The development of the international art movement of ethno-futurism, which

No abstract

Presents results of studies on the contribution of Kazan artist G.A. Medvedev to the emergence of painting in Mari region in the first third of the XX century. He appears as the artist of the art of Nouveau era and an epoch of formation of socialist realism. Two paintings «Rafting of timber along the Kokshaga» (1920s) and «Stepan Razin on the Volga» are of interest from the point of view of the history of development of Russian art in general.

Despite the official Soviet national policy, the professional art of the USSR peoples developed as a form of artistic reflection of ethnoculture about itself. The author of the article studies this process on the basis of the previously developed structural-archetypal model of the ethno-cultural space of the Mari people. The article contains the analysis of the artistic representations of the cultural field/meadow archetype on the material of fine art of the 1950s-1980s. The archetype is represented by iconographic types of “Collective Farm Fields of an Epic Scale”, “Harvest”, “Pastures”, “Blossoming Meadows”. A field, in the style of socialist realism, as a rule, is depicted as a space for heroic deeds, the greatness of the Soviet Motherland and the authorities arranging for the “battle for the harvest”. They glorify the collective farm system seen as a source of abundance and fertility. The masters of the “severe style” introduce the sign-symbolic principle in the image of the field, the artists having already gone beyond the ideological constraints while paving the way for non-romantic trends in the national art. Since the 1970s, the theme of the fields is lyrically approached by the national neoromantic artists who relieve the heroic pathos of socialist realism. The idea of man’s subjugation of nature gave way to the harmonious unity of beingness. The image of the fertile field in the pictures of the national artists was replaced by the images of meadows, pastures and forest glades. The semantics of the field archetype in the last decade of the Soviet era reveals the meaning of emptiness, loneliness and non-existence, often in combination with the image of a dry tree or a felled grove. It was the way to express feelings about the ongoing assimilation of the nation, about the loss of cultural memory. The evolution of artistic representations of the meadow/field archetype in the period under investigation has shown the failure of an attempt to substitute the traditional perception of nature for the ideaologemes of socialist realism.

Introduction. The article is the first in a series of publications dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Mari autonomy and the fact of the emergence of professional visual arts among the Mari people. The author regards it as a systemic element of national-ethnic culture, which performed the function of ethno-cultural reflection by artistic means throughout the entire century, in which four major stages and corresponding stylistic forms can be traced. The article describes the initial stage of the Mari fine arts of the 1920s – 1930s. Materials and Methods. The main material was the collection of art and ethnographic works of the 1920s–1930 found in the funds of the National Museum of the Republic of Mari El. The author used various methods: historical research, art history analysis of works of art, as well as the author’s own method of structural and archetypal analysis. Results and Discussion. The first art institutions appeared in the mountainous Mari region at the turn of the 1910–1920 thanks to the artist A.V. Grigoriev, who together with his associates later founded the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia in Moscow. The systematic institutionalization of the Mari fine arts began in the second half of the 1920, which was facilitated by the activities of the Mari Regional Society of Local History and the Central Mari Museum in the town of Krasnokokshaisk. The founders of the Mari fine arts were the invited artists from Kazan, namely P. A. Radimov, G. A. Medvedev, V. K. Timofeev, M. M. Vasilyeva, the first Mari artists K. F. Egorov and E. D. Atlashkina, and P. G. Gorbuntsov. With the beginning of the “Great Terror” period, the first stage of the Mari art was interrupted, and socialist realism replaced ethnographic realism. Conclusion. The development of the fine art of the Mari at the initial stage was stimulated by the Mari Regional Society of Local History and the Central Mari Museum represented by V. A. Mukhin (Savi), V. M. Vasiliev, T. E. Evseev. Their educational interests, combined with the documentary-oriented program of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, contributed to the formation of such a stylistic form as ethnographic realism, which became the first artistic form of ethnocultural reflection by the means of fine arts.