accessed 18.08.2023). An open lecture by M. Chemiakin. St. Petersburg, Russia, 10.03.2018 //Personal Archive of O. Sazonova. Chemiakin, M. in Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. Introduction: [film-lecture] / ТК “Rossiya-Kultura”; director B. Yanovsky, 2003, 38 minutes. (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Sazonova, O.A. Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musee Imaginaire — Creative Method or Instrument for the Acquisition of Knowledge in Art Studies // Scientific Works. Issue 48: Problems in the Development of Patriotic Art: Coll. / Scientific Ed. V. A. Lenyashin; Comp. O. E. Reznikaya, A I. Shamankova. St. Petersburg: Institute in the Name of I. E. Repin, 2019, p. 228 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Focillon, H. The Life of Forms in Art. In Praise of Hands. Translated From the French by Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler. 1992, Zone Books, New York 185 pp. Freedberg, D. The Power of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 534 pp. Mazur, N.N., ed. Mir obrazov. Obrazy mira. Antologiya issledovaniya vizualʼnoi kulʼtury (The World of Images. Images of the World. An Anthology of Research into Visual Culture), European University of St. Petersburg, Novoye izdatelʼstvo, Moscow, 2018 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Sazonova, O.A. Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musee Imaginaire, p. 228. Toropygina, M. Yu. Ikonologiya. Nachalo. Problema simvola e Aby Warburga I v ikonologii ego kruga (Iconology. Beginning. The Problem of the Symbol in the Work of Aby Warburg and in his Circle). Moscow: ProgressTradition, 2015 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Bakhtin, M. M. Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Dostoevskyʼs Poetics), Werden-Verlag, Augsburg, 2002 (Translated from the Russian by Margaret Wise Petrochenkov). Chemiakin, M. Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped figures and Objects in Art. St. Petersburg: Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2018, p. 3.

On Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire M

ihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is a very important research project, a unique interface for navigation through a collection of images and a unique artwork in its own right.* The project started decades ago, before the appearance of the Internet, and, later, social media, which have made countless artistic images from all epochs and cultures available on the screens of our computers and telephones. Paradoxically, as this enormous universe of artistic images grows, fed not only by the mechanisms of instant mass distribution of images, but also by recently developed instruments of artificial intelligence (AI) for the instant creation of artistic works, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire has become even more important and relevant. We often say that this or that earlier project anticipated the Internet with its abundance of cultural content in all media and its ideas connected by hyperlinks, as well as the extensive online digital libraries of images created in our time. Examples of these projects include the Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929) by the German art scholar Aby Warburg**; Walter Benjaminʼs Arcades Project (1927–1940); and Le Musée Imaginaire by the French writer Andre Malraux (1947–1954). Malrauxʼs project directly inspired Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. However, Chemiakinʼs research is so relevant today not because it “prefigured” digital collections of works of art with their hundreds of thousands of works arranged by categories such as historical period and medium. Rather than simply anticipating new forms of digital culture, he oﬀers us an imagined and inspired alternative to these standard ways of organizing cultural materials. And that, in my view, is much more important. The labels placed next to works of art in art museums often mention other artists or artistic movements. There might be proof that a certain artist or certain movement influenced the painter of this picture or it might be the curatorʼs hypothesis. Some websites on art go even further: for each artist they include a required section on “influenced by” or “influenced,” followed by a list of names. This practice foregrounds one way to imagine how the creators and their creations are linked—by similarity. If Artist B influenced Artist A, their works must be in some way similar. The principle of similarity is also built into the Web image search. You submit an image to the search engine and it returns a large number of images that the algorithms consider similar. The similarity is calculated on the basis of an algorithmic analysis of visual characteristics and on the content of the images.

* **

URL: (https://mihfond.ru/mihail-chemiakin/musee-imaginaire). URL: (https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/about).

At first glance, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is also organized by similarity. It includes a large number of themes. For each theme, the artist creates an album filled with relevant images. The choice of theme provides an alternative to the standard method of organizing collections of images. The themes focus on the important representations of visual artistic thinking and seeing of the world, with titles such as “Intersecting Horizontal and Vertical Lines,” “Steps, Ladders, and Stairs in Art,” “Cuts,” “Flat Forms in Sculpture,” and so on. In other words, this is not a standard library hierarchy of classifications (too rigid), nor a list of single keywords (too free). Instead, the spectator is invited to look at art from the point of view of a single artist-researcher. When we begin to look at the images collected in these thematic albums, we discover something quite unexpected. Instead of the expected similarities such as “here are many ways that the theme of X is reproduced in art,” we see other types of connections among these images. We can see contrasts, dialogues, and dissonances. Each album, in fact, may be viewed as a carefully selected art exhibition, where each work enriches every other image in the exposition. If I were to identify what I see as the primary principle used to select images for each theme, I would say it is the montage. The images in each thematic album are edited together by Chemiakin as if they were shots in a film. Possibly, this is montage in its most extreme form, as was advanced by Russian and Ukrainian filmmakers in the 1920s. The ubiquitous presence of digital collections of images in our time, and also the standardized mechanisms in the organization of these collections, aﬀects every aspect of artistic culture. In this regard, a new genre of visual art becomes important: a subjective and idiosyncratic collection of cultural images, chosen by a particular artist. If earlier artists created unique paintings or series of paintings or prints on a given theme, contemporary artists can make their own contribution to our culture in a diﬀerent way: by presenting new ways of seeing and organizing already existing

Screenshot, Digital Musée Imaginaire

cultural images or other artifacts, and also exposing and critiquing the current classification conventions. Although a series of important artistic projects used the format of image collections as early as the 1960s (for example, “The Museum of Contemporary Art” of Marcel Broodthaers from 1968-1974, and “The Color of a Fleaʼs Eyes: A Collection of Images” by Terin Saimon in 2021),*** their primary purpose was to critique the institutionalized systems. Chemiakinʼs project has quite a diﬀerent goal: a meta-collection of already existing art, which instructs the spectator to see art diﬀerently than does a curator or an algorithm. Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is not compiled with the help of computer-vision algorithms, artificial intelligence, or a group of experts. This is the vision of a single ***

URL: (https://tarynsimon.com/works/picture_collection/#1).

artist—a unique individual as opposed to many. This singularity stands out on the background of computer-selected media collections on social media sites. Image search engines and recommendation pages of image apps expose us to an endless stream of images. Their quality and relevance diﬀer dramatically. In contrast, every album of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is divided into sub-sections, or folders, that are deliberately small, each containing perhaps several dozen images. Each image has been carefully chosen to enter into a dialogue with every other image in the folder. In other words, in contrast to the current “noisy” and redundant algorithmic visual culture, using a small number of templates, compositions, themes, celebrity images, and so on that are used by millions of creators, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is entirely devoid of “noise.” Nothing is repeated, and each image is unique. Its immense breadth and the artistʼs unique curatorial methods and vision make the Musée into an unparalleled endeavor, oﬀering an extraordinary experience unlike anything else in our contemporary algorithmic-driven visual culture.

Lev Manovich Distinguished Professor, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) Director, Cultural Analytics Lab

The Digital Transformation of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire O

ver the last 60 years Mihail Chemiakin has collected nearly three million reproductions of art works sorted into over a thousand diﬀerent themes. For all these years, the research was carried out in analog form: the artist himself cut out and sorted illustrations from books, newspapers, and magazines. He created a modular storage method for the results (shelves, boxes, sub-files), and a standardized format for their demonstration. In 2002 on an episode from a series on films and lectures about Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire for the “Kultura” television channel, Mihail Chemiakin uttered a prophetic pronouncement: “All this needs to be digitalized! This should all be transferred to an electronic format.” At various times work was done on the digitalization of the research materials, but the most substantial digitalization took place in 2022, when Arkhênum in Bordeaux, France, supported by the Foundation for the Preservation and Digital Transformation of World Culture, scanned more than 700 boxes from Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire over several months. Thanks to this, an electronic copy was made of the core of the archive, consisting of 180,000 images. The process of digitalization, that is, the logical transfer of materials into an electronic structure, is a systemic challenge that requires a high level of immersion into the essence of the archive, and the development of a method of adaptation of the project to a digital format. The creation of the Digital Musée Imaginaire began with just such an immersion. Art researchers with experience in museum and archival work were brought into the project, as well as the “Red Mad Robot,” tech company (Moscow, Russia). Working together for months, the participants conducted an analysis of the archiveʼs structure. Regular training sessions on the selection of unsorted reproductions were conducted under Mihail Chemiakinʼs direct control. In the early stages of the work, it was decided to create two sections for the Web version: an “analog archive” and a “digital archive.” The Analog Archive is the digitalized “mirror” of the physical structures maintained in Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, built according to the following scheme: 1. Research Type 1.1. Material for work: images that Chemiakin selects for use in the creation of his own creative work. 1.2. Comparative Opus: materials of interest for comparative analysis within the framework of a theme.

2. Theme Black archive box (or a series of boxes, included in one theme), labelled by the artist. For example, “Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art.” 3. Sub-Theme One of several manila folders stored in the archive boxes. For example, “Absurd Staircases” or “Multiple Ladders.” 4. Comparative Opus Black cardboard sheets of standard size on which are glued reproductions based on the results of visual analysis and their detected similarity. 5. Reproductions Cut out of books, newspapers, magazines, and other print media, or images printed from the Internet. In the Internet analog archive, all names and even the punctuation that Chemiakin used have been preserved. In fact, this “conservation” of his legacy of sixty years is part of his research work. The Digital Archive opens up new possibilities for research and solves problems that emerged in the course of research using the existing analog archive. In this section of the project, the scanned reproductions were “separated” from the preservation of the analytic order of “comparative opuses,” physically glued to cardboard and presented as a gallery. The possibility of a virtual unification of the contents of the boxes, folders, and images under one theme or sub-theme, and also establishes the possibility of attributing a single reproduction to several themes simultaneously. Earlier, working in an analog environment, Chemiakin needed to photograph these reproductions or scan and print them to add them to diﬀerent folders. This process wasted substantial time and was inconvenient, whereas in a digital format the multiple reproduction of images is much simpler to achieve. The data bases for digital and analog archives are separate, although a function has been created to allow users to cross from the analog side to the digital side and back via an archival “card” of each image. These “cards” also contain titles, authors, and additional working information (if there is such). All these possibilities on the platform demonstrate the dynamic nature of Chemiakinʼs research, which can continue endlessly: the interthematic structure of the functions of the Digital Musée Imaginaire allows for the migration between archives of images, comparative opuses, and themes. Thus we have before us not only a digital copy of Chemiakinʼs archive, but also a fully-fledged instrument for the development of his artistic research, which one might call the “digital copy of a masterʼs system of thought,” a reflection of his unique visual analysis of stages of development of art.

Testing the hypothesis of using neural networks in the Digital Musée Imaginaire During the preparation stage, a hypothesis was formulated about the possibility of using the technologies of machine learning and computer vision to work on Mihail

Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. This task was carried out by RDL (a subsidiary of “red_ mad_robot,”) with the participation of art historians. In accordance with the results of the analysis of possible solutions, the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) neural network, introduced by “Open AI” in 2021, was chosen. The particularity of this system resides in its ability to work simultaneously with texts and images, linking images to descriptions. CLIP has been “trained” on an enormous amount of data (more than 400 million images and their descriptions), and can determine the degree to which an image matches the concepts in its catalogue. For example, the text “green car” will be transformed into a vector that represents the semantic content of the description. The visual coder uses a convolutional neural network to isolate characteristics of the image of a green car: the form, size, texture, and color of the objects in the photographs. Then the query vector and the image vector are compared, and CLIP classifies an image as a “green car.” The next step of research required a test of the hypotheses related to the classification and selection of images. 1) Test of the classification hypothesis The research team at first postulated that on the basis of the characteristics identified by the neural networks, the themes from Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire couild be defined, after which it would be possible to identify and add various new images. To test the hypothesis the researchers chose images from 32 themes, including: Griﬀons / Cubes / Grotesque Masks / Grimaces / Shadows / Monsters / Trees / Crucifixion / Obscured images / Cuts / Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects / Blurred Images. The test of this hypothesis demonstrated that the neural network could not, in the majority of cases, recognize one out of two or three of the closest variants of themes established by Chemiakin. 2) Test of the sorting hypothesis The researchers expected that it would still be possible with the help of sorting methods to divide the images into groups per Chemiakinʼs themes. To test this, they took 4,000 images from the collection of the Musée Imaginaire. From the results of the test they came to the conclusion that in all cases, only visually similar images were identified. Not a single applicable algorithm could reproduce the themes of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. 3) Test of the automatic tagging and large dictionaries hypothesis Further, a hypothesis was put forward that the neural network could “describe” the image with the help of tags, using a predetermined set of attributes. The researchers expected that the more words for the description of the content were loaded into the neural network, the more accurately it would select the tags that describe the content of a given image. They decided to use dictionaries rather than attempt the manual formation of a massive list, in order to simplify the task. Each image from the selection and each dictionary were loaded into the neural network, resulting in a high probability of detection of each tag. The output of the test demonstrated that the use of large dictionaries increases the quality of the chosen tags - they can describe the content of the images with maximum precision.

A correct identification for Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art

An incorrect identification for Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art

4) The search for similar images The next hypothesis was connected with the search for similar images within the collection of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. On the basis of automatic tagging, the neural network formulates a linguistic description of the imagesʼ attributes and can then identify images with the same (or similar) descriptions. The results showed that with simple verbal queries the neural network could select images related to the themes with a rather high reliability. Work on the Iconclass and Artsy sites as well as and also in Googleʼs intellectual search engine is organized in a similar fashion. Using the same database, the hypothesis of the possibility of “image query” searches was tested. The method confirmed the hypothesis that the neural network can search for the most appropriate visual materials. Thus, this method can be used to identify duplicate images in Chemiakinʼs collections, simplifying their upload to the archive. However, it is necessary to create metrics of similarity that can diﬀerentiate duplicates from originals. On the whole, the results showed that searches by text queries and visual images render satisfactory results, and the use of simple text queries are even more predictable. However, not a single algorithm could reproduce the thematic groupings in Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire with 100 percent accuracy. Based on the experiments described above, two digital services were created for the creation of searches.

Integration of the Neural Network into the Digital Musée Imaginaire The first digital service was developed for the creation, editing and attribution of all images (Comparative Opus and reproductions) and also for the transfer of data from the storage base created in the process of digitalizing the analog archive. This work is available not only to researchers, but to a wider circle of users of the Digital Musée Imaginaire. They do not have the right to make changes to the archive, they can only view it. This service enables searches by key words. The second digital service is a separate database, unrelated to the central archive, and contains models for research of themes, sub-themes, and tags. It provides the possibility of a searches for images using automatic tagging image. The given service does not depend upon themes, sub-themes, or other categories established by Chemiakin. The functionality is designed for research purposes and is inaccessible to the wider audience — with its help, under the supervision of the artist and creator of the Musée Imaginaire, new parallels in images already present in the archive can be brought to light. It turned out that it was impossible to combine searches in the Digital Musée Imaginaire with neural network modular searches: there was too great a diﬀerence in the nature of the algorithms and logic of the queries. For example, a standard search can be made using an artistʼs name, while a neural network search only works on the basis of visual data. *** Globalization, which strengthened steadily throughout the 20th century, has brought about new possibilities for dialogue and cultural enrichment between diﬀerent countries and peoples. In this context Mihail Chemiakin labored for 60 years on a unique, philosophical-aesthetic system of analysis of the heritage of world culture, creating his massive Musée Imaginaire. Technologies have turned the online archive of images into a means of communication. And today, the IT industry has made possible not only the creation of new projects, but an expansion of earlier projects through digital transformation. The work on the Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire has not only allowed the conservation of the existing analog project, but also opened up possibilities for further development: with the help of the integration of neural networks, new tools were created that allow Chemiakin, his students, and followers to add to the archive and continue the research. Nonetheless, the original ambitious idea that we could create a “digital copy of a system of thought created by a master,” which could allow for the continuation of the visual research without the personal participation of Mihail Chemiakin, proved impossible.

Graph of distribution of correct answers

Digital platform scheme

The reason for this is not related to any weakness of the technological team, but in the inimitability of the artistʼs individuality and his original view, his creative quests, his visual experience, his mood, ideas, all of which which cannot be predicted or repeated. Today and in the future the Digital Musée Imaginaire may serve as a springboard for interdisciplinary research, articles, dissertations, books, and the creation of a whole range of new projects, including those in the digital space.

Ilya Samofeev Operations Director for red_mad_robot

Aleksey Abakumov Director of the Digital Musée Imaginaire Project

Early Studies 1963–1971

Beginning in 1963 Mihail Chemiakin compiled his first comparative analyses, based on his own method of image systematization and classification

Similarities. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

Circles. Paper, collage

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

The play of proportions. Dislocation. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Interior space in sculpture. Circles-holes. Metaphysical busts. Paper, collage

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

Metaphysical schemes. Paper, collage

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Metaphysical heads. The Filonov method. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

Metaphysical figures. The Filonov method. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

Mexico 8ᵗʰ century Germany 1503 Netherlands 16ᵗʰ century Russia 20ᵗʰ century

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Metaphysical figures. Paper, collage

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

Metaphysical busts. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Metaphysical heads. Metaphysical figures. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Metaphysical heads. Paper, collage, ballpoint pen

FIRST RESEARCH WORK Easter Island tattoos 16th century (Germany) - face covered with symbols Zodiac signs Germany 16th century Mexico 5th century Russia 20th century

EARLY STUDIES 1963–1971

Figures in circles and ovals. Paper, collage

FIRST RESEARCH WORK

Figures in circles and ovals. Paper, collage

Creation of the theory of Metaphysical Synthesism 1967

A page from Apollon-77, Paris, 1977, where the theory of Metaphysical Synthesism was first published

Vladimir Ivanov and Mihail Chemiakin in the artist's studio, Zagorodny Prospekt. Leningrad, USSR, 1965

METAPHYSICAL SYNTHESISM

Mihail Chemiakin, Diagram of the theory of Metaphysical Synthesism

Paris Period 1971–1980

After his expulsion from the USSR in 1971, the artist established himself in Paris 1971

Mihail Chemiakin in his studio. Paris, 1978

RESEARCH MATERIALS

Metaphysical Heads: Africa, Oceania, 1975, paper, collage, ink

PARIS PERIOD 1971–1980

Transformations, 1976, paper, collage, ink

RESEARCH MATERIALS

Transformations: South America, 1977, paper, collage, ink

PARIS PERIOD 1971–1980

Transformations: Carnivals, 1973, paper, collage, ink, pencil

RESEARCH MATERIALS

Transformations: African masks, paper, collage

PARIS PERIOD 1971–1980

Transformations, 1978, paper, collage, ink

RESEARCH MATERIALS

Metaphysical Heads, 1978, paper, collage, ink, watercolor

Theatrical release of Michel Lancelotʼs documentary film on Chemiakin in the Artists of our Time series, in which the artist discusses his Musée Imaginaire France, 1977

Berdyaev and Dostoevsky said that art in itself is international only when a person comes to the truly mystical depths of knowledge of art, then regardless of nationality, regardless of race, art becomes the property of everyone. Mihail Chemiakin From the film Artists of our Time, 1977

FILMS

Stills from Artists of our Time, 1977

Exhibition of Chemiakinʼs Transformations series Fischer Fine Art gallery, London, 1980

ihail Chemiaknʼs present setting is a grand apartment at No. 1, rue lʼAdmiral Coligny, Paris 1er., just behind the Louvre. From its large windows he can at any time view the severe classical pillared façade of that Temple of Culture. The artistʼs transformations begin with his own external circumstances: the change from the oppressed dissident of 1970, then the Russian refugee with all his worldly goods in one little suitcase, to the master of an old grand-bourgeois apartment with a view of the Louvre… Will he… by means of dark furniture from the Flea Market, antiquated clothesstands sprouting top hats, and an outsize dog kennel in the kitchen… transform all these rooms into a stage set for Chekhov or Mrozek? In which case he could be his own leading actor, in his riding boots, close-fitting outfit of dark leather, headband, and the Russian cross on a heavy chain resting on his chest. One might almost succumb to the illusion of a superficial theatregoer, and consider the production more important than the content of the piece… However, if one succeeds in penetrating

to the final room… one soon knows better. Here are cupboards full of innumerable portfolios containing the neatly pasted-up sheets of cardboard which make up Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. In many hours of labour he has compiled a Universal Anthology of Form, culled from art books, catalogues, post cards, advertising brochures, old prints and maps, works of zoology and botany, amateur snapshots, reports of archaeological digs, and from all these he them derives his own forms. He shows me the sheet of the “Anthology of the Horse,” ranging from prehistoric sculpture via Chinese tomb figures to the torso of a horse on a Greek amphora, and in the midst of these Chemiakinʼs own shorthand symbol for a horseʼs head. Next comes a sheet displaying all conceivable examples of roundness — from a belt buckle via plates and mirrors to the spherical mask. Then a sheet dwelling on the fascination of enclosed contrasted with open forms — from the ground plan of a prehistoric town or temple to the nude-like curves of shell-forms. Amidst this positively Alexandrian library of form he celebrates his metaphysical transformations, performs his metamorphoses of visual independence. How do these transformations work out in detail? There are two distinct ways. In one case the divers visual elements of an anthology of some shape are all simplified into one “shorthand symbol”, one ʻletterʼ in Chemiakinʼs individual handwritten alphabet. The newly minted “letter” can then be incorporated in a picture or a drawing, often with a diﬀerent emphasis, or it may simply be left for the moment as a visual memorandum. In the other case Chemiakin may, for instance, ring some antique flower drawing or an 18th century map of a town with a few swift electrifying strokes on the original sheet, and thus make a visual conquest of the traditional form itself. It is like the first transcription of a leitmotiv, from which, as in music, the various workings out develop in a logical manner. The forms then take on an independent life, a new colouring, and diﬀerent coloured backgrounds plunge Chemiakinʼs fresh creation into a shimmering half-light, like marine plants in a garden of coral. The artist has instilled a soul into the liberated form, and thus given it access to a new metaphysical — or, more accurately, pantheistic — dimension. Chemiakin is indeed developing a new kind of “conservative” art, which will restore integrity to the term “conservative” and rescue it from opprobrium of outdated avant-garde movements. The visual traditions, from all over the world and spanning all eras and all cultures, to him are the ever-present elements which his distinctive sense of colour and texture discovers, collects, translates, and combines afresh to delight the beholder with a “new harmony”. Kandinskyʼs great achievement at the beginning of the century — the breakthrough from realism to the completely abstract — is now, with the century on its way out, being reinterpreted for our time by Chemiakin. In place of the explosive penetration of reality by the revolutionary gesture of pure abstraction, there is a re-appreciation of traditional realities and their transformation into forms of pantheistic symbolism: a religiously tinged reinstatement of a visual tradition; a return to the spirit of our ancestors, as reflected in the colour plates of venerable atlases or old-fashioned flower pieces. The impulse is to paint new icons, instead of peppering canvases with Dadaist blank cartridges.

Wolfgang Fischer, 1980 77

American Period 1981–2007

Chemiakin moves to the US, bringing with him his Musée Imaginaire 1981

Archive of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, New York, 1987–1995

MUSÉE IMAGINAIRE

Archive of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, New York, 1987–1995

Master Class at Stanford University Stanford, CA, 1982

MASTER CLASSES

Comparative opus: Metaphysical Heads, 1977–1992, paper, collage, ink

Master Classes at the University of San Francisco San Francisco, CA, 1985–1986

MASTER CLASSES

Mihail Chemiakin working on Transformation from Velazquezʼ Las Meninas during a master class at the University of San Francisco, 1986

Mihail Chemiakin, Transformation from Velázquezʼ Las Meninas, 1986–1987, pastel, colored pencil on paper

Master Class: The analytical method of Pavel Filonov at Oxford University Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1989

MASTER CLASSES

Master class with Mihail Chemiakin, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1986

Mihail Chemiakin, The Analytical Method of Pavel Filonov, 1989, pastel, colored pencil on paper

Master Class: Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis at the University of San Francisco San Francisco, CA, 1994

MASTER CLASSES

Master class with Mihail Chemiakin, San Francisco, 1994

Sanctuaries of Time: The Research Works of Mihail Chemiakin To reach beyond form itself, to the very mystery of being. Paul Klee

n the autumn of 1994, students, faculty and special guests, buzzing with anticipation and excitement, crowded into a huge auditorium at the University of San Francisco. On the stage stood a large easel, set up with three blank sheets of black paper side by side. A live jazz group complemented the crowdʼs mood with the rich texture of the music to which Chemiakin likes to work. Stanley Nel, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, introduced the guest of honor. When one studies the history of art, one finds oneself at times standing in utter awe at the achievements of some of the great figures of the past: the moving icons of Rublev, the poetic lines of Botticelli, Leonardoʼs scientific and artistic creations, Picassoʼs dramatic experiments and the emotional intensity of Frida Kahlo. I have often thought about what would happen if we could go back in time and be with those artists at the magic moment of creation, the moment when the artist, for however fleeting a time, escapes mortality and achieves greatness. I believe it is André Malraux who said: “One of the great powers of art is its ability to remind human beings of the greatness they ignore within themselves.” It is through the generosity of a great living artist, Mihail Chemiakin, that tonight we stand at the brink of one of those magical moments. As Chemiakin approached the podium, he must have remembered an especially memorable moment in 1984 when the University of San Francisco conferred upon him an honorary doctorate, citing not only the obvious artistic accomplishments for which he deserved recognition but also the profundity of his research into the very foundations of art.

His studio archives contain a vast collection of images, culled from every era of art, each of which Chemiakin has documented, catalogues, intensively studied and analyzed. This virtual obsession with research into past art has prompted an eminent American scientist, Dr. Mark Noble, to say of Chemiakin: In this concern for his role as a stepping stone for the development of art in the twenty-first century, and the centuries beyond, I recognize in Chemiakin the spirit of a great scientist. On that evening in October, when Chemiakin gave his third master class at the University of San Francisco, this scientific spirit became clearly evident. After an eloquent presentation of his research on the subject of the Metaphysical Head, Chemiakin began to create, swiftly but surely, three fie pastel versions of heads, as an almost mesmerized audience looked on. Intellectual analysis was superbly matched by experimental creativity and technical virtuosity. Chemiakinʼs unique quality lies in his ability to attain a profound understanding of past works of art and to penetrate the very structure of art itself. At the same time, his outstanding creative power and technical skill allow him to capture the essence of those past works and to distill that essence into his own new creations. Consider how Chemiakin transformed an unusual form from an ancient Egyptian papyrus. In his mixed media version, the artist has kept the main features of the original form but has added many new elements of his own. It is as if this strange figure had been waiting for centuries, like the mummies of the pharaohs, finally to be restored to life by the artist, “the giver of life,” according to the Egyptian conception. Although it is anchored in that ancient image, Chemiakinʼs creation subtly suggests a new and abstract dialog between geometric and biomorphic shapes. It is as though an actor, previously without a role, has now been given one, made to measure, on a stage created by Chemiakin. Gossamer lines, melodic colors and rich textures provide a harmonious décor for the piece. In The Eye, Chemiakin has transformed an ancient Arab medical manuscript. With surgical precision, he has sharpened the lines, brought every detail into clear focus and imparted a deeper meaning to the original forms. This is no longer merely a descriptive drawing; it has become the essence of sharpness, clarity and vision.

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Just as the master class allowed its audience to witness the moment of creation, so these research works oﬀer a glimpse into the artistʼs creative process and provide the key to Chemiakinʼs art… Whether or not we have an extensive background in art, most of us look at art in a linear fashion: each work, each artists tends to be viewed as a small segment of the “history of art.” Chemiakinʼs genius lies in his comprehensive ability to see the art of diﬀerent cultures and era simultaneously and as one. He is able to transcend the limitations of the linear mentality and thus gain access to the underlying structure of art. As the noted physicist, Louis de Broglie, has said: In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present and future is given en bloc, and the entire collection of events, successive for each of us, which forms the existence of a material particle, is represented by a line, the world line of the particle… Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exists prior to his knowledge of them. Chemiakinʼs visionary intuition makes us see what otherwise we could not: by connecting all the pieces of this giant puzzle and by leading us through his musée imaginaire, he helps us “reach beyond form itself to the very mystery of being,” as Paul Klee suggested.

Chemiakinʼs systematic and unrelenting analysis of form is rooted in the belief that this most important tool will provide us with a deeper knowledge of art and of life itself. While many artists and art historians consider form an important but limited element of the visual vocabulary, the intensity of Chemiakinʼs research and the consequent depth of his understanding invest form with the power to reveal fundamental realities…

Jean Audigier, Edward Muenk Professors of Fine Art, University of San Francisco Originally published in Exhibition of Works by Mihail Chemiakin: Texts, 1995, State Hermitage Museum, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Bibliopolis

Publication of Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis Ferzt Books, New York; Surgical Neurology, Tulsa, OK, 1994

PUBLICATIONS “Open the door” — the phrase is clear enough. But if someone says it to us in an open field, we cease to understand. The phrase can be understood if used in the figurative sense. Everything depends on the listenerʼs conception, whether or not it can introduce these changeable conditionalities, whether or not it can seek them out. Paul Valéry

Complex and torturous are the psychological paths of half-unconscious creative man. K. Sunnenberg

an has always striven to overcome the limits of ordinariness and habit in the perception and depiction of himself and his kind. Images of man began to undergo metamorphoses in distant prehistoric times. This was primarily related to attempts to picture a Deity, to portray the Unknown. Watching his peers grow older and die, prehistoric man was apparently little inclined to worship his own kind, even long before he perceived God in man (Christianity). Perhaps this is why the Lascaux cave paintings, along with realistic human figures, portray enormous mysterious creatures whose heads are depicted as spheres remarkably similar to 22nd-century astronautsʼ space suits out of the novels of Bradbury and Asimov. These drawings have already led some to propose a theory of early visitors from outer space to our planet. Theories aside, the fact remains that the Lascaux painters left us proof that they possessed a phenomenal sense of deformation and an extraordinary feeling for harmony and proportion. Although they are 20,000 years old, the Lascaux cave paintings are more up-todate and contemporary than the works of our most extremist reformers. André de Segonzac, 1951

Cults and religions multiplied, and with them metamorphoses of the figure, and particularly the head, became more diverse and numerous. The abstracted representation of the head of the Deity gave way to various fantastical images, executed in a more recognizable realistic manner. Human shoulders sprouted heads of beasts, birds, snakes and various reptiles, sometimes transformed by the artistʼs imagination and the demands of cult followers into heads of dragons and other chimerical creatures (Assyria, Egypt, Asia, Western Europe). The head doubled, tripled, multiplied. In Tibetan Buddhist art we see many-tiered multiple-headedness. In the art of Ceylon the human head is half-human, half-snake;

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

in Western Europe, half-head, half-skull. The idea of the hermaphrodite was rendered as a merged male and female head. Planets descended to the shoulders of the human figures in order to take part in an endless game of transmutation: Sunheads, Moon-heads, Mars-heads. Hair as rays, hair as tongues of flame, hair as snakes (Medusa). Eyes were also subject to metamorphosis: the Cyclopsʼ single eye, many-eyed Argus. The form of the skull began to be deformed in extraordinary ways. (Heads of Chinese saints, twelfth century). Nature flattened and shrank the skulls of microcephalics, and blew up hydrocephalicsʼ heads to monstrous proportions. There were attempts on the part of man to remake the structure and form of the human head in nature. Skulls were bounds in infancy to achieve their elongation either vertically (“tower-skulls”) or horizontally (Ancient Egypt, Central Asia, Pre-Columbian America). The Chinese grew monsters in glass jars for sale to the imperial courts. The skulls of these unlucky creatures were of the most fabulous form. Even after death, the human head continued to be the object of metamorphosis. When someone died, Oceanic Aborigines smeared his (already severed) head with clay and sculpted from it an image resembling the dead man, decorating the clay with shells. The “head-hunter” tribe shrunk the severed heads of its enemies to a tiny size, managing to preserve the individual features of the victim. Skull have been decorated with gold and precious stones. They have been colored with paint and had artificial eyes placed in their sockets. The image of “Adamʼs head,” “The Skull,” “Death,” have an undisputed significance in the art of all times and all peoples. This eternal philosophical theme merits many volumes of serious research. Later epochs brought the emergence of a new type of metamorphosis of the head: masks. Ritual masks. Theatrical Masks, grotesque masks (Ancient Greek theater, Commedia dellʼArte). Carnival masks (Venice). Diﬀerent peoples have diﬀerent aesthetic values. In Africa, the neck was elongated, lips stretched, earlobes enlarged, teeth filed down. In its own way, this too was a sort of carnival. There are elements of magnificent metamorphic aesthetics in the stunning color facial tattoos of Tahiti and Melanesia, and in African raised tattoos. With the emergence in the twentieth century of numerous art movements — Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and so on, — the head again became the object of countless metamorphoses and transformations. It has often been depicted in purely abstract forms and patterns. A sort of aesthetic and spiritual bridge between the artists of the twentieth century and masters of ancient times. With the help of the Surrealists, deeply immersed in the subconscious, the head was transformed into ever more chimeras, often surpassing the old mastersʼ fantasy.

PUBLICATIONS

Here we are witnessing the fulfilment of Dostoevskyʼs prophetic remark, “The most terrible trial is the trial by freedom.” For as Joshua Reynolds said as early as 1772, “Art has its boundaries, though imagination has none.” The mechanism of imagination must be perfected. It demands taste and irreproachable technical skill. In order to create art, I must find for myself all that which is close to me in the innumerable works of the old masters, in nature, in geographical maps, architectural blueprints, often in medical diagrams and drawings. And on this all-important base I must build my own ideas and visions. In this way I juxtapose what I see before me with visual knowledge. This knowledge helps my inner self to predominate over literal reality. I always remember that “representation is achieved beyond the limits of direct representation” (Qi-Baishi 1926). And so I believe that “a work is as good as it is immeasurable and inaccessible to reason” (Goethe). I try to reach in my works “that mysterious and deep sense of form which is a sort of hieroglyph” (Delacroix). In this book I would like to show a small part of my research on the Metaphysical Head and a few examples of my own creative results. I am confident that in the near future an institute of research will be founded to study the history of development and ties among cultures of all mankind, where artists and art historians, together with medical researchers and scholars in the fields of psychology, physics, neurosurgery and genetics, will work fruitfully together, enriching one another with their discoveries and research. Through careful study and analysis of the sources of ancient cultures and the synthesis of their achievement in the field of harmonic form, it will perhaps be possible to approach that mysterious interrelation of metaphysical forms of the history of man, and, as the Swiss scientist Johann Friedrich Miescher, discoverer of nuclean acid, the molecule of inheritance, said of stereoisomers: “With their help, we can express all the endless variety of hereditary signs, just as with help of twenty-four or thirty letters of the alphabet we can compose words and express ideas in any language” (1897). In closing I would like to quote Henri Poincaré: Intellectual beauty provides satisfaction in itself, and perhaps more for this than for the future good of mankind does the scholar doom himself to long and arduous labors… Our mind is just as feeble as our feelings; it would be lost amid the complexities of the world if that complexity did not have its own harmony.

Mihail Chemiakin May 1994

Master Class: Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis at the Waterford Symposium University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 1996

MASTER CLASSES

Master class with Mihail Chemiakin, Salt Lake City, 1996

Master Class: Metaphysical heads and busts at Franklin & Marshall College Lancaster, PA, 1998

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MASTER CLASSES

Metaphysical Heads, 1977–1992, paper, collage, ink

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Inauguration of the Museum of the Imagination Hudson, NY, 2000

Mihail Chemiakin in the Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, New York, 2000

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Museum of the Imagination to open on Sunday The Museum of the Imagination will open Sunday in Hudson at

The Museum of the Imagination is named in honor of French

217 Warren St. (second floor), with its first thematic exhibition,

author, critic and long-time Minister of Culture, Andrei Mal-

"Spheres: An Examination of the Sphere in Life and Art."

raux's, "Musee Imaginaire," a project based on the collection of

The exhibition traces the roles and representations of the sphere

reproduced images for comparison and analysis.

through the art of all times and cultures as well as in nature and

"Spheres" presents a research conducted by the Institute of the

science. Hundreds of images of spheres provided by the Insti-

Philosophy and Psychology of Art (founded by Chemiakin). The

tute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art in Claverack show

Institute conducts ongoing imagery research on thousands of

spheres that are geometrically perfect; spheres that are bro-

themes defined both by subject (e.g. "Still Life Paintings with

ken, cut, stacked, piled up; spheres within spheres; aggressive

Bottles") and by technique (e.g. "Roughly finished surfaces in

spheres; architectural spheres; ephemeral spheres; and meta-

sculpture"), as well as by theme (e.g. "Images of War").

physical spheres; among others.

The non-commercial exhibition, sponsored by the Bridg-

Along with the research are original works on the sphere by

ing the Ocean Foundation, will open with a reception from

contemporary artists including Vladimir Zimakov, Anatoly Vas-

5-7 p.m. Sunday, and will be open from noon to 5 p.m. Friday

siliev, Daniel Yusupov, Akhmed Tchakhkiev, Leon Smith, Susu-

through Monday.

mu Sato, Brigid Rockwell, Gennady Parfeniouk, Giorgy Orlov,

For more information, call Zimakov at (518) 671-6711.

Arkady Lvov, Eugene Korpachev, Gregory Kepinski, Mihail Chemiakin and Sarah Berney.

During the exhibition, the documentary film "Spheres," by Chemiakin and Andrei Zagdansky (AZ Films, 1997), will be shown.

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Spheres in Art and Life Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2000 National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria, Nalchik, Russia, 2006 Festival of Contemporary Art, Khanty-Mansiisk, Russia, 2007 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2009 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2016

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SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Spheres: Аrmillary sphere, 17th–18th century; A. Rodchenko, 1920; T. Karpowicz, 20th century

Comparative opus: Spheres: Globe, 17th –18th century; J. Plensa, 1990

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AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Spheres: Armillary sphere, 14th–16th century; P. Manship, 1928

Comparative opus: Spheres: H. Bosch, 1500-1510

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SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Spheres: Globe and armillary sphere in the style of Louis XVI, 18th century; Atlas, 17th century; Atlas, late 16th century

Comparative opus: Spheres: K. Yanobe, 1990; K. Yanobe, 1990

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AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Spheres: E. Lindquist, 1970; R. Baiker, 1995; G. Kuehn, c. 1975–1989; Yarn; D. Lipski, 1990; A. Pomodoro, c. 1974

Comparative opus: Spheres: K. Funayama, 1959

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SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Spheres: «Globe» Fountain, Olympic Park, Seoul, 1988

Comparative opus: Spheres: Necklace made of cultured pearls, 21st century; K. Fritsch, 1983

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AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Spheres: T. Karpowicz, 1994; G. Herms, 1978

Comparative opus: Spheres: P. Manship, 1918; Mario Ceroli, 1987; Mario Ceroli, 1968

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SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Spheres: J. L. Parant, 1980s; M. François, 1995; J. L. Parant, 1980s

Comparative opus: Spheres: Medici coat of arms, 17th century

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AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Spheres: J. Granville, 1844; Juggler, 20th century

Comparative opus: Spheres: Celtic Coin, II–I century BC; J. Mroz, 1972; S. Meddaugh, c. 1992

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SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Spheres: J. L. Parant, 1985; 1980-1990

Comparative opus: Spheres: 19th century rosaries; O.Piene, 1961

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Forcing us to Look at Art in a New Way Welcome to Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, the brainchild

From the very first exhibit in the category of the “Single Spheres”

of Russian artist, sculptor, and art historian Mihail Chemiakin!

the mystical role of the sphere in art can be felt. Here a repro-

The new and unusual exposition is fully dedicated to the sphere

duction of the artist da Crevalcore (16th сentury) next to the

and its role in art and nature. The exhibition is divided into two

work of Kazimir Malevich (early 20th century) and of Richard

parts, in two rooms: the first room displays reproductions and

Serra (late 20th сentury). Amazingly, these works, created at dif-

photographs, the result of scientific research; the second — orig-

ferent times, display images that bring each other to mind, as

inal works of contemporary artists. The reproductions and pho-

do other exhibits in this category — spheres by diﬀerent artists

tographs were collected by Mihail Chemiakin himself, over the

using similarly rough texture. The next part of the exposition

course of many years.

acquaints the observer with a collection of works by diﬀerent

They have been carefully cut from magazines, books, catalogs

contemporary artists of single spheres, exhibited in galleries

and placed in black boxes in accordance with their themes.

throughout the world. Interestingly, the artists are diﬀerent, but

Themes such as “Spheres in Art of the old Masters,” “Trees in

the idea is the same. This always elicits amazement and count-

Art,” “Hands in Art,” “Images of Death,” “Sphinxes,” “Fauns,” “Still

less questions. Once, during an excursion of American school

Lifes,” “Strange Techniques in Painting,” and so on in Chemi-

children, one of them accused Serra and Malevich of plagiarism.

akinʼs collection number in the thousands — in each are hun-

But whether all these artists knew about the existence of each

dreds of reproductions. Part of the collection of reproductions

otherʼs work remains a question.

on the theme of “Spheres in Art” provides the basis for this

In the next category, “Spheres with a Cut,” the work of René

exhibition.

Magritte neighbors a depiction of a sphere-like bell used on post

Visitors look at the exhibits with great curiosity. Few have seen

horses in the 19th century. In both cases, the spheres have rect-

anything like it. The room exhibiting reproductions opens with

angular cuts. Also shown are the Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomo-

a display of a scarab beetle, creating a perfect sphere out of

doro, Tulio, and other daredevils, who have smashed the ideal

dung. Adjacent to this is a photograph of an enormous sphere

form, revealing the inside of the sphere.

comprised of tiny beetles. Why do people and other living beings turn to the ideal shape of the sphere? Since ancient times, this image has been imbued with symbolism: the sphere embodies the universe, energy, and life. In the drawings of the old masters, the earth was often depicted as a sphere even before its shape was proven by science. The sphere is an ideal form, and for that reason the first exhibition of Chemiakinʼs museum is dedicated to it. In the room of reproductions (around 500 are displayed), the spheres are organized systematically into 22 categories — “Single Spheres,” “Multifaceted, Aggressive Spheres in Architecture,” “People made of Spheres,” “Spheres Made of Diﬀerent Materials,” “Spheres with Holes,” “Spheres with Dents,” “Spheres Lined

In another time, the idea of an aggressive sphere interested

up in Rows,” “Scattered Spheres,” “Suspended Spheres,” “Flying

many artists. Here we see Boschʼs thorny sphere (15th century),

Spheres,” and so on. In each category are shown reproductions

Heinrich Eckerʼs sphere with nails (20th century), and also pho-

and photographs of the work of sculptors, as well as creations

tographs of sphere-like plants with thorns.

of Her Highness Nature.

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At the exhibition numerous displays link painting and sculpture

dedicated to the theme of conceptual space. The Chechen artist

with nature. For example, the image of a hamster ovum hangs

Ahmed Tchakhkiev created a sphere on canvas using the bones

next to a reproduction of a sculpture by Eva Hesse, a sphere with

of ancient animals. There are some very curious works by the

a cable extending from it, which is reminiscent of the zoological

St. Petersburg artist Anatoly Vasiliev. A no less original construc-

photograph.

tion is the Polish artist Gregory Kepinskyʼs collage. There are

In the category of “Spheres with Dents,” photographs of one of

many interesting works and most importantly, there is some-

Marsʼs satellites — Phobos, is juxtaposed with a reproduction of

thing for everyone.

a sculpture by Lucio Fontana. Characteristically, his sculpture

No one leaves this this exhibition unmoved. Many take a philo-

was made later, and its form and texture are quite similar to the

sophical view of what they have seen, others simply meet with

surface of Phobos.

the works of artists that are new to them.

The category “People-spheres” or “People Made from Spheres,”

The exhibition turned out to be as interesting for specialists as

greatly interests children. Here we see 15th century engravings, illustrations from books of the 19th century, works from masters of the twentieth century — Rodchenko, Dali, and also the work of Bosch, which is positioned next to an installation by the contemporary Japanese artist K. Yanobe. Is there any material that has not been used to make a sphere? In the section “Spheres Made from Diﬀerent Materials” are works in wood and metal, papier-mâché, string, wires, spheres made from trash, dirt, flowers, and snow. For the most part this is work of our contemporaries. There are duplications. For example, it occurred to more than one artist to make a sphere from flowers — here we see flower spheres by D. L. Byars and M. Broodthaers. Aside from the reproductions and photographs, observers may

Pp. 114–115 Exhibition views, Spheres in Art and Life, Museum of the Imagination, 2000

also view the documentary film “Spheres,” created by Mihail Chemiakin and Andrey Zagdanskii (AZ Films, 1997).

it is for children, who discover the many facets of the sphere.

In the second hall room works of contemporary artists and

Some spend a long time visiting the exhibits, carefully looking

sculptors on the sphere are exhibited. The central installation is

at each reproduction and work, and others quickly glance at the

a work by Mihail Chemiakin himself, a rather large metal con-

exposition and return later.

struction with many diﬀerent spheres; wooden and metal, hol-

The exhibition helps observers to better understand the sur-

low and solid. The installation bears the name “A New Model

rounding world and forces them to look at art and everyday

of the Universe” and resembles a miniature cosmic world, the

life in a diﬀerent way, to think about history and the essence of

spheres hung in the air like strange small planets.

many familiar objects and phenomena.

Close by stands an interesting kinetic sculpture by Alan Smith. The hall is international in terms of the participating artists.

Vladimir Zimakov

Those exhibiting include Americans, Russians, Poles, Bulgar-

Director, Wedeman Gallery

ians, Japanese, and others. Some works are by emigrés from

Professor of Art & Design

the former Soviet Union. The Ukrainian sculptor Gennady

Lasell University, Newton, MA

Parfenyuk presented his series of computer-generated works

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AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

***

For the first time Petersburgers can acquaint themselves with

for several themes or sub-themes. He includes in the collection

the fruits of Mihail Chemiakinʼs more than forty years of re-

original works, and photographs he takes himself.

search. An exposition entitled “Spheres in Art” has opened at

“My collection shows the great diversity of views on one or anoth-

the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation on Sadovaya Street. Although

er theme, or philosophical and creative approaches. But I have

some of Chemiakinʼs admirers may have already seen a film by

more than 800 themes,” says Mihail Mihailovich. “Clothing, Fur-

the same name — one of twenty produced by the Kultura televi-

niture, and Death. Figures, and skulls, and feet, and knees, and

sion channel in the series Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musee Imaginaire,

biceps. There was a time when I couldnʼt imagine I would inter-

broadcast from time to time on the night ether.

est myself with peopleʼs internal organs... I organize films and

All of his creative life, Mihail Chemiakin has been engaged in

exhibitions to raise the level of education in artistic circles, but

research activities, and for just under half a century has collect-

as it has turned out, this is not just for artists.”

ed materials for an unusual thematic collection. He cuts illustrations from books, newspapers, catalogues, of which he some-

Vladimir Zheltov

times buys several copies — the same “picture” may be needed

Nevskaya vremya, 2009

Mihail Chemiakin with participants in the Spheres in Art exhibition, 2006, National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria. Nalchik, Russia

116

Installation at the National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria, 2006. Nalchik, Russia

SPHERES IN ART EXHIBITION

The exhibition The Sphere in Art is the sixth part of the large-scale project Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. Anthology of Forms, organized by the Northern Caucausus Branch of the State Museum of the Oriental Art together with the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation (St. Petersburg). The expression “the sphere of beauty” is quite appropriate for the current exhibition. Of course, many geometric images are utilized in world art, but the sphere is especially well regarded by artists of all times and all peoples. Its perfect form is seen through all of world art, from the masterpieces of well-known artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, Kazimir Malevich, Mihail Chemiakin, to utilitarian objects — armillary spheres, post-horse bells, snowballs, and beads. The exhibition consists of two parts. The first is academic and artistic, based upon the unique research of the projectʼs author Mihail Chemiakin, in which the artist demonstrates the multitude of images on the theme of spheres in world culture. For around forty years, the artist has collected pictures, gravures, photographs, clippings from magazines from the whole world, and created his own works. Citizens of the United States, St. Petersburg, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Khanty-Mansiisk have already seen this section. But the second section is presented for first time — it contains works of contemporary artists from Maikop, Cherkessk, Nalchik, Makhachkala, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Astrakhan, and other cities, selected through a competition, in the techniques of painting, drawings, photography, sculpture, art objects, and decorative applied art. Around 200 works of art were submitted to the competition but Chemiakin selected only 62 this time. In their works, the artists not only paid attention to the symbolic meaning of the sphere, but also experimented with its form, presenting it in many materials and textures, and playing with the size of the object.

Fatima Suleimanova, Curator of the Project “Sphere as an image in art” Maikop, 2016

Spheres, performance, Anwar Libabov and the Litsedei theater at the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2009. St. Petersburg, Russia

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Premiere of six episodes of the filmed-lecture series Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire on Russian televisionʼs “Kultura” channel Russia, 2002

The Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art Skulls in Art Spheres in Art Images of Death in Art Grimaces in Art Cries in Art

Most importantly, the artist compiles his Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire before the audienceʼs eyes, selecting the most unexpected objects, be they everyday items or the creations of a great master. Before us opens up a special world in the history of art, of art of the whole world, presented through the eyes of a truly outstanding artist. This is rare and wonderful because itʼs personal and subjective, steeped in his long years of thought about his profession and about the fate of world culture. Dmitry Shvidkovsky Rector and professor at Moscow Architectural Institute Introduction to the Series of Filmed Lectures Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire on the “Kultura” Channel

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FILMS

Stills from episodes of Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire

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Creation of the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation 2002, St. Petersburg, Russia

Foundation views, 2018

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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN FOUNDATION INTERIOR VIEWS

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The Reaper: Images of Death in Art Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2002 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2010

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IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Images of Death: I. Generalich, 1934; 1959

Comparative opus: Images of Death: A. Kubin, 1900; 1903

123

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Images of Death: Anonymous; P. Cézanne, 1898–1900; Anonymous

Comparative opus: Images of Death: Coatlicue statue, 15ᵗʰ–16ᵗʰ century; S. Herrán, 1918

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IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Images of Death: J. de Heem, c. 1660; Still Life, 16ᵗʰ–17ᵗʰ century; F. Gijsbrechts, 17ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Images of Death: F. Clemente, 1981; R. Magritte, 1935

125

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Images of Death: R. Horn, 2002

Comparative opus: Images of Death: L. Boulanger, c. 1829; A. Kubin, 20ᵗʰ

126

IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Images of Death: M. van Reymerswaele, the first half of the 16ᵗʰ century; D. Bailly, c. 1651

Comparative opus: Images of Death: Floor mosaic, 17ᵗʰ century, St. John's Cathedral, Malta

127

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Images of Death: Mosaic from Pompeii, 30 BC–14 AD; S. Dali, c. 1939

Comparative opus: Images of Death: Floor mosaic, 17ᵗʰ century, St. John's Cathedral, Malta

128

IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Images of Death: R. Horn, 2005;

Comparative opus: Images of Death: C. N. Gijsbrechts, 1668; 1666–1668

129

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Images of Death: L. Nesbitt, 1963; C. Langager. 1985; M. Kelley, 1989; M. Jackson, 1986; M. Nadin, 1987; R. Prince, 1991

Comparative opus: Images of Death: L. Fini, c. 1948

130

IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Images of Death: J. von Valkenburg, 1299; Anonymous; Fresco, 14ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Images of Death: J. de Valdés Leal, 1670–1672; Scipione, 1930

131

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Images of Death: T. E. Rosenthal, 1917; E. Normand, 1904

Comparative opus: Images of Death: H. Goltzius, 1614; L. van Leyden, c. 1519

132

IMAGES OF DEATH IN ART EXHIBITION Not only does the topic of death not frighten oﬀ museum vis-

acquire an understanding of death without fear and preconcep-

itors, it reminds them of the importance of enjoying the life

tions, to tell even children, as they do in Europe, where school

they have.

children are taken on excursions to see necropolises, museums,

An exhibition on Images of Death in Art has opened at the Mihail

and mummies. Death is the single theme that absolutely all peo-

Chemiakin Foundation. Such a number of visitors has not been

ple on earth have in common. And from the philosophical per-

seen for a very long time — evidently, the spectators have been

spective it is a continuation of life.”

attracted by the unusual theme. Displayed at the exhibition is

The visitors at this exhibition were not frightened by the paint-

Mihail Chemiakinʼs research on images of death that have come

ings and other artifacts on the theme of death, they were not

down to us from diﬀerent times and countries, as well as paint-

even upset. Perhaps such exhibitions force them to think about

ings, photographs, sculptures, and art objects of contemporary

the joy of life.

artists from diﬀerent cities in Russia. “We turned cowardly away from this theme during the Soviet era, when artists usually portrayed death as a nasty old woman with

Elena Dobryakova

a braid,” said Mihail Chemiakin, “but in any case, we need to

Neva Times, 2010

Mihail Chemiakin at the Images of Death in Art exhibition, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia, 2010

133

Premiere of seven episodes of the filmed-lecture series Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire on Russian televisionʼs “Kultura” channel Russia, 2003

Metaphysical Figures Metaphysical Heads Hands in Art Monsters in Art (Parts I and II) The Artist and the Theater Digest

134

FILMS

Stills from episodes of Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire

135

The Hand in Art Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2003 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2013 Voronezh State Academy of Arts, Voronezh, Russia, 2014 Kaliningrad Regional Scientific Library, Kaliningrad, Russia, 2016

136

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: M. Grünewald, c. 1515; H. Bellmer, 1933–1934; M. Grünewald, c. 1512–1515

Comparative opus: Hands: Washington Post cover, 1993; Postcard, 21ˢᵗ century

137

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: Anonymous

Comparative opus: Hands: M. Grünewald, c. 1515; 1512–1514; H. Moore, 1979

138

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: J.-B. Greuze, c. 1760; 1765

Comparative opus: Hands: Prosthetic Hands, c. 1580

139

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: Buddha Hand, 7ᵗʰ century, Horyuji Temple, Japan; B. Brake, 1970

Comparative opus: Hands: S. Neshat, 1996; H. Zenderoudi, c. 1960

140

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: R. Vashkevich, 2001

Comparative opus: Hands: Arm-reliquary, 14ᵗʰ–15ᵗʰ century; G. Zevola, 1987

141

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: G. Serpotta, c. 1688; Glove, late 18ᵗʰ–early 19ᵗʰ century; E. Rimmington, 1950

Comparative opus: Hands: F. Barocci, c. 1582–1586; A. van Dyck, the first half of the 17ᵗʰ century

142

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: B. Shahn, 1952; E., Chillida,1960–1980s

Comparative opus: Hands: J. Vanarsky, 1970s; 1978–1979

143

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: A. Rodin, 1885; S. Szukalski, 1917

Comparative opus: Hands: A. Rodin, c. 1885; c. 1906; J. Heartfield, 1928; A. Rodin, c. 1900; E. Druet, c. 1900; E. Druet, late 19ᵗʰ– early 20ᵗʰ century; Fat Lori's hand with a shortened index finger, 20ᵗʰ century; E. Druet, late 19ᵗʰ– early 20ᵗʰ century

144

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: G. Girope, 1965; J. Styrsky, 1940; J. Dine, 1960s; Fish Eye, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Hands: Stone disk with engraving, c. 1200–1600, North America; J. Krechowicz, 1960; Illustration to a treatise, 17ᵗʰ century; Amulet, Jordan, 19ᵗʰ century

145

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: Wax seal, c. 1880; Walking stick handle, 19ᵗʰ century; Tombstone, 1888

Comparative opus: Hands: A. Rodin, c. 1908

146

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Hands: J. R. Ipoustéguy, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Hands: J. R. Ipoustéguy, 1970s

147

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Hands: M. Grünewald, c. 1515

Comparative opus: Hands: R. Vashkevich, 2000; 1996

148

THE HAND IN ART EXHIBITION

Exhibition of works by contemporary artists on Hands in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011

Opening of the Hands in Art exhibition, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011

149

Monsters in Art Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2004 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2012

150

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Monsters: U. Aldrovandi, late 16ᵗʰ century; Book illustration, 16ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Monsters: S. Yabuuchi, 1990s

151

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Monsters: Le Mazurier, 1782

Comparative opus: Monsters: A. Martini, 1910

152

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Monsters: A. Rockman, 2000

Comparative opus: Monsters: A. Savinio, 1930–1931; J. Granville, 1829

153

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Monsters: Statue of the god Horus, 800–700 BC

Comparative opus: Monsters: U. Aldrovandi, late 16ᵗʰ century

154

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Monsters: A. Kubin, 1900

Comparative opus: Monsters: A vessel with a wide throat with volutes, c. 500 BC

155

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Monsters: Guardian of the Tomb, 8ᵗʰ century, China

Comparative opus: Monsters: R. Testard, 1496–1498; Anonymous

156

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Monsters: F. Tosalli, 1921; M. Speaker, 1987; USA, 19ᵗʰ century; C. Nivola, 1944; M. Mascherini, 1958; Fritz Røed, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Monsters: A. Savinio, 1950; 1948; A. Laleian, 1991; D. Chemiakine, 1993; D. Youngblood, 1983; The Cambridge centaur, 19ᵗʰ century

157

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Monsters: F. Bocchi, 17ᵗʰ–18ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Monsters: J. Callot, 1616; J. Callot, 1616

158

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Monsters: Gates of the Underworld grotto, c. 1552

Comparative opus: Monsters: Gilles de Kerversau, 2000s

159

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Monsters: U. Graf, 1418; A. Kubin, 1902

Comparative opus: Monsters: Anonymous, c. 1910

160

MONSTERS IN ART EXHIBITION

***

The exposition Monsters. Mythological Figures is made up of

monsters and vampires, works which, sadly, have no relation-

paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs.

ship with aesthetics. In contemporary art pathological elements

The heroes are mythological characters, mythical creatures,

have become popular - images that have no connection with an-

monsters, fairytale animals, images of the most diverse ep-

cient culture. People say that Chernobyl and other radioactive

ochs and cultures. More than 150 original works from artists in

catastrophes have aﬀected human nature, and therefore many

Russia and abroad, and unique exhibits from the personal col-

monsters have been spawned. In reality, monsters existed in

lection of Mihail Chemiakin, selected by him out of magazines,

the ancient world and the Middle Ages. In ancient Egypt and

catalogs of exhibitions, gravures, and his own photographs. The

ancient Greece, these characters were created in accordance

materials include canvas, paper, metal, wire, an aquarium com-

with an aesthetic. That is to say, the primary aesthetic princi-

pressor, chemistsʼ beakers, paper-mâché, clay, fabric, ceramics,

ples were maintained — beauty, harmony, and line. Some of

wood, bronze…

the first famous drawings of monstrous heads were created by

In the words of Marina Scherbakova, Director of the Mihail Ch-

Leonardo da Vinci. In the 17th century, Velázquez painted a se-

emiakin Foundation, more than 70 artists from St. Petersburg,

ries of portraits of dwarfs from the kingʼs court that were unusu-

Moscow, Murmansk, Taganrog, Minsk, and Toronto participat-

ally strong psychologically. When he was asked why he painted

ed in the exhibition.

them, he said, "There is nothing so ugly in nature that it cannot

“The exhibition does not show what I like, but rather how the

become beautiful in art."”

concept of "monstrosity" evolved,” explained Mihail Chemiakin, who came from France to the opening of the exposition. “We look at the diversity of artistsʼ views. We rejected hundreds of drawings submitted to the competition — pathetic attempts to

Svetlana Mazurova

make something comparable to horror films, connected with

Rossiiskya gazeta, 2011

Monsters, performance, Dance Erato, 2011, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia

Monsters in Art exhibition, 2011, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia

161

Metaphysical Heads and Busts Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2005 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014 Siberian Center of Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk, Russia, 2016

162

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Engraving, 16ᵗʰ century; S. Luchishkin, 1924

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Sarcophagus, presumably of Pharaoh Akhenaten, 14ᵗʰ century BC; The heads of Demeter and the titan Anita, 190–180 BC; Ancient Greece, 3ʳᵈ– 2ⁿᵈ century BC

163

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: A. Modigliani, c. 1911–1912

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Twin Mask Nda, 19ᵗʰ–20ᵗʰ century; Double mask, 19ᵗʰ century

164

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Helmet Mask Bwoom, 19ᵗʰ–20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Helmet of Charles V, F. Negroli, 1533; V. Export, 2002

165

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Ranseurs, 17ᵗʰ century; Halberd and Glaive, 15ᵗʰ–17ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Combined arms, 1580–1590s; Pollaxe, 15ᵗʰ–17ᵗʰ century

166

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Mask amiilk; Mask; Tlingit shamanʼs mask, all 19ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: God Xiuhtecuhtli, 15ᵗʰ century; Earth goddess Teteoinan, 13ᵗʰ–16ᵗʰ century

167

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: D. Garcia, 1998; J. Rouse, 2003

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Armet, 15ᵗʰ–16ᵗʰ century; Armet, 16ᵗʰ century

168

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Hacha of the Maya culture, 6ᵗʰ–9ᵗʰ century; Hacha of the Maya culture, 7ᵗʰ–10ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Royal Tukah royal mask, Cameroon, 19ᵗʰ century; Crest of the Tsesah helmet, South Africa, 18ᵗʰ–19ᵗʰ century

169

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Incense Burner, 250–430; South America, VI century; Anonymous

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Reconstructed kiva painting, 15ᵗʰ–16ᵗʰ century; Anonymous

170

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: African sculpture; Akan Mask, both 19ᵗʰ–20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Olmec mask, 9ᵗʰ–6ᵗʰ century BC; Haida mask of a man, 19ᵗʰ century; Ritual mask, 18ᵗʰ–19ᵗʰ century; Helmet, 16ᵗʰ century

171

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Male head, Nok culture, 10ᵗʰ century BC–3ʳᵈ century AD; Ancient Egypt, 7ᵗʰ–4ᵗʰ century BC

Comparative opus: Metaphysical heads and busts: Anonymous engraving, 2000s; David Hammons, 1993; Scythian ceremonial female headdress, 4ᵗʰ century BC

172

METAPHYSICAL HEADS AND BUSTS EXHIBITION

Perhaps no other image in art is encountered as frequently as the human head. The head, ritual masks, the heads of Gods, and, naturally, portraits are represented by hundreds of kilometers of paintings and graphics, and sculptures with their countless tons of bronze and granite. The head has interested humanity from its infancy to the present day. Mihail Chemiakin Nevskoye vremya, 2014

Metaphysical Heads and Busts exhibition, 2014, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia

Metaphysical Heads, performance, Anton Adasinsky and the Derevo Theater, 2014, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

173

Out of Focus: Blurred Images Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2006 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014

174

BLURRED IMAGES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: D. Michals, 1973; W. Dunikowski-Duniko, 1976; A. Warhol, 1965

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: F. Tolstoy, 1837; Christo, 1962; D. Salcedo, 1990s; J. Rosen, 1975; Christo, 1962; D. Salcedo, 1990s

175

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: P. Filonov, 1928–1929; P. Filonov, 1927–1929

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: D. and M. Starn, 1985–1987; 1987

176

BLURRED IMAGES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: F. Van Deren Coke, second half of 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: F. Woodman, 1978; 1977

177

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: M. Rosso, 1906–1907

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: A. Rodin, 1892–1897; F. Godwin, 1973–1974

178

BLURRED IMAGES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: S. Polke, 2002

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: A. Jacquet, 1964

179

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: C. Mattioli, 1985

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: A. Durer, c. 1500; C. Mattioli, 1985

180

BLURRED IMAGES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: Anonymous

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: W. Turner, 1835; A. Monticelli, c. 1875–1880

181

AMERICAN PERIOD 1981–2007

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: X-ray of an old painting, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Blurred Images: Anonymous

182

BLURRED IMAGES IN ART EXHIBITION

***

In fact, Chemiakin has a passion for collecting almost every-

masterwork Las Meninas, the great artist intentionally blurred

thing, so much so that he has his very own museum. At the

the image of the royal couple in the mirror in the background

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire on Warren Street in Hud-

of the painting, in order to accurately reflect the way distance

son is stored decadesʼ worth of material he has acquired and

is perceived and to draw the eye in, and how early photography

collated into something like “an anthology of everything,” as

unintentionally mimicked this eﬀect. Chemiakin laments the fo-

well as many of his own and other artistsʼ works. “When I lived

cus of much twentieth-century photography, where every pore

in Russia,” he explains, “it was impossible to study many of the

of a subject is exposed, but finds it pleasantly ironic that late-

old masters in Soviet museums. So I started to collect repro-

ly a new attention to the power of blurred images is returning

ductions, thus creating my own museum… The more exten-

photography to its roots.

sive my museum became, the more similarities I discovered between the roots of the art of ancient peoples, irrespective of geography. That is how I originally started to create my own transformations.”

John Isaacs

Currently on show at the Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire

From “Black Prince: The World of Mihail Chemiakin”

is the exhibition Out of Focus, a study of blurred images, a sub-

Our Town, Claverack, NY, 2007

ject to which he was drawn when he noticed how, in Velasquezʼs

***

While studying the history of photography, I noticed that

orthodox monastery gave him a box with glass negatives. The

blurred, washed-out images were always present. Both on early

sea air, saturated with moisture and salt, destroyed the nega-

photographs made in the mid-19th century, when people were

tives. What did Zimbardo do? He printed them as they were. He

happy if the buildingsʼ silhouettes could be made out: thatʼs Par-

made a book of unusual portraits of monks. Some of these pho-

is; and then during the time of severe realism, masters began

tographs can be seen in our exposition and attest to the amazing

consciously to retreat into blurriness and uncertainty.

eﬀect of mystery the ruined negatives can produce. Thanks to

Sometimes I compare photos from the earliest, say, French,

his fantasy and mastery, the German photographer Erwin Blu-

masters with what is done today — it is almost impossible to

menfeld transforms the usual and everyday world into some-

distinguish one from another. Itʼs clear that a contemporary art-

thing enigmatic and mystical. He would photograph a model

ist departs from clear and precise images by choice, according

through a screen. Another photographer takes pictures through

to his own conception. Perhaps even to a larger extent, this re-

waﬄed glass or a sheet of polyethylene. For both the artist and

lates to painting. The first artist to use a blurred image was the

the observer, there is a moment of play in the blurred image be-

Spaniard Diego Velázquez — on one of his portraits of the infan-

cause both begin to complete it with their imaginations. While

ta, the young princess Margaret of Austria, he painted her par-

continuing to immerse yourself, you suddenly understand that

ents reflected in a mirror and in this foggy image managed to

the blurring can reveal several images at the same time.

achieve a tremendous realistic resemblance. As Velázquezʼs contemporaries noted, everyone recognized the king and queen. In the exposition, other great artists are included, such as Dürer and Giorgione.

Mihail Chemiakin

Also included is my favorite photographer, another Frenchman,

From an interview by Vladimir Zheltov

Xavier Zimbardo: he worked on Mt. Athos, and the abbot of the

Strela, 2014

183

Chamousseau Period 2007 — present

Chemiakin moves to France, to the Château de Chamousseau in the Berry 2007

Château de Chamousseau, Villedieu-sur-Indre, France, 2023

186

MUSÉE IMAGINAIRE

Hermitage. The building that now houses Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire and art library, Chateau de Chamousseau, 2023

Archive of Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire, Chateau de Chamousseau. 2021

187

Premiere of eight episodes of the filmedlecture series Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire on Russian televisionʼs “Kultura” channel Russia, 2008

Shoes in Art The Nose in Art Chairs in Art Children in Art Wrapped Figures in Art Cuts in Art Contemporary Art (Parts I and II)

188

FILMS

Stills from episodes of Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire

189

Not Made for Walking: Shoes in Art Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2009 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2012

190

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Shoes: Arman, 1977; G. Herms, 1960

Comparative opus: Shoes: G. Jamieson, 2003

191

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Shoes: L. Simpson, 1994

Comparative opus: Shoes: Plaque on the school of German Shoemakers in Venice, 1659

192

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Shoes: Spanish copy of medieval poulaine, 19ᵗʰ century; Poulaines, 14ᵗʰ–15ᵗʰ century; Sabaton, 14ᵗʰ–15ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Shoes: Anonymous

193

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Shoes: S. Fleury, 2003; 1998

Comparative opus: Shoes: J. Fig, 2007; M. Broodthaers, 1974

194

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Shoes: L. Bartrina, 1991; 1992

Comparative opus: Shoes: Antiques magazine cover, 1998; M. Godot Villani, 1992

195

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Shoes: L. Milroy, 1986; 1985

Comparative opus: Shoes: A. Homler, 1987; D. Lipski, 1980

196

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Shoes: J. Castillo, 1967

Comparative opus: Shoes: Arman, c. 1978; Arman, c. 1971

197

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT pp. 198–199 Exhibition views, Not made for walking: Shoes in Art. Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, New York, 2009

Mihail Chemiakin with his work Musketeersʼ Shoes, 2009, acrylic on cement, Claverack, NY

198

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

199

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

***

A new thematic research exposition is up at the Mihail Chemi-

a pair,” “Farewell to youth!” “Those boots need some porridge,”

akin Foundation. The first object you see as you enter the show

“Under the heel of…” and “A barefoot shoemaker.” Rubber, porce-

is a pair of enormous leather boots worn by a French postman

lain, bronze boots, hand-embroidered shoes. They even appear

in the 18th century. They are real — not a copy! The images in

in the form of head pieces. In the center of the hall is a moun-

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire are collected from many

tain of real shoes: tennis shoes, basketball shoes, everyday shoes,

sources: books, newspapers, museum and private collections,

diﬀerent kinds of boots (all for the left foot), colored by children

catalogs of exhibitions, old engravings, and his own photo-

with watercolors. These were provided by the performance art-

graphs. Petersburgers have already seen unique works on the

ist Anwar Libabov, a friend of Mihail Chemiakin.

themes of Spheres (Hands, Death, Cries, Monsters) in Art.

“Each artist creates in his own way. We are not easily governed

On display are more than 250 images of “Shoes Not Made for

and have large cockroaches in our heads, as the French say,”

Walking.” Also shown are artifacts from the collection of Mihail

Mihail Chemiakin noted at the opening of the exhibition. “Here,

Chemiakin, including the boots of a French barge hauler, straw

along with assorted gimmicks and curiosities, there are many

galoshes used by German soldiers during the Second World War,

interesting things. There are shoes related to established reli-

and jewelry in the form of a shoe (for example, cuﬄinks and

gious and national traditions. Take a look at this rare photo-

pendants). The old signs for cobblersʼ shops are interesting: one

graph: a Jewish cemetery in Berdichev. We might think that

from Italy during the 19th century and another from France cir-

Gulliverʼs descendants threw oﬀ their shoes and ran oﬀ into

ca 1900. And next to them, the fantasies of contemporary artists,

fields and meadows. There are no tombstones in the photo, only

fanciful illustrations of well-known proverbs: “Two boots make

chunks of granite measuring one and a half to two meters each, chiseled into the shapes of shoes with the dates of birth and death of the departed engraved on them. Shoes played a large role in Judaism. They are a symbol of prosperity. When newlyweds enter their bedroom, wedding guests threw boots or shoes after them. Interestingly, for Arabs, on the contrary, one of the worst insults is a shoe thrown at the face. We have an original work by an Abkhazian artist: an Abkhaz with a shoe on his head. When the first Abkhazians traveled to Constantinople, they would place the emperorʼs foot on their heads in a show of submission. This pleased them, so when they returned home, they created hats in the form of the emperorʼs foot and wore them. Many original works of young artists are displayed here. We are very pleased that the famous Petersburg artist Konstantin Simon agreed to participate in the exhibition. Each year, the exhibitions of contemporary art become more and more interesting and professional. We have so many works to display that we normally organize two exhibition openings.”

Svetlana Mazurova Rossiiskaya gazeta, 2012 18ᵗʰ century postmanʼs boots from the collection of Mihail Chemiakin, at the Shoes in Art exhibition, 2012, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia

200

SHOES IN ART EXHIBITION

Shoes, performance, Mikhail Eliseev and actors from the Litsedei theater, 2012, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

Comparative opus: Shoes: L. Bourgeat, 2006; A. Mendini Bruno Gregori & Bisazza, 1997

201

Cries in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2010 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2011

202

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: A. Petrov; D. Orlov, both 1920

Comparative opus: Cries: M. Rotella, 1961; H. Chadwick, 20ᵗʰ century; Marisol, 1971

203

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cries: Frame from the film Battleship Potemkin, 1925; F. Bacon, 1949; F. Goya (detail), 1819–1823; F. Bacon, 1949

Comparative opus: Cries: F. Goya (detail), 1819–1823; F. Bacon, 1960s; 1970s

204

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: F. Bacon, 1952

Comparative opus: Cries: P. Strand, 1917

205

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cries: 100+1 magazine cover, 1996; Photography, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Cries: J. Janssens, c. 1650; Anonymous

206

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: P. Picasso, 1937

Comparative opus: Cries: F. Bacon, 1948; 1949

207

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cries: G. Calandrucci, 17ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Cries: Anonymous

208

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: S. Nikritin, 1928

Comparative opus: Cries: E. Degas, 1878

209

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cries: K. Zao, 2008

Comparative opus: Cries: H.D. Williams, 20ᵗʰ century

210

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: N. Vadukul, 1990s

Comparative opus: Cries: Anonymous

211

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cries: F. Brunery, late 19ᵗʰ–early 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Cries: L. Doomer, 1668; T. Rowlandson, late 18ᵗʰ–early 19ᵗʰ century

212

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cries: M. Beckmann, 1910; R. Long, 1985; W. Isle, 1989

Comparative opus: Cries: The Last Judgment (detail), Spain, 19ᵗʰ century

213

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT The acclaimed artist spoke recently with a correspondent from

creation of branches of the Institute of Philosophy and Psychol-

the Rossiskaya Gazeta about why Russians do not always un-

ogy of Art. I am convinced that they will prove to be an excellent

derstand modern art, and what his friend Vladimir Vysotsky in-

springboard for people who study art. First of all, it will serve

spired him to do.

as a resource for young artists and art scholars. Russian art has its own individual and very interesting path. We have much to

RG: The exhibition Cries in Art is part of the series Mihail

show the West, but few are seriously and actively engaged in this

Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. Tell us what is special about

work. At the same time, exhibitions that come to Russia from

this project.

abroad are more often than not nearly incomprehensible to Rus-

Mihail Chemiakin: This series is based on close analysis of art

sian museum visitors for the very same reason — no one is ap-

history on which I have spent an enormous amount of time.

proaching the issue in a comprehensive manner.

Starting in the 1960s I have systematically selected and re-

RG: How do you think we can better prepare Russian

searched fine art publications, documents and assorted artistic

museum visitors?

objects, combining them into a visual library containing mil-

Mihail Chemiakin: We need to exhibit Western artists in the

lions of individual items. This is the basis for a research collec-

context of their development, demonstrating how they have ar-

tion created by me and housed in the Institute of Philosophy

rived at the experimentation that exists in todayʼs world of art.

and Psychology of Art in Hudson, NY. I collect my library while

Foreign masters have experience and work that would be inter-

traveling the world, consulting with colleagues, associating with

esting to the Russian museum visitor. For example, the art of

specialists from many fields of culture and science. Cries in Art

book design is dying in Russia. Itʼs with great sadness that we

is the third exhibition in the Musée Imaginaire presented to Pe-

now remember the great masters of book illustration - Fonvizin,

tersburgers in my Foundationʼs exhibition halls. This exposition

Lebedev, Kravchenko, Kibrik, and Konashevich. In the West, il-

is structured in a form analogous to the preceding exhibitions

lustrations have also undergone multiple metamorphoses, but,

Spheres in Art and Images of Death in Art. It represents an origi-

kitschy book covers notwithstanding, there are many artists

nal synthesis of original works on the given theme and research

working in book design at the very highest levels.

material. In accordance with tradition, the works of young art-

Alternatively, we could present the Russian spectator with the

ists are included.

chronological development of Western art in contemporary art

RG: What percentage of pictures sent by beginning artists pass

museums. Having created such exhibits, we can kill two birds

through your filter?

with one stone: the contemporary masters can be successful-

Mihail Chemiakin: The best ones remain. For example, while se-

ly introduced to the Russian museumgoer; and our artists will

lecting works for the exhibition Images of Death in Art, only one

be able to experiment more easily and not fear to be misunder-

out of every forty submitted works were selected for the exposi-

stood in these endeavors.

tion. One of the founding goals of our foundation is to provide active support both to beginning and already established artists, photographers, and artistic collectives... Assisting in the development of creative potential was one of the reasons for estab-

Maria Bortnovskaya

lishing the foundation. The next step in this direction will be the

Rossiiskaya gazeta, 2010

214

CRIES IN ART EXHIBITION

Cries, performance, Andron Terentyev, 2010, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

Comparative opus: Cries: Engraving, c. 1820

Exhibition of works by contemporary artists on Cries in Art, 2010, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

215

The Chair in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2012 Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2013 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2017

216

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

217

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Chairs: U. Fischer, 2006; 2003

Comparative opus: Chairs: M. Grostein, 1985–1992; S. Wewerka, 1970

218

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Chairs: J. Armleder, 1987; A. Toren, 1983

Comparative opus: Chairs: E. Ende, 1965; G. Roux, 1976

219

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Chairs: D. Ireland, 1978; E. Dietman, 1966–1967; T. Cragg, 1983

Comparative opus: Chairs: D. Iames, 1989; Anatol, 1986

220

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Chairs: Arman, 1985; D. Salcedo, 2003

Comparative opus: Chairs: C. Zhen, 1998; 2000

221

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Chairs: W. De Maria, 1966; A. Mendini, 1973

Comparative opus: Chairs: Sculpture of a goddess, 19th century, India; K. Armitage, 1983

222

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Chairs: Arman, 1999; 1996

Comparative opus: Chairs: M. Egana, 1983; G. Kuehn, 1985

223

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Chairs: V. Rapaport, 20ᵗʰ century; M. Pedersen, 21ˢᵗ century

Comparative opus: Chairs: M. Pistoletto, 1977

224

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Chairs: A. Tapies, 1963; 1964

Comparative opus: Chairs: M. A. Robinson, 2002–2003

225

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

***

This is the seventh exhibition of thematic research presented by

to a Museum Guard” (an ordinary chair on which lie a knitted

the renowned artist and sculptor Mihail Chemiakin at his Foun-

sweater, a long skirt, a purse, and beneath which stands a pair

dation in his home city, St. Petersburg, and one more project of

of shoes). Fantasies without number… And how do you sit on

his Musée Imaginaire.

a chair made of chicken eggs, or nails with the sharp side up?

At the opening of the exhibition, Chemiakin confessed that he

A toilet is also a chair with a back. Rocking chairs, wheelchairs,

fell in love with the painting “Van Goghʼs Chair” as a young artist.

dentistsʼ chairs from the 19th century, electric chairs…

In his opinion, there are very few educated people who are not

“It is curious what the human brain invents: chairs made of as-

familiar with “Van Goghʼs Chair” and “Gauguinʼs Chair.”

pirin tablets, liquid air, neon,” Chemiakin remarked. “I see rep-

“The chair is an ordinary object in our lives,” the artist remarked,

etitions, repetitions, repetitions. For example, many artists saw

“starting with the highchair in which we are fed, and ending with

oﬀ one leg of a chair or bandage it up. Ideas float in the air. And

chairs and thrones that are significant to us.”

many of these artists have no idea and donʼt suspect how much

Chemiakin has conducted research on “Chairs and Armchairs

they are alike, creating the same things other artists have al-

in Art” for many, many years, and he has collected a colossal

ready made. In fact, they are constantly inventing the wheel. In

number of images and materials. Due to space limitations, the

my research I attempt to unify and classify all this, so if a young

exhibition in St. Petersburg contains only a small part of the

artist wants to create a work in a particular genre, he can look at

whole. For the sake of comparison: at the exhibit you can see

a book (catalogue, program) and think up something original.”

around 250 images and objects, but in the collection stored in

All the expositions staged in St. Petersburg — “The Shoe in Art,”

France are 1,500. The same can be said of the works of contem-

“The Sphere in Art,” and so on — travel on to Maikop, and some-

porary artists who participated in the competition to show their

times to Moscow.

work. Many works passed the juryʼs selection, but the Founda-

“Unfortunately, I very rarely work in Moscow. Itʼs a very partic-

tion only has room to exhibit 60 items, so in early 2013, when

ular kind of city. The city is more interested in allocating space

the exposition of original works is renewed, the same number

for restaurants and boutiques than for cultural events. But not

will be shown.

to just anyone, of course. Zurab Tseretelli owns a large number

The works exhibited in the research section are created in diﬀer-

of buildings, but no matter how often I ask him to allot me some

ent techniques and styles: painting, graphics, photographs, per-

space, even 200–300 square meters, I always hear: "I canʼt. Itʼs all

formances, and installations. Also shown are performances by

occupied." Considering the size of his work…”

Chemiakin and photographs of installations created by Ameri-

At the same time, Chemiakin is researching the depiction of the

can, Japanese, and Turkish artists. You can see how a painter of

couch and the bed in art and has promised that there will be ex-

the Dutch School, Cornelis Dusart, depicted a chair in the 17th

hibitions of these too. Incidentally, Chemiakin also made a film

Century, and how Franciso Goya did the same in the 18th Cen-

about “Chairs in Art” for the “Kultura” television channel where

tury, and Salvador Dali in the 20th. In the artistsʼ fantasies, the

he provides commentary on the transformations of this image

back of a chair might become the trunk of a human or an arm,

in the history of art.

a beautiful butterfly, or even tall womenʼs boots with heels; the arm of a chair could be shaped like a human arm. There is a horned chair made of forks and spoons, “The Rat Kingʼs Chair,” “The Alchemistʼs Chair,” a broken chair titled “One-eyed and

Svetlana Mazurova

Lame,” a tower made of chairs, an art object called “Monument

Rossiiskaya gazeta, 2012

226

CHAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Chairs, performance, Serf Ballet dance theater, 2012, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

227

Disturbed Surfaces: Cuts in Art Exhibition Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY, 2012 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2014 Mikhalkov Academy of Cinematographic and Theatrical Art, Moscow, Russia, 2014

228

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cuts: A. Fabri, 20ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Cuts: G. J. Wolman, 1981

229

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: L. Fontana, 1964; 1968

Comparative opus: Cuts: Scene from the legend of St. Nicholas, 1330–1335, Bozen, Dominican Church, St. John's Chapel; The Tupi people, 20ᵗʰ century, North America

230

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cuts: G. Ciniglia, and detail, 1975–1976

Comparative opus: Cuts: A. Zaatari, 2012; P. Knapp, 1980s

231

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: Anonymous; M. Minujin, 1982

Comparative opus: Cuts: Reliquary, 1220–1240; I. Mitoraj, 20ᵗʰ century

232

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cuts: M. Rolston, 20ᵗʰ century; W. Evans, 1930

Comparative opus: Cuts: A. Rainer, 1970s

233

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: V. Yakovlev, 1967; c. 1970

Comparative opus: Cuts: F. Sommer, 1949

234

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cuts: A. and B. Blume, 1990s; T. Florschuetz, 1985

Comparative opus: Cuts: M. Ray, 1938; H. Moore, c. 1950

235

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: E. Paolozzi, 1984

Comparative opus: Cuts: L. Dabos, c. 1801; N. Alden Brooks, 19ᵗʰ century

236

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Cuts: Water ja, 16ᵗʰ century r, Japan; L. Fontana, 1960s

Comparative opus: Cuts: M. Chemiakin, 2008

237

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

M. Chemiakin at the opening of the Cuts in Art exhibition, 2015, Mikhalkov Academy of Cinematographic and Theatrical Art. Moscow, Russia

Cuts in Art exhibition, 2015, Mikhalkov Academy of Cinematographic and Theatrical Art. Moscow, Russia

238

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

N. Mikhalkov, A. Volkov and M. Chemiakin at the opening of the Cuts in Art exhibition, 2015, Moscow, Russia

Comparative opus: Cuts: R. Mapplethorpe, 1986

239

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: Michelangelo, 1511; Theseus liberator; Herculaneum, 50–79 AD

Comparative opus: Cuts: E. Galsworthy, 1988; 1987

240

CUTS IN ART EXHIBITION

***

The Mihail Chemiakin Foundation is presenting an exhibition

incisions, tears, holes, and scratches on his canvases. The imag-

on Cuts in Art, in which are displayed what at first glance seem

es of Fontanaʼs red and blue cut canvases appear in the research

like very exotic “substances”, such as cuts, slices, cracks, and

section of the exposition.

tears on artistic spaces and forms. In this way, from the more

It goes without saying that in this section also appear images

familiar categories of medicine and tailoring, the disturbance of

from Sir Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, Roy Lichtenstein, and Erwin

all kinds of wholeness migrates to the metaphysical realm, bur-

Olaf. Yes, and a lot of people who cannot be done without.

dened with additional meanings.

“Fresh” ideas (which might on closer examination turn out not

It's worth noting that the first “disturbers” of the whole were not

to be so “hot oﬀ the presses”) on the given theme can be seen in

the wielders of scissors (scalpels, razors, knives), but to nature

the original works of artists participating in the show. However,

and time. A crack on the façade of an historical building; a sur-

there is nothing truly new here, not to mention anything that

face on the earth, cracked by drought; a piece of fruit bursting

might show up the masters.

from ripeness; all are on equal footing with a pierced canvas.

Most of the exhibits come down to peeping; a person looks at a

However, the canvas cited above manifests a transformation in

plant that has broken through thick asphalt; another at a team

art that is so radical that it occupies a place on the hierarchical

of strange-looking doctors carrying out an operation (Caesarian

stairway close to the legendary black square.

section); yet another is dipping into an album of the reproduc-

The first to slit a canvas was the Italian abstract artist Lucio Fon-

tions of Fontana. In principle, an artist can be inspired by some-

tana, in his Buchi series of punctured pictures. This significant

thing already familiar that appeared earlier in art, thereʼs noth-

event took place in 1949. A few years earlier, the tireless inno-

ing criminal about that. And the new images may be no worse

vator had presented his “White Manifesto,” in which he suggest-

than those of their forebearers, all the more because the phe-

ed looking at painting and sculpture as one type of art, com-

nomenon examined by Mihail Chemiakin is worth it.

bining color, sound, space, movement, and time, and he called this new movement “Spatialism.” While working on a series of

Svetlana Rukhlya

paintings called Conceptual Space, the artist generously inflicted

New Izvestiya, 2014

Exhibition view, Cuts in Art, 2014, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

241

Publication of The Chair in Art The Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art, Villedieu-sur-Indre, France, 2013

Тема Comparative opus: Chairs: A. Warhol, c. 1963; 1971

242

PUBLICATIONS

…Since antiquity, humans have advanced toward the creation of contemporary forms of the throne as objects demonstrating greatness and power: the seat was designed to elevate the ruler above everyone else. Contemporary attitudes have decidedly debunked the idea of a “chosen” ruler on a throne. The first step was the creation of dental chairs in the 18th century, which were associated with pain and suffering. Paradoxically, in an effort to lessen that suffering with the help of a modern mechanism in the dental chair, the American dentist Albert Southwick added a slight jolt of electric current, and inadvertently invented the electric chair. His idea was seized upon by Thomas Edison, who was conducting parallel experiments with electricity. In 1810, the mechanism he constructed was first used for an execution, and the chair, since that moment, bears the name “The Electric Chair of Thomas Edison.” The artist Lucinda Devlin presented work on the theme of the electric chair under the name “Room of Death.” This is a series of thirty photographs taken in the 1990s in American prisons. They show no similarity with traditional photos and do not cause the observer to empathize in the face of the pain and death of the condemned. The photos show the series of rooms through which the condemned walked to their execution: the corridor, a white room with an electric chair, and a room for the witness to the execution. In this way, the artist presents to our imagination the final path along which the condemned person must pass. Perhaps the most famous electric chair of all was that of Andy Warhol, who transformed it into an aesthetic object. All of this demonstrates once again that art of the post-modern epoch combines the initially opposing phenomena and objects in its own way.

Olga Sazonova Published with changes in this edition O. A. Sazonova. The Chair in Art. Presentation / O. A. Sazonova // Mihail Chemiakin. The Chair in Art. Villedieu-sur-Indre; Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of Art, 2013

243

Publication of Cuts in Art The Institute of the Philosophy and Psychology of Art, Villedieu-sur-Indre, France, 2013

244

PUBLICATIONS

*** In the 1950s the Italian artist Lucio Fontana began slashing canvases and leaving them as is. Soon thereafter, his canvases became classic examples of modern art, and his “cuts” adorn the walls of the worldʼs museums. In 1976, when I was in Tokyo, I visited a gallery dealing in ceramics where I discovered an interesting collection of Japanese ceramic teacups. These small objects attracted my attention by their delicate pale, blue-gray color. Every little cup had its own unique form. On many of them I could see cracks that occurred during their firing. There was something unusual and unique in those cracks. I decided to buy the whole collection of cups, assuming that they would be inexpensive, like in Europe. How surprised I was that the cheapest cup cost $5,000, and the most expensive one, nearly $150,000! I was, of course, amazed, and called for my Japanese interpreter, who had accompanied me throughout Japan, to find out from the owner of the gallery why the prices were so high. Then the ancient Japanese man approached me, lifted one of the tiny cracked cups from the velvet display, broiught it close to my eyes, indicating with his finger the zigzag crack and the white spot on the side of the cup, and said “Can it be that this crack and spot are not worth one-hundred thousand dollars, dear Sir?” I confess that at that moment I felt rather ashamed… After that episode, I began to study ancient and contemporary Japanese ceramics, trying to decipher the secrets of the deformations of these small objects, and finally I created a large series of paintings that were closely related to ceramics. These nearly monochrome reliefs were built on the beauty of the cracks, which were quite original. I did not make the cracks

245

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Cuts: Japanese ceramics, 1970s

Comparative opus: Cuts: Bowl, Japan, 16ᵗʰ – 17ᵗʰ century; Ceramics, Western Europe, 19ᵗʰ century; Tea Bowl, Japan, 16ᵗʰ century

246

PUBLICATIONS

myself, rather I prepared a special mass just like the Japanese ceramists, and left it to nature and the sunʼs rays to determine where the primary crack would appear, and where additional horizontal, vertical, or parallel cracks would form. The theme of “Cuts and Cracks” can be traced on ancient sculptures throughout Greece and the Orient, where Christian crusaders, considering them to be pagan idols, hacked them to pieces. I have a large collection of photographs of ancient Greek sculptures and many broken pieces that are truly beautiful and significant. In the broken piece the whole sculpture or parts that have been carried away by time, can often be read. The theme of “Cuts and Cracks” is present not only in ceramics, but also in the paintings of old and new masters. If you look at the cracks on the paintings of the old masters, at frescoes in monasteries, you can see that they add a completely new aesthetic element, one which links them to the experimental art of the 20th and 21st centuries. My research on cuts and cracks in art embraces many epochs and unites artists of diﬀerent times and nationalities. Mihail Chemiakin

247

Children in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2013 State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop, Russia, 2014 National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria, Nalchik, Russia, 2016

248

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Children: D. Velázquez, c. 1656; Y. Morimura, 1990

Comparative opus: Children: D. Velázquez, 1656; J.-P. Witkin, 1987

249

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Children: W. A. Bouguereau, 1879

Comparative opus: Children: P. Chocarne-Moreau, 19ᵗʰ– 20ᵗʰ century

250

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Children: D. Baccarini, 1904; J. Epstein, 1902–1904

Comparative opus: Children: S. J. Guy, 1877

251

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Children: G. A. Fasolo, c. 1565; P. Veronese, c. 1559–1650

Comparative opus: Children: photograph, 20th–21st century; photograph, 20ᵗʰ–21ˢᵗ century

252

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Children: G. Mazzoni, c. 1948

Comparative opus: Children: H. Varnum Poor, 1932

253

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Children: K. Kollwitz, 1921–1922; 1911

Comparative opus: Children: J. A. Houdon, c. 1786; c. 1791

254

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Children: F. Goya, c. 1778

Comparative opus: Children: M. Rosso, c. 1892

255

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Children: O. Dix, 1925

Comparative opus: Children: H. Rousseau, 1904–1905

256

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Children: B. E. Murillo, 1645–1650; c. 1670

Comparative opus: Children: H. Schjerfbeck, 1888

257

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Children: O. Leone, 16ᵗʰ–17ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Children: F. von Lenbach, c. 1903; C. Willink, 1945

258

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

*** More than five thousand depictions of children are included in the research on this topic in the collection of Mihail Chemiakin. However, in this exposition, many Western European images were not included: cupids and images of the infant Christ, Valentin Serovʼs “Girl with Peaches” and Auguste Renoir's remarkable portraits of children. Only 1/20 of the research materials are included in the exhibition, and they were selected to reveal as many lesser-known works and artists as possible to the observer. Here you can see rare reproductions and original works which for a variety of reasons are not accessible to a wide circle of observers: these are works that were destroyed by bombs in the First and Second World Wars, or hidden in unknown private collections, as in the case of the work by Ottavio Leoni “Portrait of Dona Liza Aldobrandini,” which Mihail Chemiakin finally found in a Sothebyʼs 1908 catalogue. After that auction, the work was never again shown publicly. Thanks to the latest technology of computer restoration, the image has been cleaned and enlarged in size in order to allow it to be exhibited. Another example — a little-known portrait from the brush of Franz von Lenbach realistically depicted the young Peggy Guggenheim, long before she began to collect first-class works of modern art and introduced the world to the outstanding artists of the 20th century. The artist subscribes to the catalogues of auctions such as Christieʼs, Sothebyʼs and several German houses. Chemiakinʼs library contains catalogues beginning from the end of the 19th century.

Olga Sazonova Children in Art: Catalogue of the Exposition / Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, 2013

259

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Children in Art exhibition in the State Museum of Oriental Art, 2014, Maikop, Russia

Comparative opus: Children: H. Geoﬀroy, late 19ᵗʰ–early 20ᵗʰ century

260

CHILDREN IN ART EXHIBITION

The juried competition exposition Children in Art was organized by the Northern Caucasus branch of the Museum of Oriental Art (Maikop), together with the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation (St. Petersburg) as part of the project Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. As usual, the exposition is divided into two segments. The research segment is made up of archival materials selected from Mihail Chemiakinʼs research in his Institute of Philosophy and Psychology of Art. This unique collection, which contains more than two hundred depictions of children in paintings, drawings, installations and sculptures, allows museumgoers to follow how the child was depicted in the 15th and 16th centuries and how with the advent of surrealism the classic aesthetic portrayal of children acquired an anti-aesthetic and anti-human character. The exhibition demonstrates how details of old drawings are repeated in later compositions and how the images become shocking through their treatment by the existentialist Chapman and the traumatized subjects of Dianne Arbusʼ photographs. Genre compositions by Francisco Goya and Peter Brueghel are presented, and the hypertrophication of images in daguerrotypes of Italian, French, and German masters as well as in the works of Morimura and Waldmüller. The present collection provides a considerable academic resource and enriches the creative wellspring for contemporary artists. In the section including original art, works by artists of the Northern Caucasus and Southern Federal District are presented. A competition of original works preceded the exhibition, to which 390 applications were submitted from Adygea, Astrakhan, Volgograd, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Krasnodar, Korenovsk, Rostov, Northern Ossetia-Alania, Stavropol, Taganrog, the Chechen Republic, and unexpectedly, due to the unexpected breadth of the exhibition, the cities of St. Petersburg, Penza, and Khanty-Mansiysk. Mihail Chemiakin rated these works highly, having noted that the level of the exhibition is constantly improving; he selected 70 works in which the theme of “Children in Art” was expressively and individually presented by the artist. At this exhibition, Mihail Chemiakin showed a preference for photography, which framed the conception of the exposition. In it, painting, graphics, and sculpture entered into a dialogue between artistic photography and other genres, leading to an intriguing narrative.

Lyudmila Gunina Curator of Exhibitions at the State Museum of Oriental Art

261

Publication of the bilingual monograph Letters, Words, Text in Art Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2015

262

PUBLICATIONS

263

The Automobile in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2015 Sochi Museum of Art, Sochi, Russia, 2016

264

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: César, 1971. J. and D, Chapman, 2010; T. Cragg, 1980

Comparative opus: Automobiles: S. Fleury, 1997; S. Y. Pal, 1999

265

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Automobiles: M. Kunc, 1992; C. Gold, 2007

Comparative opus: Automobiles: A. Slominski, 2001; A. Slominski, 1999; T. Cragg, 1990

266

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: D. Shuler, 1989; 1986

Comparative opus: Automobiles: D. Ortega, 2002

267

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Automobiles: D. Butterfield, 1980s

Comparative opus: Automobiles: D. Butterfield, 1986; 1980s

268

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: E. Kienholz, 1992; 1964

Comparative opus: Automobiles: W. Delvoye, 2003; 2010

269

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Automobiles: S. Sosno, c. 1979; R. Baquié, 1985

Comparative opus: Automobiles: E. Ghinato, 2011

270

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: J. M. Basquiat 1981

Comparative opus: Automobiles: E. Ghinato, 2003; 2006

271

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Automobiles: A. Sawyers, 1967; Honda advertising, 2000s

Comparative opus: Automobiles: M. Biagi, 2008; C. Labrooy, 2000s

272

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: M. El Baz, 1993

Comparative opus: Automobiles: M. Elmgren, I. Dragset, 2003; M. Chemiakin, 2006

273

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Automobiles: D. Shuler, 1986; 1983

Comparative opus: Automobiles: Dado, 1968–1975; A. Wenzel, 2007; Dado, 1968–1975; T. Bayrak, 1968

274

THE AUTOMOBILE IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Automobiles: S. Abu Abdallah, 2011; 2012

Sergei Oskolkov performing at the opening of The Automobile in Art exhibition, 2015, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

275

Letters, Words, Text in Art Exhibition Siberian Center of Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk, Russia, 2015 Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2015

276

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: P. Blake, 2008; P. Manzoni, 1958; M. Broodthaers, 1975; T. Kawachi, 1990; Broodthaers, 1975

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: J. Johns, 1959; Y. Albert, c. 1980–1981

277

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: E. Rukhin, c. 1975; I. Nakhova, mid-1970s; V. Bakhcharyan, 1975

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: L. Bolin, 2006

278

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: M. Grobman, 1978; 1975

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: R. Stingel, 2002; C. Twombly, 1963

279

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: Cuneiform tablets, c. 600 BC; A. Tapies, 1956

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: F. O. Nanetti, 1959–1972; F. O. Nanetti, 1959–1972

280

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: L. Corrigan, 2010s

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: D. Yago, 2016

281

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: V. Molnar, 1961

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: O. Waquialla, 1984; C. H. Zenderoudi, 1972

282

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: V. Izdebski, c. 1960–1965

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: E. Bulatov, 1993; L. Sokov, 2008

283

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: H. Kern, 1993; c. 1988

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: E. Ruscha, 2012; 1967; 1970; 1968

284

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: N. A. Brooks, c. 1890; c. 1896

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: E. Rukhin, 20ᵗʰ century; V. Komar and A. Melamid, 1985–1986

285

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

***

Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire has come to Novosibirsk.

be saleable, and it must be accessible. Exactly this has been a

Mihail himself, along with representatives of the Mihail Ch-

basis for my Musée Imaginaire.

emiakin Foundation, spoke about this unique project, its histo-

Editors: Will this project become a Wikipedia of Art?

ry, creation, and much more. Fifty years of work, 700 themes, an

Mihail Chemiakin: I call it an anthology of forms. It is a very

entire cultural world from antiquity to the present.

large collection of visible materials, organized by certain cat-

Editors: This is your first exhibition of scientific research. Novo-

egories. This is an eternal project. Itʼs a good thing that digital

sibirsk will be the first city to see the exposition “Calligraphy in

technology has appeared and the collection can unendingly add

Text as an Image in Art.” Why did you choose our city?

and save everything in a electronic form. Fifteen exhibitions on

Mihail Chemiakin: In 1967 my first one-man show was held

diﬀerent themes are already prepared, but if we were to show

at the Novosibirsk Academy of Sciences. I really love Russiaʼs

each theme in its entirety, they wouldnʼt fit in the Hermitage. It

provinces. I am a Muscovite by birth, but I do not like Moscow

would be impossible. Each city receives a theme which it exam-

as a city; people there are rather strange. But in Novosibirsk,

ines in world culture from its very beginning to contemporary

Khanty-Mansiysk, and Krasnoyarsk, people are well-educated.

times. Such art must be received in smaller portions.

Their genes are good. Which people were exiled? The best peo-

Editors: How is the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation involved in

ple in the country were sent to Siberia. Many served sentences,

this project?

and many were not allowed to return. For this reason, there is a

Foundation: First, the Foundation promotes this project on

wonderful Russian gene pool. Being here and working with you

which Mihail has been working for more than 50 years, Mihail

is very interesting for me.

Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire. It was initially based on the idea

Editors: You have lived in Russia, America, Germany, and

of André Malraux, who thought that world culture was not avail-

France. In each country thereʼs a diﬀerent mentality, and peo-

able to all people, and a person cannot visit all the museums in

ple experience art in their own way. Does this influence your

the world. The goal was to create a collection of images. Mihail

work, and do you create works that are especially aimed at a

developed his own project. Since he is a perfectionist, he inter-

particular public? People can become afraid and angry when

nalized any themed he worked with to its very roots. If he was

they do not understand.

working on a still life, he became interested in how and when

Mihail Chemiakin: Some artists live in an “ivory tower,” and only

this form appeared, how it was transformed through time and

engage in their personal quests. I have never worked to please

space, and how it looked in diﬀerent cultures. In this way, he

the public. For example, when I worked for the theater, I be-

collected a library around each symbol. And at some moment,

came a theatrical artist. A performance must be bright and col-

he understood that his work was now an academic project. And

orful. I always think about how the spectator will receive it. I

he went beyond simply collecting images, he classified them.

can create something clever, but always understand that it must

Nothing like this exists anywhere in the world.

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LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

Editors: What exactly makes the project unique?

is collected on the theme. This is a fantastic collection which re-

Foundation: You can look at the historical development of an

quires preservation and distribution.

image. This is an enormous number of cultures and variations

Editors: Where and how could we see the entire collection.

in their depiction. The space harmoniously collects all visual art,

Foundation: At this stage work is underway to digitalize the col-

not just paintings, but also sculptures and photographs. Mihail

lection. Russia will become the owner of the systematized space.

Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire is an educational system aimed at

This treasure of world culture will become accessible to all on

the development of creativity. The Ministry of Culture has al-

the site of the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation.

ready supported this project.

Editors: We understand that one goal of the Foundation is to en-

Editors: How many themes are included in Mihail Chemiakinʼs

courage active cooperation between beginning and famous art-

Musée Imaginaire?

ists, and with other members of creative professions.

Foundation: More than 700 themes, and in each of these are

Foundation: Yes, the Foundation has organized around 13 exhi-

many sub-themes. This is the classification. For example, in the

bitions. For each one, we have conducted a competition among

exposition brought to Novosibirsk, “Calligraphy and text as an

contemporary artists. First of all, the artists are free to present

image in art” we find sub-themes like “Aggressive text,” “Ripped

their works in any way they see fit. The competition is conduct-

text,” “Informational Text,” “Refined Text,” and so on. Through

ed anonymously, so beginners as well as famous artists can par-

these themes we see a more impartial history of culture, with-

ticipate. When evaluating the art work we do not see the names

out opinions. Nothing is forced on you. Looking at the collec-

of the artists.

tion, you see images from antiquity and the current era side by side, and you understand that these same forms were born in the heads of people from diﬀerent times. To us it may seem that

WHERE Siberia, 2015

we are distant, that we are not similar, but afterwards we understand that space overlaps and intertwines. When we see that in diﬀerent contexts the same image appears, we realize how unified we actually are. Editors: In the project are more than 700 themes. Are they already established or are they being developed? Foundation: All the themes are collected, but each collection exceeds the space in any museum. They claim not to be complete, but rather broad in their grasp. Preparation for an exposition consists in selecting the very best materials out of all that

287

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: W. Guyton, 2005

Comparative opus: Letters, words, text: A. Tapies, 1971

288

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

***

A new exhibition has opened at the Mihail Chemiakin Founda-

hide Samizdat writings and knew that if someone informed on

tion: “Letters. Words. Text in Art.” The famous artist explains

me, I could be sentenced to seven years in prison. All the talk

why in our country even a single letter can play a special role.

about how printed books will disappear are ridiculous. So what

Technology and Brains

if some super-geniuses, hackers appear and all our screens go

“This exhibition has already been shown in Novosibirsk and

dark, then what? We have forgotten how to do anything with-

Maikop, and now in St. Petersburg,” Mihail tells us. “My fellow

out a computer, we can only read a recipe or instructions on the

artists have done some really interesting work. At one time, we

screen. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has said, we

had a hard time collecting enough original works for a single

are entering an epoch of complete dilettantism in everything

exhibition, but today, we have a huge collection of very good

but high technology. We have forgotten how to work with our

art works. Why is the exhibition dedicated to letters, words,

hands, and to achieve anything, we push a button. Sooner or lat-

and text? In our country, even a letter can play an enormous

er we will come to our senses and start to resemble human be-

role. Under Stalin, a mistake in a newspaper could lead to pris-

ings again. But today, we have such powerful technology, and

on, when for example, instead of Red Army [Krasnaya Armi-

nothing in our heads. I know people who say, “We donʼt read

ya] they printed Rat Army [Krysnaya Armiya]. I myself would

books anymore—only on the screen.”

Letters, Words, Text, performance, 2015, Litsedei theater, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

289

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

It appears that access to information is not always good.

times artists were forced to work, but as a result many wonder-

“In my time, when not only literature, but even books on contem-

ful works of art. And we donʼt even know how to use what has

porary art were forbidden, in the library of the Academy of Art

been left to us as an inheritance and we are destroying the re-

these books were not lent to students. We entered into Platonic

alistic school. Russians tend to "throw the baby out with the

romances with the librarians and read the books by night. We

bathwater," and we declare everything that originated in the

were eager for knowledge. And so I, like an ant, carry on with

Soviet Union trash, and this also relates to art. I was one of the

my own work, and am obliged to educate young people. not only

first to write a letter to the Ministry of Culture, fearing that in

as professional artists, but simply cultured people. We Russian

the ecstasy of destroying monuments on political themes, they

artists may have the chance, in time, to lead world art.”

might destroy the child. Many monuments were created by great

On what do you base this audacious pronouncement?

masters — Tomsky, Vuchetich, and Anikushin. We simply donʼt

“I constantly emphasize that we do not have the right to follow

know how to be proud of ourselves. There are always complex-

the Westʼs lead because we have our own phenomenal base. We

es. Dostoevsky described this phenomenon, that we are always

need to learn to use it, and understand that the Russian artist

embarrassed about something, and on the other hand, we be-

has a diﬀerent fate: we do not have the right to engage in "enter-

have terribly, obnoxious, like a slave who has freed himself from

tainment." We have a tragic, fearless, and heroic history. But do

his chains.”

many artists work now on the theme of the Civil War? In earlier

Letters, Words, Text, performance, 2015, Litsedei theater, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

290

LETTERS, WORDS, TEXT IN ART EXHIBITION

At the top of the pyramid

twenty.” Many people have relatives buried there, people with

Surely, in the West, people are also becoming less educated?

very good genes, the children and grandchildren of political

“I donʼt in any case say that it is better in the West! Not long ago, I

prisoners, live in the region. I consider it my duty to bring ex-

had to kick a student out of class on the third day. He had gradu-

hibitions there, and the Ministry helps. Schools need to be es-

ated from the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. In his dossier, he list-

tablished and programs made not just for artists, but for critical

ed among his teachers Gerhard Richter, one of the most expen-

thinkers. You can teach even a monkey to draw, but you need to

sive artists working today, a giant in the area of new movements

teach a person to think. In America, President Kennedy gave an

and technology. I began to check on the studentʼs preparation —

order to support contemporary art and raise Americans to the

he could not even draw! It appears that all these famous artists

top of the aesthetic pyramid. This was done, and in the world,

did not teach, but only collected their pay. And the students

the dependence on American art is very strong. And we in Rus-

taught themselves, absolute freedom! And in our country, pret-

sia mainly occupy ourselves with sports and physical fitness, but

ty much the same thing is happening.

not culture. As Dmitry Likhachev said: "If a nation has no cul-

In any case, how much does the state support artists?

ture, its existence is meaningless."

All our exhibitions are presented under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture. I asked Medinsky to support two exhibitions in

Elena Petrova

the Kolyma — in Vorkuta and Magadan, and he said, “Letʼs do

Arguments and Facts, 2015

Letters, Words, Text, performance, 2015, Litsedei theater, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

291

Clothing in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2016

292

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Clothing: Page from an ivory devotional book, c. 1330–1340; M. Merian, 17ᵗʰ century

Comparative opus: Clothing: F. Ober, 1867; P. Bailly-Maître-Grand, 1999

293

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Clothing: A. Weiwei, 2007

Comparative opus: Clothing: L. Dill, 2011; 2010s

294

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Clothing: A. Fuss, 2010; J. Sterbak, 1984–1985

Comparative opus: Clothing: P. Clark, 2007; V. Lunn, 2000s

295

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Clothing: L. R. Agbodjelou, 2011

Comparative opus: Clothing: N. Cave, 2000s; G. Jamison, 2002

296

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Clothing: V. Belin, 2000

Comparative opus: Clothing: Z. Huan, 2001; T. Bruguera, 1997–1999

297

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Clothing: S. Pfister, 21st century; L. Plaisted, 2010s; A. Mesa-Bains, 1997

Comparative opus: Clothing: D. Tanning, 1942; M. Tabard, 1947

298

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Clothing: A. Tanaka, 1956

Comparative opus: Clothing: Illustration, Encyclopédie de Diderot et DʼAlembert, 1777; J. Dine, 1964

299

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007—PRESENT

Comparative opus: Clothing: D. Rhodes, 1980; P. Shelton, 1983

Comparative opus: Clothing: Do Ho Sun, 2001

300

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Clothing: A. Wyeth, 1980; 1979

Comparative opus: Clothing: T. Keens-Douglas, 2000s; Dress, 21ˢᵗ century

301

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007—PRESENT

Comparative opus: Clothing: T. Burr, 2012

Mihail Chemiakin working on the Clothing in Art exhibition, 2016, Chamousseau, France

302

CLOTHING IN ART EXHIBITION

Media preview of the Clothing in Art exhibition, 2016, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

Works by Mihail Chemiakinʼs students at the Clothing in Art exhibition, 2016, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation. St. Petersburg, Russia

303

Master Classes in Chelyabinsk Chelyabinsk State Institute of Culture, Chelyabinsk, Russia Russian-British Institute of Management, Chelyabinsk, Russia

304

MASTER CLASSES

305

Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2018

Comparative opus: Swaddling: photograph, 20ᵗʰ century; Cat mummy, c. 390 BC; J. Fontcuberta, 1986; Ibis mummy, c. 30 BC

306

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Swaddling: G. Bellini (detail), 1460; M. Blanc, 2014

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Fake Egyptian child mummy, 19th century; Etruscan votive figure, 4ᵗʰ century BC; S. V. Malyutin, late 19ᵗʰ century; E.V. Day, 1993–1998; Types of swaddling for babies in various times

307

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Yves Tanguy, 1943; Christo, c. 1963–1987

Comparative opus: Swaddling: D. McDermott, P. McGough, c. 2000; T. Mercier, 2012

308

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Swaddling: L. Baskin, 1971; E. Trova, 1982

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Human figurine, Cycladic culture, 2800–1400 BC; Egyptian mummy, IVth century BC–IVth century AD; Fayum female portrait, 1ˢᵗ–3th century AD; K. Guillot, 17ᵗʰ–18ᵗʰ century

309

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Swaddling: A. Canova, 1783

Comparative opus: Swaddling: G. Uféras, c. 1995; D. Arsham, 2010s

310

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Swaddling: C. Roncati, 1977; R. A. Penrose, 1938; J. Bernstein, 1994

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Infiniti Advertising, 1997

311

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Sylvia Schramm, 2013; M. Borremans, 2015

Comparative opus: Swaddling: S. Smith, 2006

312

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Swaddling: J. Anthony, 2000; J. Anthony, 2000

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1995

313

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Rick Griﬃn, 1971; S. Mo Park, 2004; C. Federighi, 2002

Comparative opus: Swaddling: K. V. Grey, 2011

314

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Swaddling: Christo, 1997–1998

Comparative opus: Swaddling: W. Inanger, 20ᵗʰ century; D. Krasnopevtsev, 1963

315

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Mihail Chemiakin gathering material for his Swaddling study, 2017, Venice, Italy (left) Mihail Chemiakin working on the Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art exhibition, 2018, Chamousseau, France (right)

Works by Mihail Chemiakinʼs students at the Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art exhibition, 2018, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

316

SWADDLED FIGURES IN ART EXHIBITION

Media preview of the Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art exhibition, 2018, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art exhibition, 2018, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

317

Publication of the bilingual monograph Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2018

318

PUBLICATIONS

In all the various modifications of the device of concealment in fine art, what is clear is its connection to the moods of fear and horror. Any — even the most ordinary — object, hidden from view, is seen as concealing a threat. At the same time, as Berdyaev observed, “fear, always connected to empirical danger, must be diﬀerentiated from horror, which is tied not to empirical danger but to the transcendental, with the sadness of being and nothingness.” In ancient times statues hidden under a thick cover were meant to awaken the sacred terror of standing before a transcendental Secret. In the 20th century this transcendental terror is replaced by the madness of fear born of a world of ordinary objects that conceal the death of the soul in the abyss of Nothingness. Vladimir Ivanov Professor, philosopher, art critic

Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art / Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, 2018

319

Stairs in Art Exhibition Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2019 State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2023

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: Interior ladder, Indonesia, 19ᵗʰ –20ᵗʰ century; Dogon Ladder, 20ᵗʰ century

320

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: X. G. Hui, 2008; Workshop of C. Dusart, c. 1680–1704

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: B. Chatwin, 1974; Etching, 1815

321

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: Armando, 1994; 1991

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: Photography, 2000; H. Gläsker, 2006

322

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: M. Tirelli, 2013; Do Ho Sun, 2008

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: A. Kiefer, 2008; A. Zemlianichenko, 1988

323

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: Z. Rumeau, 2018; J. Barber, 2017

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: Battle of Kadesh (detail), 13ᵗʰ century BC; Seal impression with image of agricultural worker, 3700–3100 BC

324

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: G. Kuehn, 1964; A. Petti, 2013

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: J. Carelman, 20ᵗʰ century; S. Rossi, 2012; S. Dean, 2007; A. Van Triest, 2010s; S. Rossi, 2015

325

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: M. Tansey, 1987; R. Kent, 1930

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: A. Rurikov-Simes, 2014; R. McBee, 2010; A. Houthuesen, 1966

326

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: M. Chagall, 1956; R. McBee, 1996

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: A. Raﬀo, 1972; A. Hogenberg after A. Braun, c. 1608–1658

327

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: V. Tsivin, 2007; V. Tsivin, 2007

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: P. Barclay, 2013; G. and C. Chapuisat, 2005

328

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Comparative opus: Steps, Ladders, Stairs: S. Sheﬃeld, 1980s; Q. Buchholz, 1992; J. M. Folon, 1999–2000

Scale Naturale, a curatorʼs project at the Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art exhibition, 2019, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

329

CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art exhibition, 2019, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

Mihail Chemiakin at the Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art exhibition, 2019, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

330

STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

Works by Vladimir Hoﬀman at the Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art exhibition, 2019, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art exhibition, 2019, Mihail Chemiakin Centre. St. Petersburg, Russia

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Interdisciplinary Conference “Stairs in Life, Consciousness, and Art” Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2019

Speakers and Topics: 1. O. Sazonova, Art Critic, Curator, Art Director of the Mihail Chemiakin Centre Stairs in Art: Form, Function, Context Stairs are an ancient symbol, characteristic for the mythological consciousness in the majority of cultures. Within their system of images, they connect not only a large number of religions and denominations, but also times and epochs. Contemporary artists draw on the traditional forms and original functions of stairs, imbuing them with many different meanings, a degree of depth and in many cases adaptation to new religious or social contexts. 2. T. Boborykina, Literary Critic, Translator, Professor at St. Petersburg State University The Metaphysics of Stairs in the Artistic Space of Dostoevsky In F. M. Dostoevskyʼs “Crime and Punishment” the stairway is a “close at hand” physical object that is frequently encountered, and becomes a visible metaphor, a figurative leitmotif of the entire novel. 3. V. Florov, Architectural Historian, Editor-in-Chief, Project Baltia Journal The Staircase in Contemporary Architecture: quo vadis? The theme of descent and ascent, considered to be fundamental for architecture, will be considered using the example of projects and buildings of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, with some digressions into the past. 4. O.Yudina, Art Critic, State Hermitage Museum Stairs in the Work of the Mexican Muralist David Siqueiros The talk is dedicated to the theme of the social function of art using the Mexican muralist Siqueiros as an example. The speaker analyzes the use of the physical space of stairways in public buildings to increase the effect of murals on the viewer. 5. A. Kechik, Filmmaker, Film Critic Stairs in Film: From Eisenstein to the Present The image of stairs in cinematography is one of the most popular and most often utilized devices. As an obvious and convenient symbol of vertical movement, stairs often serve as a conduit between different layers of the film.

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STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION 6. A. Gudkova, Musicologist, Composer Steps in Music: From “Gradus ad Parnassum” to the merging of forms and images The metaphor of steps lies at the base of music theory — an overtone scale, steps of a mode, and harmonic steps in the Schenkerian analysis of musical works. 7. S. Kurich, Philologist, Biblical Scholar Stairs and Steps in the Religious Traditions of the Near East and Europe In antiquity, time was thought to be cyclical, and steps are often a visual equivalent to perceiving the stages of the afterlife. Stairs descend into hell and rise up to heaven, leading sometimes only in one direction, and sometimes in both. 8. E. Fandorina, Film Theorist, Professor Stairs in Sergey Eisensteinʼs Film “The Battleship Potemkin.” Eisensteinʼs The Potemkin Steps are the greatest stairway in the history of film and one of the most cited examples of this image in world culture. 9. E. Lobanov, Architecture and Design Theorist, Professor at St. Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design Stairs and Fractals in the Context of Symbolic Geometry of Architectural and Design Objects At the beginning of the 21st century, fractals were connected with the theory of self-organization of complex systems and synergetic principles, and also with the possibilities of computer graphics. In the talk, examples of projects with elemental fractal geometry and additionally, fractal stairs, will be discussed.

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CHAMOUSSEAU PERIOD 2007 — PRESENT

Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire. Stairs in Art, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2023

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STAIRS IN ART EXHIBITION

In Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, if you look at it as a conceptual project, inevitably, there is an element of appropriation and authorization of the images: the creator of this museum becomes the artist of artists, and includes in his game everything that exists, including future images. This possibility is built into the projectʼs thematic structure. All the reproductions have been grouped together by theme and motif — primary and derivative. They may be both universal, like the theme of death or the motif of stairs, and marginal. For example, the motif of the shoe appears in many works, but is rarely the main character, as in Van Goghʼs iconic painting Shoes. The object as carrier of an image, be it a work of art or any other object, is not meaningful. Mihail Chemiakin easily integrates “Snakes and Ladders” playing boards, and not only the Indian miniatures, but also mass-produced boards: prints of contemporary production with extremely simplified pictures. But the simplification makes possible the transformation of the image, in this case the ladder motif pulls in a snake motif, making it possible to cross from one theme to another… In Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire stairs lead to many very diﬀerent themes, and here there can be no doubt that a strict and final division will never be found, like “Stairs to Heaven,” “Stairs to the Executionerʼs Block,” “People on Stairs.” We may sooner talk about thematic dominants, look at the crossovers from one theme to another and invent a scenario. So, “Angels on Ladders” (to heaven) find their continuation in other characters, carrying ladders (pathway to consciousness). In many cases, these is an accretion of motifs, seen either in of Alexander Tischlerʼs A Humble House (1965), or Vladimir Elkoninʼs Woman with Ladder by Candlelight (1981). And in the section where images of spiral or mechanical stairs are shown, some images can be associated with DNA, like Spiral Helix by Viacheslav Koleichuk and Victor Galkin, (1966–2009), and instead of the formal fusion of the human figure with architectural elements we see an experiment in modeling from the realm of techno-organics. Kirill Svetlyakov Curator for Exhibitions, State Tretyakov Gallery

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Publication of the two-volume monograph Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art Russian edition, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2019 English edition, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2023

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PUBLICATIONS

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Digitization of 200 000 images from Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire Chateau de Chamousseau, Villedieu-sur-Indre, France, 2022

Preparation of Comparative Opus materials for scanning, 2022, Chateau de Chamousseau. France

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DIGITAL MUSÉE IMAGINAIRE

Technicians from Arkhenum (Bordeaux, France) scanning materials from Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire, 2022. Chateau de Chamousseau, France

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Presentation of the Digital Musée Imaginaire platform State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2023

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia, 2023

Screenshot, Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire https://musee.imaginaire.art

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DIGITAL MUSÉE IMAGINAIRE

Screenshot, Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire https://musee.imaginaire.art

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Chronology of Mihail Chemiakin's Musée Imaginaire 1963 1967 1977 1981 1982 1984 1985 1989 1993 1994

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1997 1998 2000 2002

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2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

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− Chemiakin creates his first analytical collages, Leningrad, USSR − Creation of the “Metaphysical Synthesism” manifesto with philosopher V. Ivanov − Release of Michel Lancelot's documentary film Artists of Our Time: Mihail Chemiakin − The archive moves to New York from France − Master class at Stanford University − Honorary Doctorate from University of San Francisco − Admission to New York Academy of Sciences − Master Class at University of San Francisco − Honorary Doctorate from Cedar Crest College, Allentown, Pennsylvania − Master Class The Analytical Method of Pavel Filonov at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford − Mihail Chemiakinʼs Art and Science, panel discussion at the University of San Francisco: art historian Jean Audigier, biologist Mark Noble, neurosurgeon Manfred Westphal, geneticist Thomas Bewley − Master Class Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis, University of San Francisco, San Francisco − Publication of the first book on Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire: The Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis (Ferzt Books, New York) − Order of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, France − Master Class Metaphysical Head: Deformation and Metamorphosis, Waterford Symposium, University of Utah, Salt Lake City; Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow − Honorary Doctorate degrees from Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, and University of Kabardino-Balkaria, Nalchik, Russia − Release of documentary film, Spheres, based on research by M. Chemiakin, directed and produced by A. Zagdansky − Master Class, Metaphysical Heads and Busts, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania − Creation of the Museum of the Imagination in Hudson, New York, USA − Exhibition: Spheres in Art and Architecture, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Establishment of the Mihail Chemiakin Foundation in St. Petersburg for the implementation of cultural and research programs − Premiere of television series, Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, produced and broadcast by Russiaʼs “Kultura” channel (6 episodes) − Six additional episodes of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire produced and broadcast on “Kultura” − Exhibitions: The Reaper: Images of Death in Art and Hands in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibition: Monsters in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibition: Metaphysical Heads and Busts, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibition: The Black Square in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: Spheres in Art. National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria, Nalchik, Russia − Exhibition: Out of Focus: Blurred Images in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − The archive moves from New York to Villedieu-sur-Indre, France − Exhibition: Spheres in Art at the First Annual Festival of Contemporary Art in Khanty-Mansiisk, Russia − Eight additional episodes of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Imaginary Museum produced and broadcast on “Kultura” − Exhibition: Not Made for Walking: Shoes in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibition: Spheres in Art and Architecture, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia

2010 2011 2012

2013

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2017 2018

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2022 2023

− Exhibitions: The Reaper: Images of Death in Art and Cries in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibitions: Monsters in Art and The Hand in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: Cries in Art, State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Digitization of Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire with the support of the Haydarah Foundation − Exhibition: Disturbed Images: Cuts in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibitions: Shoes in Art and The Chair in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: Monsters in Art, State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Publication of the book Chairs in Art, Cuts in Art album and Shoes in Art board presentation with the support of the Haydarah Foundation − Exhibition: Seats of… The Chair in Art, Museum of the Imagination, Hudson, NY − Exhibitions: Children in Art and Blurred Images, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition The Hand in Art, State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Exhibitions: Cuts in Art and Metaphysical Head, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: The Hand in Art, Voronezh State Academy of Art, Voronezh, Russia − Exhibition: Children in Art,State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Publication of Letters, Words, Text in Art monograph − Exhibitions: The Automobile in Art and Letters, Words, Text in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: Letters, Words, Text in Art, State Center for Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk, Russia; State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Exhibition: Cuts in Art, Mikhalkov Academy, Moscow, Russia − Master Class, Mikhalkov Academy, Moscow, Russia − Exhibition: Clothing in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Foundation, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: The Automobile in Art, Sochi Museum of Art, Sochi, Russia − Exhibition: Metaphysical Head, State Center for Contemporary Art, Novosibirsk, Russia − Exhibition: The Hand in Art, Kaliningrad Regional Scientific Library, Kaliningrad, Russia − Exhibition: Spheres in Art and Architecture, State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Exhibition: Children in Art, National Museum of Kabardino-Balkaria, Nalchik, Russia − Master Classes at the Institute of Culture and the Russian-British Institute of Management, Chelyabinsk, Russia − Exhibition: Chairs in Art, State Museum of Oriental Art, Maikop branch, Maikop, Russia − Publication of Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art monograph − Exhibition: Swaddled, Bandaged, Wrapped Figures and Objects in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia − Exhibition: Mihail Chemiakinʼs Metaphysical Workshop, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia − Publication of Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art, a two-volume monograph − Exhibition: Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art, Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia − Interdisciplinary conference Stairs in Life, Consciousness and Art, Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia − Digitization of 200,000 images from Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire, Chamousseau, Villedieu-sur-Indre, France − Exhibition: Blurred Images in Art, Mihail Chemiakin Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia − Publication of Steps, Ladders, Stairs in Art, a two-volume monograph − Creation of the Digital Musée Imaginaire Internet platform − Release of documentary film Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire: 60 Years of Research − Exhibition: Mihail Chemiakinʼs Musée Imaginaire: Stairs in Art, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia

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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN'S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE 60 Years of Research

Signed for print August 22, 2023. Format: 215×280 mm. Oﬀset printing. Coated matte paper. Edition of the book: 300 copies. Foundation for the Preservation and Digital Transformation of World Culture Raduga Publishing Russia, Saint Petersburg, Revolution Highway, 102A Printed in Russia, Saint Petersburg, Revolution Highway, 102A www.123book.ru

Foundation for the Preservation and Digital Transformation of World Culture https://imaginaire.art

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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN’S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE

60 Years of Research

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MIHAIL CHEMIAKIN’S MUSEE IMAGINAIRE 60 Years of Research