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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

COSSACK MAMAI WITH A GLASS EYE

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

There is still time to explore David Burliuk’s exhibit at the National Art Museum.

Imagine a biologist of the Cuvier school who can recreate a giant dinosaur having only the beast’s backbone to start with. Such is the impression his works produce. There are 35, but there could have been 3,500, had it not been for the malignant atmosphere of the past 70 years with Ukrainian national art being officially hunted down. This handful of canvases left in Ukraine was collected and restored by museum zealots, dedicated restorers, and art critics. This exhibit was literally put together by bits and pieces and the result has turned out fascinating.

Years back, David Burliuk’s figure was gradually turned into a kind of bogey. He was very tall and hefty, wearing a yellow jacket with a cluster of radish in the lapel (just look at him, he thinks he is another Mayakovsky!) and a glass eye. Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian poet, wrote of him, “You responded to everything with your deafening ho-ho-ho, because you knew your power...” and in another poem, “You turned up on Munich streets, blowzy as ever...”

Unruly and unkempt as he looked, Burliuk was actually a friendly and well-wishing person who abided by strict rules in his art. His “Merry-Go-Round” (1921), compared to the proletarian-revolutionary-Leninist garbage that officially passed for art at the time, is graceful and carefree. Just like the author who, among his futurist counterparts, was perhaps the least persnickety. Contemporary critics did not like him. One wrote acidly that Burliuk “spent days on end at the archaic section of the Hermitage... having mastered pencil drawings copying academic paintings with photographic precision, a style he so viciously attacked himself.” He made friends with Repin and Gorky (dedicating to the latter his “Oscine”). Brodsky who would paint his “Lenin at Smolny” kept his works to his dying day.

Burliuk called the sky a cadaver and the stars a purulent rash, but he also knew other motifs, dreamy and tender. In 1911, he glorified sewers, but he always loved to watch the sun rising over blossoming lilac shrubs and painted aristocratic landscapes, verandahs, abandoned estates, shadowy alleys, until the “great futuristic leap.” (The sentimental period is very well represented at the exhibit.) “I like to picture pregnant men,” Burliuk declared and was fond of Turgenev-type damsels sitting on park benches and orchards in spring. However, he was not nearly so meretricious as he seemed. Pavel Muratov wrote in The Golden Fleece: “Of course, these are just spineless and not very skilled experiments with techniques borrowed from ‘radical Parisian art salons.’” Yet precisely these “experiments” were most eagerly purchased at his art shows.

His “Turn Off All the Lights” and “Shake the Skies in a Fiery Hopak” futuristic series went down in the history of art (note that he mentions the Ukrainian hopak folk dance and not some foreign counterpart). In this period Burliuk painted using colors of “boiling blood” and “colorful smallpox.” In immigration he became known as the American van Gogh. Hence his obscenely scorched land in “Harvest Time” (1915), ugly emaciated “Women of Hot Countries” (1921).

Yet the nihilism in his works was somehow very cheerful. Pink American landscapes of the 1940s are truly idyllic. Naturally, they loved him in the United States. His memorial museum is still functioning in New York City. “New York served to enhance his inborn enterprising spirit,” Kornei Chukovsky wrote in his diary after meeting with Burliuk in 1956. There is no venom in this statement. He took it for granted. The man was born that way, so what? Break a chair over his head? Nothing seemed to spoil the artist. He was Ukrainian, saturated with Ukrainian friendliness.

He was born in Semyrotivshchyna, a hamlet in Kharkiv province. His pictures were displayed in Moscow, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Kherson, Kharkiv, Odesa, Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk), and of course in Kyiv (he personally organized the famous Lanka exhibit in 1908). His family tree was rooted in the Pysarchuks, a Zaporizhzhian Cossack family, and all his life Burliuk was fond of painting horses (his German teacher said he was a “beautiful wild steppe horse”). He painted the Dnipro and sang Ukrainian songs to the accompaniment of the bayan (button accordion). He thought his “Niagara Falls” creative coloration was “profoundly national.” He wrote poetry rich in national themes: Khortytsia Island, Cossack Otaman chief Nalyvaiko, and even “an old Japanese man wearing a bryl (Ukrainian straw hat).” Pure postmodernism! He loved to paint in his native village (which he poetically called Old Gilead). It was there that he illustrated and printed Khlebnikov’s books of verse. Unfortunately, we do not have his “Sviatovslav” (1915), “Cossack Mamai” (1916), “Zaporizhzhian Cossacks in the Field” (1920s), not even copies...

Burliuk is returning to Ukraine at long last. Some five years ago his two drawings were quickly sold at an auction in the L’Art Gallery, starting at $1,500 and $2,000 (and both are on display at the current exhibit, “Welcome Back to Ukraine, Mr. Burliuk”). A conference dedicated to his creative legacy is expected this summer.

David Burliuk, “Women of Hot Countries,” 1921

 

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