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# Mikhail Chernyshov's memoirs of the 1963 American graphic art exhibition and pop art
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/nastupila-osen-shestdesiat-tretego-noiabr/
- Published: 2021-06-17T18:34:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:57:45.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Art, Moscow, People

“Autumn came in sixty-three, November. One day I came out of the TYuZ (I worked there as a lighting technician), walked up Gorky Street and saw fresh posters for an exhibition of American graphic art. I thumped the hoarding in delight and noticed two men eyeing me; I heard English spoken. I asked where they were from, and the shorter of them answered in Russian. It turned out they were guides at that very exhibition. The tall one knew no Russian and in general said nothing, but with the other, Igor, I arranged to meet the next day. We met at Mayakovsky Square, dropped in on an acquaintance of mine and sat at her place (a wretched interior), then went for a stroll along the Brestskaya streets. My knowledge and theoretical pronouncements took Igor by surprise. In our conversations I had to use a home-grown terminology, to some extent even worked out jointly; the word pop art, as far as I remember, I did not use. A slang word of the time from the musicians’ jargon, something like “lazha” \[rubbish\], for example, served me to name what was later called “kitsch” and so on. In our discussions of the “popular image” concepts from dialectics were a great help, the negation of the negation, for instance. Pop art (I use the term only for want of another), its formula was the inevitable consequence of the dominance of Parisian abstract “Impressionism”. The French of the fifties and sixties had reached their ceiling; you could not jump higher. It was a kind of Tell el-Amarna, or rococo. New York reacted sharply to the situation that had arisen, and a “primitive” of a new quality appeared: an intellectual one. The formal ideology of Lichtenstein and Warhol is akin to the declarations of Picasso and Larionov of 1907–1910\. Both used negative values (I called this conception, loosely, anti-formal). American pop art used a system of signs designed for millions of consumers whom it needed and respected. In the USSR there was, and is, only one respected consumer, the army; there are simply no others, everything is depersonalised, and that is the stove one must dance from. The all-embracing cult of Soviet imperialism includes revolutionary and Party themes as its components. I exploited this militaristic Eldorado with a pleasure bordering on self-mockery; I knew what I was doing. Militarism has already been instilled into several Soviet generations, and it is almost impossible to rid oneself of it; the exception was a comparatively small group of intellectuals.

The enamel dried quickly. Each day I turned out a work, stood it against the wall and set about the next. I overfulfilled my plan, so I could allow myself a little fooling about: I made a picture, “Kandinsky Out for a Walk”, in which a constructivist bounder in a top hat, with Ukrainian embroidery, strolls along. A hero of the Korean War, the “Super Sabre”, was also made for this exhibition; I could not get hold of a photograph of the aircraft, so again I drew a linear rectangle, a “sight”, and outside its bounds wrote the name in small letters: “Super Sabre F-100” (quite the “Fascist has flown past”). I picked out some graphics, many with English text, more rarely Russian, “Dunkirk” with its red and blue toy soldiers. Lipkov, too, brought round the soldiers he had bought from me, “22 June”. He was caught in the rain, and the gouache (on plywood) ran a little. In that state it hangs with him to this day; I never got round to restoring it. I developed a peculiar self-defence: having made a work and taken pleasure in looking at it, “see what we can do”, after a while I cooled towards it, or else they would have turned me out of my own flat. It was easier for Roginsky: he would take the canvases off, stretch new ones, and off he went. Even so, he filled almost a whole room with rolls, and no buyers for this stuff turned up. It had long been clear to me that I would have no buyers; the works might be unexpected and interesting, but no one’s wife would let him hang such a thing on the wall, and she would rather buy prints at five roubles apiece, glazed and framed. I had no eccentric academicians or musicians among my acquaintance; Rabin and Tselkov had monopolised them, and they were on their last legs anyway. This position, strangely enough, was yet another of my advantages: I did not glance back at the fool of a viewer, and they are 99%, and I showed off to my heart’s content.”

Such are the memoirs of Mikhail Chernyshov on Moscow in the 1960s