Обухов Платон Алексеевич / Platon Obukhov
Родился в 1968 году в Москве. Учился в юношеской студии художника Льва Токмакова (1928-2010), в 1980 г. поступил в детскую художественную школу на Красной Пресне. В 1990 году закончил Тарусское отделение Калужского областного художественного училища. Образование получил на художественном факультете педагогического института г. Калуги. Позже занимался живописью под руководством Т. А. Шевченко - дочери А. В. Шевченко, учился в студии художника И. Голицына, которого считает своим учителем. С 1995 г. - свободный художник-станковист. Участвовал в городских, районных, Калужских областных выставках живописи. В 2005 году вступил в ТСХ России, отделение живописи. Удостоен Почетного знака Национального фонда &"Общественное признание&" (1999), лауреат награды &"Бронзовый крест&" Русского биографического института (2001). Считает себя одним из представителей “третьего русского авангарда”, который на рубеже ХХ и ХХI веков пришел на смену легендарному первому русскому авангарду (1900-1920ые годы) и второму русскому авангарду (1960-1980ые годы). Девизом Обухова являются слова К. Малевича: «Художник открывает мир и являет его человеку», П. Сезанна: “Труд художника, которым он достигает совершенства в своем деле, есть достаточное вознаграждение за то, что дураки его не понимают», В. Кандинского «Искусство - это умение сделать и закончить вещь, а творчество - это бесконечное состояние», М. Ларионова: «Лучшее, что есть в русском искусстве, всегда будет инстинктивно восприниматься как нечто универсально прекрасное» и И. Старженецкой: «Если хотя бы одному человеку нравятся мои картины, значит, я не зря живу».
Картины Обухова выставлялись на арт-ярмарках Франкфурта и Кёльна. Живописные и графические работы находятся в частных и корпоративных коллекциях в России, Германии, Италии, Израиле. Несколько работ было продано на аукционе «Dobiaschofsky» (Bern, Switzerland), и в ходе работы Salon International d’Art (Базель) и FIAC (Париж). Работает в фигуративной и абстрактно-экспрессивной манере, с уклоном в сторону сезаннизма, фовизма и супрематизма. Также занимается скульптурой (абстрактные пространственные формы) и росписью фарфоровых тарелок.
Platon Obukhov is Moscow-based European artist educated in the traditions of Paul Cezanne and Kazimir Malevich. He belongs to the Third Russian avant-guard movement which came in the wake of the legendary First and Second Russian avant-guard movements at the turn of the 21st century.
The First Russian avant-guard was the ultimate creation of such great artists as Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Michail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitsky and Robert Falk, and sought to promote the ideas of European Futurism, Fauvism and Abstract Constructivism on Russian soil. The Second Russian avant-guard was mainly the painters’s uprising against the suffocatng Communist system, ehich luckily led to its final demise and decomposition. The Third Russian avant-guard, following directly in the footsteps of the two original ones, combines the unbounded non-conformist spirit of the Second Russian avant-guard with the precious artistic talent and genuine art achievements of the First one.
Building on the gorgeous richness of Russian cultural treasures from icons to Malevich, striving for the ultimate political emancipation of the Russian people in the Promiced Land of of true Democracy, the Third Russian avant-guard is both ethnic and international, inward and outward oriented. Obukhov is proud to be a part of this artistic movement which seeks to introduce the most colorful and talented artistic formulas into Russian art life, as well as endow Russia with the true Democracy and finally emancipate the Russian people from the odious remnants of the former oppressive political system. Both these things, true art and fight for freedom, go hnd in hand and simply cannot survive apart from each other, and settle the main agenda for the Third Russian avant-guard at present.
Platon Obukhov began to paint earlier than he began to talk. As soon as his baby fingers were able to hold a pencil, he sratred drawing - drawing all he could see around himself: cats and dogs, houses, flowers, birds, the Earth and the sky. When he learned to read, he came to illustrate his favourite books of Alexander Dumas, Jules Verne and Charles Dickens with his own drawings. By the age of the , he was an accomlished young artist with several youth exhibitions behind. The ultimate climax of his artistic genius at that time was Obukhov’s picture of a Soviet self-propelled intermediate-range nuclear missile published in the “Murzilka”magazine, the second in number of daily circulation only to “Pravda”, on the eve of October revolution.
As the young painter grew older, he sought to get a more proper formal schooling and went to study first at the studio of Lev Tokmakov (1928-2010), the pupil of Pavel Kuznetzov and Alexander Kuprin. Lev Tokmakov was a figure “sine qua non” of the Moscow art world at the time - he was known as the leader of the most successful art studio in Russian capital of 1970s and 1980s and as the discoverer of young talents. Tokmakov noticed the gifts of Pavel Leonov, Elena Volkova, Vladimir Mizinov, Vasili Romanenkov, Alexander Suvorov, Igor Semenikhin, Leonid Shmelkov, Elena Zelenina, Alexander Turkin who later all became renowned artists. It was widely considered that a beginner was to call on Tokmakov to find out whether he was destined to become a painter or not. Obukhov stood Tokmakov’s test and studied for 3 years in his studio. Obukhov’s works of that period won numerous awards at the Moscow city art contests and at the Russian republican art events.
In order to practice oil painting, Obukhov went to study under Boris Turetzky (1928-1997), and then under Nikolay Andronov (1929-1998), the pupil of famous Russian painter Rudolf Frentz. He also took advantage of the happy opportunity to study under Tatyana Shevchenko - daughter of legendary artist Alexander Shevchenko, member of the Donkey’s Tail group and close friend of Michail Larionov. After that, Obukhov studied under Magdalina Verigo, the pupil of famous Russian painter Ilya Mashkov, and took lessons from Nadezhda Navrotzkaya - the widow =pupil of painter Alexander Osmerkin. Then Obukhov studied under Illarion Golitzyn, whom he considers his principal tutor. While studying in Golitzyn’s studio, Obukhov had the chance to receive the lessons of Dmitry Zhilinsky - Golitzyn’s closest friend and colleague.
At the same time, the interest for the art of non-conformist painters and sculptors developed in Obukhov - that came simultaneously with his reading Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag” and Vladimir Maximov’s proze “The Seventh Day of Creation”, “Cross the line”, ”The Ark for the non-invited”, Sakharov’s philosophical works, Mandelstam’s poetry and Akhmatova’s bold lyrics. This appeared to be fantastically interesting area of art long hidden from the general Soviet public, and Obukhov embraced it enthusiastically. He established contacts with Michail Shwarzman, Alexander Kharitonov, Dmitry Krasnopevtzev, Boris Sveshnikov, Lev Kropivnitzky, Vladimir Nemukhin, which later grew into long-standing friendships and endowed Obukhov with a new vision of art.
With the help of the prominent collectioner, deputy Minister of foreign affairs and Ambassador to Germany Vladimir Semenov, Obukhov came to know Alexander Zverev and Vladimir Yakovlev, and see them work. Yakovlev’s art - unbounded in spirit, sometimes primitive in outward form but immensely rich in its intricate layers of color and composition - immediately stole Obukhov’s heart, and he became acquainted with the entire Yakovlev’s family, and together with his sister Olga Igorevna would often go to the mental hospital where Yakovlev was stationed to bring him fruits, cakes and sausages, and see him work, and to paint side by side with him, trying to catch the precious glimpses of Yakovlev’s rare technique.
At that moment, Obukhov couldn’t have possibly imagined that the time will come for him to duplicate the fate of Vladimir Yakovlev and to be put in a psychiatric asylim himself and to become another Russian painter incarcerated and working there.
In 1988, Obukhov family bought a house at the outskirts of an ancient Russian town of Tarusa on the river Oka. Tarusa, which was founded just a hundred years later than Moscow, was a privileged summer resting place for the creme de la creme of the Russian intelligentsia, painters and dramatic artists. Famous Ivan Tzvetaev, the founder of the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow, had his summer residence there, and his daughter, the great and dramatic poet Marina Tzvetaeva, grew up in Tarusa. One of the most intricate and refined of all the Russian painters, Victor Borisov-Musatov, used to come to Tarusa for inspiration and painting, and was buried there. Such famous painters as Nikolay Krymov also lived and worked in Tarusa.
In Tarusa, Obukhov made the acquaintance of Max Birstein, a pupil and close friend of Robert Falk, and asked Birstein to become his mentor. Max Birstein used to teach Obukhov to paint nudes - the subject which he knew perfectly well because he himself used to paint the nudes together with Falk, and made the famous portrait of model Stanislava Osipovich who served the model for Falk’s nude canvas of 1922 which was wildly attacked by Nikita Khrushev at the exhibition in Manezh in 1962.
But after the Second world war, Tarusa became not only the artists’s town, but also a dissident town: those dissident figures who got the rare chance to survive in Stalin’s death camps, were not alowed to return to live in Moscow, and had to settle in towns positoned not less than 100 kilometers far from Moscow. For the dissident intellectuals, Tarusa, which they knew in their happier days as the art’s hub, became the natural choice. Thus Tarusa became the home town for Ariadna Tzvetaeva-Efron - daughter of Marina Tzvetaeva who settled there after 20 years in Stalin’s camp, for Alexandra Timireva - widow of Admiral Kolchak, for the dissident poet and human-rights activist Alexander Ginzburg, for dissident Anatoly Marchenko who was the last victim of the Soviet regime during Gorbachev’s Perestroika dying in 1988 in the prison of Chistopol, for [[Andrey Amalrik]], [[Kronid Lubarsky]], [[Sergey Kovalev]], [[Natalia Gorbanevskaya]], [[Felix Svetov]], [[Zoya Krakhmalnikova]], [[Vladimir Maximov]], [[Frida Vigdorova]].
And, quite symbolically, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent his honeymoon in Tarusa before the war - possibly not foreknowing his future dissident fate but mystically preparing himself for it in the terms of place.
One of the most prominent and inspirational dissident figures in Tarusa was poet and painter Arkady Steinberg (1907-1984), the friend and colleague of Arseny Tarkovsky (father of film director Andrey Tarkovsky), Eduard Bagritsky, Semen Lipkin and Vladimir Gonik. Steinberg was twice sent to Gulag - before and during the Second world war, and was freed only after Stalin’s death. Not being allowed to return to live in Moscow, he went to live in Tarusa where his younger son Eduard Steinberg was born. In Tarusa, Arkady Steinberg became the heart and soul of a huge group of young aspiring artists, poets and writers who were eager to create new post-Stalinist art. Steinberg taught them not only the technique of painting and poetry, but also the need to remember the grand lessons of the first Russian avant-guard which was banned by the Soviet authorities as formalist and anti-Socialist in its nature. With the magic wand of Steinberg’s encouragement, a whole group of youths became prominent artists - such as his own son, Eduard Steinberg, Boris Sveshnikov, Jury Zheltov, Vladimir Vorobiev.
Steinberg, who personally knew Robert Falk, Vladimir Tatlin, Kazimir Malevich, Nikolay Suetin, Ivan Klun, Nadezhda Udaltsova and Alexander Drevin, Alexander Rodchenko, Alexander Vesnin, Adolf Milman, El Lissitsky, knew and understood the great spirit of their art and the majestic potential imbued in it, regarded the harsh crushing of their avant-guard art under the pressure of “Socialist realism”, forcibly introduced by the Communist Party, to be a national Russian tragedy. His noble dream was to try to close the dramatic gap between the great art of the first Russian avant-guard and the present artistic endeavours in the USSR, so that the rare and cherished lesons of the first Russian avant-guard were not lost andwasted uselessly. In a way, he managed to achieve this lofty goal, since his own pupuils and the artists inspired by him were able to create the Second Russian avant-guard after the death of Joseph Stalin, the end of Gulag and the revival of the rudiments of democracy in Russia.
It was this very Tarusa, colored with the dissident spirit and the high aura of the creators of the Second Russian avant-guard where Obukhov came in 1988. And when he became acquainted with Arkady Steinberg’s son Eduard Steinberg, and plunge himself into his art, it was like the enchanting immersion into the world of high art, into the traditions going directly from Malevich and Tatlin through the Steinberg family till present days, a captivating journey into the history of Russian art first broken up by the Communists and then revived by the selfless genius of Arkady and Eduard Steinberg.
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