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Contents
The Rape of Europe – In solidarity with Ukraine ............................. 5 by Michel Polfer Putin’s war on Europe ............................................................................ 7 by Stephen Whitefield The painter as prophet ......................................................................... 9 by Vittorio Hösle Being an artist ....................................................................................... 13 by Maxim Kantor Biography of Maxim Kantor ...............................................................17 Paintings ................................................................................................. 18 Graphics ................................................................................................ 46 Artwork index.........................................................................................87 Colophon ............................................................................................... 88
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The Rape of Europe – In solidarity with Ukraine Michel Polfer, Director
Russian aggression and the murderous war that has been falling on the Ukrainian people since February 24, 2022 takes us back to the darkest times in European history. Tens of thousands dead, cities partially razed, millions of Ukrainian refugees wandering across Europe. How to react, as a museum, how to show a sign of solidarity with the oppressed, when direct cooperation with a Ukrainian museum is currently proving impossible and our own collections contain almost no objects related to this country?
will be free, however, we invite visitors to make a donation to help Ukrainian refugees in Luxembourg. More than ever, culture can be an important resource in the face of lies and barbarism.
By pure coincidence, at the start of hostilities we were already in contact in view of a retrospective — scheduled for the end of 2023 — with the artist Maxim Kantor. A painter of Russian origin living in France and known for his very critical attitude towards the Putin regime and recent developments in Russia, Kantor spontaneously agreed to modify our common plans. Thus, the National Museum of History and Art is showing, from April 28, more than sixty of his works of a political nature that unmask the totalitarian and aggressive character of the current Russian regime. The exhibition also includes a painting specially created for our exhibition and which gave it its title: The Rape of Europe. A second coincidence happened to be that several rooms on the 4th floor had been completely emptied while waiting for the parquet to be refurbished. In consultation with the artist, we decided to use them immediately, leaving them in their current raw state. Many people contributed — in record time — to the realization of this exhibition. Maxim Kantor himself who worked tirelessly to locate works in private collections, to create others. The collectors, institutional and private, who did not hesitate a minute to lend their works under emergency conditions and whom we cannot thank enough for their trust and their generous commitment. The authors of the catalog, Vittorio Hösle and Stephen Whitefield, who wrote their contributions over the weekend! Not to forget the museum team, who set up this project within three weeks. However, special gratitude is due to Mrs Cristina Barbano who worked night and day on the high resolution images of the works. Without her unfailing commitment, this exhibition and its catalog would simply not exist. We present this exhibition, exceptional in every respect, in collaboration with the Luxembourg Red Cross. Admission
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Putin’s war on Europe Stephen Whitefield, Professor of Politics, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
This exhibition was put together with the urgency of the moment to respond to Europe at war. The impact of some of Maxim Kantor’s most powerful pictures will surely help galvanise us to declare: no to this war, to war, to the causes of war. These pictures show us what we should already have seen. Kantor sensed the rumblings of war deep under the earth years before it broke ground. His prophetic vision in these paintings and graphics only heightens the necessity to understand and confront the monsters — so brilliantly and hideously drawn in these works — that led us to these present horrors.
status and wealth. So, as I discuss in my book, Industrial Power and the Soviet State (OUP, 1993), the process of reform that Gorbachev unleashes with perestroika in 1985 ends with the very apparatus of communist power using political chaos and nationalism to privatise the state for itself. We should contemplate in that context the resonance of Western capitalism of the 1980s on Russians at the time. For the Russian intelligentsia, as with their counterparts across Central and Eastern Europe, and including Kantor, the West (which as a concept strongly aligns with Europe in the minds of many Russians) meant a liberal order that stood with them in their hatred of Stalinism. But to the Soviet political-economic elite, the massive economic inequalities that had emerged in the West, legitimated by a neo-liberal ideology, signalled only its relative decline. How poor these Soviet elite must have felt by comparison with the glamourised new super-rich in the Western “liberalised” economies! How tempting to the Soviet apparatus to lay claim to great wealth themselves that they controlled through the Soviet state! How satisfying to have such wealth as to put billionaires anywhere else in the shade! And how wonderful to have the cover of markets and democracy to justify their theft! But these slogans of markets and democracy were not Russian inventions but ours! And we British especially welcomed the thieves and their money into our society. Among the many pictures on display, I reserve a special place for “We are still on top”, which speaks to a common global experience of massive inequality that have afflicted all of us since the triumphal victory of neo-liberalism in the 1980s.
These are explicitly political pictures, produced over many years in response particularly to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s perverted integration into Europe and the Western economy. “The Rape of Europe: Maxim Kantor on Putin’s Russia” of course well describes the exhibition’s content, but the title begs important questions. What Europe means is the first. Kantor shows us maps, but with a terrible irony in them since the lines mark borders, often drawn by force and violence, and themselves the cause of further grotesque violence, as we now witness each day in Ukraine. Europe for Kantor is an ideal explicitly without borders. Understanding Putin’s place in Europe — and Russia’s — is the second. Kantor demands that we see the war in Ukraine not just as an outbreak of madness in Russia or as an attack on Europe by some alien force, but as something systematic that is only intelligible by seeing interconnections of power around the world, in which the West played a crucial enabling role. Yes, the attack on Ukraine is Putin’s war but he is the cankerous boil on a broader rot. We should therefore see the current conflict in a longer framework to understand Russia’s place in the Europe that Putin’s forces now defile.
Scholars have spent considerable energy since 1991 in trying to label the system of power that was established in Russia. Oligarchy was and still is a common description, perhaps most accurately to describe the politics of the 1990s, but this became increasingly misleading following Putin’s rise after 2000 because it ascribed far too much political power to the oligarchs and underestimated their dependence, financially and even physically, on the system that Putin presides over. Kantor likens the post-Soviet Russian system to feudalism, though I find this term misleading also, since feudalism has connotations of honour and obligation as well as control and subservience. To avoid the trap of labels, one might simply describe the system as a generalised form of corruption in which each
Kantor emerged as an artist in a transformational milieu, in the waning years of the Soviet Union. Soviet socialist ideals we should recognise were widely shared by its citizens, not only in their support for welfare and security, but also in a common rejection particularly among the Russian intelligentsia of materialism. The Soviet elite, however, perhaps because it controlled the agencies of state and economy, had for the most part long lost its faith in the spiritual and comradely promises of socialism. For it, the developmental failures of the system were of paramount concern, both in the economy and the military, and their biggest concerns may have been with their personal
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The painter as prophet Vittorio Hösle, Professor of Arts and Letters in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures and Concurrent Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science, University of Notre Dame
For at least two centuries, a fierce battle has been fought in philosophical aesthetics between content aesthetics and formal aesthetics. To put it simply, content aesthetics focuses on the content that a work of art aims to communicate, while formal aesthetics concentrates on the forms by which this is done. Content aesthetes relate to the truth and cognitive content of art, while formal aesthetes refer to the beautiful treasury of forms that is reflected in the work of art, which is considered an autonomous universe. The abundant references within this universe, and those between the artwork and other artworks, are at the centre of their attention. The artwork's claim to relate to reality beyond this is considered obsolete.
not only come to an arrangement with the arsonists, but have made common cause with them and supported the financial preparations of their activities. Now, that Ukraine is in flames — and perhaps soon other parts of Europe as well — it is high time to look at Kantor's artistic interpretation of the last decades to understand what is happening and to prevent the worst of what might be to come. “Ruins of Empire” from 1992 is a stirring testimony to what followed the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991: violence, poverty, loss of one's dignity due to forcing millions of people who were deprived of their livelihood through unemployment and the loss of pensions, to become part of the humiliated and insulted. “The State” from 1995 resumes Kantor's earlier paintings, which, in parodic reference to Plato's “Republic,” depicted the three social strata of the Soviet Union: the ideological rulers in the centre, the police apparatus in the middle, and the ordinary subjects on the periphery. In the new painting, we see alongside the rulers, whose expressionless faces contrast with highly expressive hands that are primarily busy eliminating competitors, on the very outside the common people, who continue to be kept under control by a brutal repressive apparatus, among other things with the help of barking dogs. But now there is a fourth layer consisting of the profiteers of the new society. They celebrate, copulate in an original way, make music and dance. The transition to the predatory capitalism of the 1990s was only possible through the so-called oligarchs, who accumulated huge wealth in the chaos of the decline by snatching up state property. “The Ball of Thieves” from 1995 portrays these profiteers, while for most people the “Open Society” (2002), praised for instance by Karl Popper and illustrated by Kantor in a somewhat different form, ended in an economy of shortages and mass poverty as a result of the economic shock therapy under Boris Yeltsin.
Of course, there is no doubt that the work of art forms a world in itself, characterised by formal criteria, and that fictionality is an essential feature of art. The artist is not a scientist; he may, and even should, deviate from the facts of reality. But — and formalism usually fails to conceive this — he should do so just because deviating from the facts allows him to reveal deeper structures of the reality in which we all live. The formal shaping of one's own perceptions in a work of art is certainly indispensable. However, real great art is inspired by factual insights that it wants to communicate — it is not a mere play with forms. Maxim Kantor's special position within contemporary art is not simply the result of his imagination and expressiveness, his inexhaustible capacity to work, his magnificent knowledge of Western art history — which always resonates in the background of even his most daring alienations — his heroic courage, his great sense of justice, his empathy and his deeply Christian religiousness. As this catalogue demonstrates, Kantor was one of the very few who, based on an extraordinary political intelligence founded on an extremely broad historical knowledge, had long foreseen where the journey that Russia began in 2000 under Putin would lead. Of course, until February 2022, the Western countries largely allowed dust to be thrown in their eyes, certainly because it was much more convenient not to see what was slowly but inevitably going to happen and what would have required clear-sighted and responsible governments to enhance their military capabilities on the one hand and to rapidly reduce their energy dependence from Russia on the other. But the truth is that the European elites, much like Gottlieb Biedermann in Max Frisch's drama “Biedermann and the Arsonists”, have
In this period full of chaos, the drunkard Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin, a former intelligence officer, first as prime minister, then in 2000 as his successor in the presidency (“Keep Russia Safe”). Sitting on Yeltsin's lap, Kantor makes Putin look like a puppet. However, Putin soon proves to be a loyal successor to Stalin (“It Almost Fits”). Both lithographs are from the cycle “Vulcanus” from 2010, a time when the Western world was enthusiastic about Putin, who was then satisfied with his role as prime minister. In the same year, Kantor created a portrait of Putin that mag-
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Being an artist Maxim Kantor, artist
1. Since the October Revolution, Russians have dispersed all over the world. The comparison sometimes applied with the settlement of the Jews is not accurate, since the Jews scattered all over the world when both Jewish kingdoms ceased to exist. The same applies to the Irish or the Armenian emigration: the state fell apart, after that the people scattered across the planet.
contradiction. Troubles are expected from government officials, but the state represents a kind of unity — may it be unity in inequality — but a unity nonetheless. People give their lives for the state, not for its justice, but because they are left with no other way to show brotherhood. In a country that did not know the Renaissance and practically passed the Enlightenment, but at the same time imagines itself to be in a Christian civilization, such a performative counteraction is painful.
The Russian emigration, in contrast, is not related to the collapse of the Russian Empire: the Bolsheviks restored it almost instantly. Nothing is more vivid than the idea of the Russian State. When Russian artists, writers, and philosophers left Russia, they did so not because the state ceased to exist, but because they ceased to identify themselves with it. Most of them continued to feel part of Russian culture. Culture and the state are related concepts, but they are not identical. Moreover, Russian culture is constantly in dispute with Russian statehood.
This contradiction is extremely painful for the artist. In principle, one becomes an artist from the realization of the imperfection of being in relation to the Creator's plan (no matter how one defines the Creator): the artist is called upon to fill the gap between the given and the ideal with his creativity; in Russia, this need is intensified by the fact that the artist is a witness to the ontological injustice of what is happening to the people. But the artist himself, with all the uniqueness of his talent, is part of the people and thus shares the contradiction of folk culture. Because after all, art, no matter how “intellectual” it may be, arises from the nature of folk life, from the matter melted down by the spirit.
There were Russian thinkers who realized that the demanding statehood, which did not declare equal laws for its people, was an obstacle to entering the aesthetics of Enlightenment. There were also opponents of such a position: they considered Russian statehood a sacred phenomenon — even with its peculiarities. The latter (who consider the Russian Empire an heir to Byzantium with a special mission) were called “Slavophiles”. Within Russian culture, the dialogue between “Slavophiles” and “Westerners” is a basic concept.
The Russian cultural gene is a gene of contradictory intentions. Most likely, I am the heir of the Russian literary tradition (I am not only an artist, but also a writer, and I think of paintings from a writer's point of view — as the plot of a novel); I constantly think about Tolstoy and Pasternak. To a much lesser extent, I feel belonging to Russian visual art. Visual art is connected to the individual language of plastic arts; in the vast expanses of the continent of Russia, the plastic language is homogeneous. It is possible to preserve individuality in the crowd: so did Mandelstam. It is possible to dissolve into the crowd in order to gain individuality through unity — in literature Mayakovsky did this, so did the hero of the novel “War and Peace”, Pierre Bezukhov, or Doctor Zhivago. But in visual art this is impossible — the visible image exists only individually. Since childhood, my teachers have been the European masters — first of all, Goya and Daumier, Brueghel and Van Gogh; I have always been guided by them. My father (Karl Kantor was a philosopher) brought me up in the German philosophical tradition, I will conditionally call it “Kantianism”; the principle of Christian humanism, which defines the art of the Renaissance, is for me the defining one in art.
Actually, we are talking about whether “Russian statehood” is an instrumental or sacred concept. If “statehood” is a sacred concept, then service to the state is a moral duty and a merit, whatever that state is doing, and if statehood is an instrumental concept, then morality and a free mind develop in conflict with the state machine. Both trends exist in Russian art at the same time. Sometimes this contradiction is called the “mysterious Russian soul”: the combination of opposites gives rise to paradoxes. It often happens that these opposites unite in one person. The poet Pushkin, for instance, was both a singer of the Russian Empire (which suppressed rebellions of dependent peoples) and a singer of abstract freedom. People who have been in serfdom or in various variations of such from birth are familiar with a life in constant
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Biography of Maxim Kantor
Maxim Kantor (Moscow 1957) is a painter, draughtsman, sculptor, writer, essayist and art historian. He holds Russian, German and Argentinian nationalities.
Gallery, Moscow; Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg; British Museum, London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; University of Notre Dame's Snite Museum of Art, Indiana; Bass Museum, Miami Beach.
In 1972, Kantor was expelled from the 9th special school for publishing anti-Soviet wall newspapers. By his own wish, he left KOMSOMOL (Communist Union of Youth) and participated in dissident groups of philosophers and scholars. For one year, he worked as a loader in a railway station, then in a laboratory of design. He graduated from the Moscow State University of Printing Art in 1980, took part in unofficial exhibitions and founded in 1983 in Moscow the underground art group “Krasnyj Dom” (Red House).
As a painter, Kantor never joined any artistic group. Since Soviet times he became a critical observer of society and a political critic. He creates series of large paintings and graphic works, which intertwine with his fiction works and public statements and essays. As a writer, Maxime Kantor became famous in Russia through his two-volume novel “Uchebnick Risovania” (Drawing Textbook) published in 2006. The novel, which describes the process of regime change in Russia and the change of aesthetics in the new ruling classes, will be published in its 6th edition this year. Since 2006, Kantor's comedies and dramas have been staged by several Russian theatres.
He left Russia in 1992 and lived between Russia and Western Europe for about 10 years. Since 2004, he has been living in Berlin, London and currently on Ile de Ré. In 1997, he represented the Russian Federation at the 47th Biennale d’Arte di Venezia with his exhibition “Criminal Chronicle”.
His novel “Krasnyj svet” (Red Light) from 2013, a wide-ranging fact-saturated but fictionally embellished panorama of Russian history from the failure of the Russian revolution to the Ukraine war of 2013 was on the short list of several Russian literary awards. It has since been translated into French (Feu Rouge) by Louison Éditions in 2016 and German (Rotes Licht) by Paul Zsolnay Verlag in 2018. His philosophical reflections on oil painting "Chertopoloch i Tern" (Thistle and Thorn), published in 2021, are currently being translated into Italian and will be published by the University of Turin later this year.
From 1987 until today, Kantor has exhibited in museums all over the world, including the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (1988); the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island (1990); the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee (1990); the Kunsthalle, Berlin, 1995; the Royal College of Art, London, 1996; the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 1996, 1997/98; the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt am Main, 2000; the Villa Vauban, Luxembourg, 2000; the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main, 2001/2022; the Querini Stampalia Fondazione, Venice, 2005; the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 2007; the Musée du Montparnasse, Paris, 2012; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2012; the State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, 2012; the Fondazione Stelline, Milan, 2016; the National Museum Gdansk, 2016; the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, 2017/2018. Works by Maxim Kantor can be found in museum collections worldwide: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; Gemäldegalerie, Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; Kunsthalle Emden; Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig; Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art, Luxembourg, National Museum Gdansk; State Tretiakov
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Paintings
State, 1995 Oil on canvas, 300 x 380 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Minotaur, 2014 Oil on canvas, 160 x 120 cm Private collection, Switzerland
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Travelling Comedians, 2015 Oil on canvas, 196 x 306 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Dragon, 2016 Oil on canvas, 170 x 170 cm National Museum Gdańsk, Poland
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Brown Spring, 2016 Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Graphics
Lonely Crowd, 1992 Copper, etching, aquatint drypoint, 60 x 149 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Europe and Asia Portfolio Wasteland Atlas, 2000-2001 Aquaforte and woodcut, 68 x 54 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Government Prepares Reforms Portfolio Wasteland Atlas, 2000-2001 Aquaforte and woodcut, 68 x 54 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Putin, 2010 Pastel on paper, 21 x 29,7 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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It Almost Fits Portfolio Vulcanus Atlas, 2010 Lithograph with colored pencils, 90 x 60 cm Collection Maxim Kantor, Germany
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Artwork index
Paintings
Graphics
19.............................................................................. Lonely Crowd 20........................................................................... Map of Europe 21..............................................................................................State 22 ............................................................................. Open Society 23 ............................................................Requiem for a Terrorist 24 ........................................................................... Haute Couture 25...................................................................... Unlimited Edition 26................................................................. The Rape of Europe 27 ...................................................................................... Minotaur 28................................................................................. Skull of Bull 29.....................................................................................Refugees 30.............................................................. Travelling Comedians 31..................................................................................... Leviathan 32 ......................................... The Temptation of Saint Anthony 33......................................................................................... Dragon 34..............................................................................Brown Spring 35........................................................................ Flight into Egypt 36.......................................................................................Civil War 37 ...............................................................................................Arks 38............................................................................Le Bateau Ivre 39................................................................................Three Skulls 40........................................................................... Ship of Europe 41............................................................................... Ship of Fools 42....................................................... Erasm and Thomas More 43................................................................................... Left-overs 44 ............................................................................... Black Horse 45 ................................................................ The Rape of Europe
47.............................................................................. Lonely Crowd 48........................................................................Each for Himself 49................................................................... Chimera of Eurasia 50..........................................................................Russian Sphinx 51......................................................................... Europe and Asia 52............................................Government Prepares Reforms 53................................................................. Parliament Debates 54 ...................................................Change of Elites: New Toys 55...................................................................................Free Them 56.....................................................................................It's a Deal 57 .................................................................................... Leviathan 58 ........................................................................The Four Riders 59................................................................................ Tournament 60................................................. Hommage à Deconstruction 61............................................................................ Haute Couture 62.................................................................... Twelve Stray Dogs 63............................................................................................. Putin 64 ............................................................................. It Almost Fits 65......................................................................Keep Russia Safe 66 ................................................................Devourers of Sharks 67 ................................................... Clockwork Is Nearly Wound 68 ........................................................... We Are Still on the Top 69 ........................................................................................ Dragon 70 .......................................................................He Is Behind You 71 ..................................................................................... On March 72 .................................................................................... Big Game 73 .........................................................................Dance Macabre 74 .................................................................................. Chess Play 75 .................................................................. Great Expectations 76 ............................................................................................. Help! 77 ......................................................... Dragons over the Crowd 78 ................................................................................. Geopolitics 79 .................................................................... The Predicted End 80 ................................................................ Digging for Capitals 81 ..................................................................Master of the World 82..................................................................... You Have to Obey 83.....................................................Would It Ever Be Possible? 84 ........................................................................................... Beast 85..........................................................The Master of the World
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Colophon
This catalogue was realized in the context of the exhibition The Rape of Europe. Maxim Kantor on Putin’s Russia (Works 1992-2022) shown at Musée national d’histoire et d’art Luxembourg from 29 April – 16 October 2022 (curators: Michel Polfer and Ruud Priem).
Catalogue editor Michel Polfer Coordination Sonia da Silva Authors Vittorio Hösle, Maxim Kantor, Michel Polfer, Stephen Whitefield Proofreading Lis Hausemer Sandra Litzinger Design and layout Arnaud Hanon/Visualis
ISBN : 978-2-87985-713-8 Publications du Musée national d’histoire et d’art – Luxembourg, 45
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Maxim Kantor on the exhibition [April 2022] “This exhibition, realized in a very short time in reaction to the war in Ukraine, brings together works that can be called political. In fact, any humanistic art that addresses people and society inevitably becomes political. We live in a society that believed it had overcome war. But greed and a desire to triumph over one’s neighbour do their usual job. We thought fascism was defeated forever. But fascism proved very resilient. Works from the last 30 years are shown. I have long warned of the danger, observing from year to year how the proclaimed ideals have been denied and distorted, and how ‘conditional’ democracy has been replaced by a new feudalism. I have seen people become monsters. Sometimes, I called things by their right names too clearly in my works — and it seemed offensive. Today it seems to me more necessary than ever to show these works. Russia — the country where I lived for many years before becoming a citizen of Europe — has been a laboratory for inhumane social projects all through the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, Putin’s project is not the first, and it is important to understand its genesis.
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ISBN ISBN 978-2-87985-713-8 9782 87985 473 1
2022
However, the current conflict does not negate the humanistic component of Russian culture, a culture born within the framework of an inhuman empire and in the struggle against serfdom. Therefore, I hope that today’s evil will be overcome. However, what is happening right now reminds us how thin the cultural varnish is. How fragile humanism is and how easily evil can triumph in the world if we do not find moral solidity within ourselves.”