Биография художника Доброва Г. М. / Biography of the artist Dobrov G.M.: Part 1 (passages 1-5)

1. Introduction.

...We were deeply amazed by everything: his paintongs, the richest graphics, and a conversation with Gennady Dobrov which happened right there, in the studio. We clearly realized that we met not just an interesting man, but a some enormous phenomenon.

SeverraRei 14.09.13 в 15:37

We tried to reproduce this feeling of bouleversement in a twenty-minute TV story «The Parable of the ten righteous men», shown on the channel «Dobry vecher, Moskva!» on the 9-th of August in 1990.

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...He used to take things that others were afraid even to touch, things that were not only outside the sphere of art, but contraposed art itself; he used to take dreadful, mutilated, mostly ugly; - and he did it fearlessly, like a surgeon enters the room with severely injured patients.

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He chose human's suffering as his material: fates of war's invalids, victims of genocide, poverty, destitution, madness.

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He looked into eyes of dumb, cracked, nameless, down-and-out people, even into the past, into eyes of old men and children, crippled by wars, - and he saw greatness and beaty in them, the true size of the man, his essence, which opens exactly in the enormity of suffering.

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...And what is really amazing: there is nothing disgusting, repulsive, humiliating feelings stuff in this actually scary material, which the artist goes to, - on the contrary, a man in Dobrov's works - maybe, to the greatest extent is a man.

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Using the terminology of Thomas Mann, this talent is truly enlightened: what a high spirit overshadows the portraits of his heroes, forgotten by us, often expelled from society, who live on the another, sort of shadow side of the Great Life.

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Behind all of this there is a deepest faith in indestructible, light, devine beginning in a men; and through the distorted by suffering faces, the fair beautiful faces exude...

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The Master is sad, but the world around him, the air itself, seem to be washed by the light - he remelted the most poignant grief into the purest gold of art by the power of his love, the endless compassion.

Nikitina T.S., writer, literary critic,
member of the trade union committee of the Moscow playwrights.

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2. Childhood.

Sometimes he used to say:
«I was born in 1937 - in «The Year of the Ox».
I am the ox, ploughing a fallow field».


Post-war Syberia... Crowded noisy «Kazachy» mart on the outskirts of Omsk. Beggars. Recent soldiers crippled by war. Accordeon, laughter... A passing close by road to the cemetery. A brass Orchestra, mourning, tears...

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Dust and barefooted children...
Finally, the family reunited again, after 7 years of separation with a father, front-line soldier, after mother's wandering in the Far East with a little son. Parents-artists work in the art fund, Gennady studies in school, takes care of younger sisters, goes to fetch water at the pumping station, queues for kerosene and bread, goes fishing on Omka and Irtysh with a friend...

SeverraRei 15.09.13 в 11:12

And he draws, draws from nature every day. Peacefull life is gradually getting right. But the future artist already knows that not everybody's happy. There are two mental hospitals not far from home...

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He remembered all his life that red brick four-storey house on the neughbour street «1st liniya», bloodcurdling women screams and blubbers, coming out of there in evenings, and odd anguished figures of women in chemises with bare-cutted heads, emerging behind the bars.

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He saw them every day on his way to a pumping station, passing by barefooted, with buckets and a yoke. Images of them sank into his mind and haunted the soul of the impressionable boy darkly and painfully. He also knew that his own mother was in this hospital before the war...

SeverraRei 15.09.13 в 12:53

On family circumstances, he failed to realize his cherished dream - to study in the Academy of Arts in Leningrade, though, he was reccommended in there afrer an excellent graduation of Vrubel's Omsk Art College (his mother finished the same college). But she educated her art principles and diligence in her son since childhood.

SeverraRei 16.09.13 в 03:29

Gena never parted with his pencil since early childhood, he even slept with a pencil under a pillow. His father, coming back at night from work, woke up the son and asked him to show his homework - one drawing from nature, one from memory and one aquarelle drawing. «Spare the son, he is just a child», interceded for a boy his drowsy mother...

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3. The artist about himself.

I remember nothing, there is only one photo saved, where I am on my mother's hands, the weenie in swaddling clothes. But my father said that I «loved» to draw even then, in «Tvorchestvo» and «Iskusstvo» magazines, which my father ordered even before the war in 1938-1939. I draw circles with a pencil on their pages, lots and lots of irregular circles.

SeverraRei 16.09.13 в 18:03

My father shrined these my first «arts» untill the end of his life, as well as my first drawings. And this thing that they kept my first drawings (although there was a war and removals) tells that they divined an artist in me. And there were projects of the Palace of Soviets with a huge statue of Lenin and lost of lights for a night illumination, printed in magazines in those times.

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And I left sweeping circles and lines over those projects. And if to look on this from the depths of time, it turns symbolically now - I cross the official art and draw my own.

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In general, it was exactly the way it came out. When I started to draw - everybody told me that I go «against the current». And I had keen senses myself. I even have a drawing «Against the current»: a crowd goes, and I go counter to them...

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4. Moscow Secondary Art School (1951-1956)

Thirteen year-old Gennady was directly accepted in the third class of Surikov's MSAS. Teachers were doubting, that this shy, provincial boy was the author of that beautiful drawings and aquarelles, which came to them by post. But ther doubts were dispelled when they saw him working with a pencil and paint.

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And all the next years of study (1951-1956) his drawings were hanged out in the methodical office as the best, they were shown to a plenty of delegations and then were taken to funds.

SeverraRei 22.09.13 в 09:31

There is a small travel alarm clock kept in the house, which was sent to the young artist as a gift from Italy by the owner of firm Olivetty, who was excited by his drawings. In the same years, there was the reportage «Visiting Korney Chukovsky» shown, where Gennady paints a portrait from nature, a portrait of the famous children's writer.

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Gennady longed a lot for expanses of Syberia, for home Omsk. Among the twelve year-old teenagers, with whom he lived in the boarding school, ther was Volodya Kutnovsky, a very gifted boy from Novosibirsk.

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They became friends. Volodya treated his friend gently, covered him with his blanket in cold nights, even bought him galoshes once... But their friendship didn't last long.

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Volodya didn't come back from Novosibirsk to Moskow after holidays, to the 5-th class. And in the next summer Gennady went searching him. Volodya was in a mental hospital. It turned out, that his way of thinking, outlook on life, judgments diverge sharply with traditions of his family, so they decided that he is sick... Gennady was shocked.

SeverraRei 22.09.13 в 12:18

Then he had been visiting him on holidays in far Novosibirsk, in the mental hospital every summer, again and again, untill the relatives transfered Volodya to a country boarding school and entreated doctors not to tell anyone, that they have the poor boy...

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5. Surikov's Art Institute (1956-1962)

Troubles appeared on the 2nd course of the painterly faculty. Students were writing a nude model. It was required to achieve volume, plasticity, correct proportions. But it was hard for Gennady to write a detached lifeless portrait. He already got used to create images, characters, types, psychology.

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The model on his canvas was with an expressive face and red lips. The teacher expressed his displeasure. But the student could not betray himself, he couldn't adapt to the requirements of the institute's program. «Clouds began to gather» above him and he accepted the offer to transfer to the graphics faculty.

SeverraRei 22.09.13 в 13:35