online exhibitions:
Canyon
Landscapes
Italy Revisited
Stonehenge
Landscapes
online
retrospectives:
Blue and Red
Centaur
Series
Central Park Landscapes
Clownade
Duality
Face to Face
Human Kind
Masks
Neo Cubo-Futurism
Princess
Sculptural
Sand Reliefs
Song of Love
Still Life
Time of Beauty
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the artist:
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"Anatoly Krynsky
- A Life of Art" by Gaither Stewart |
The one-half ton etching press stands like a gentle but invasive
elephant in the center of the crowded studio of Maestro Anatoly
Krynsky on the backside of his darkened top-floor apartment on New
York's Upper East Side. The bemused artist gazes at the iron giant
fondly. Fatalistically he shrugs at the suggestion that it might
crash through to lower floors and provoke a progressive collapse of
the old building under the shadow of the Mount Sinai Hospital. The
press, he says, has after all not wavered nor the floor even
trembled through the 24 years since he arrived here from the then
repressive-permissive Moscow.
The artist caresses the pampered Pelikan Etching Press. It occurs to
me that the giant is emblematic of Krynsky's life for art. For even
if the Maestro prints limited copies of each etching and then paints
on top of them so that each is a unique work, his art world is
nonetheless so vast as to be illimitable -- Krynsky's art is total
art.
The visitor looks around the studio space bewildered, at first with
unseeing eyes as when you seek one face in a crowded bus, until then
the objects separate and each assumes its own distinctiveness.
Miraculously order emerges from confusion. Each object plays a role
and seems to mark the diverse stages of his life -- a New England
chair from a Vermont ski trip, an antique desk from a Long Island
garage sale, a wooden file cabinet on whose doors the artist has
painted scenes of his beloved
centaurs, a paint-smeared easel dating
back to his Kharkov days, a miniature bronze tiger from a trek
through Siberia, a Tyrolean wall clock from his stay in Italy, a
Novgorod icon from his private collection. And here and there on the
totally covered studio walls -- a heavy relief in sand, an oil
painting of Central Park, an engraving of magic Stonehenge.
As your vision broadens, the dream-like figures of the
centaurs,
contorted and enigmatic, emerge omnipresent, leaping and romping and
prancing throughout the studio and up and down the dark corridors of
the apartment, from cabinet doors in the kitchen, to closet doors in
a bedroom, to panels in the madness of the Boa Constrictor-computer
room.
The centaurs create a sense of timelessness. Unpredictability
reigns. Greece and Rome compete with Moscow and New York. In
perpetual movement, the
centaurs appear like countless film frames
that somewhere fit together to produce the artist's art ideal. The
essence of his art.
What does the
centaur mean, you wonder? It is a mystery. An alluring
mystery. The artist does not say what it means. Again he shrugs. He
tells you only that he began painting the
centaurs in the 1960s in
Moscow in protest against the reigning official art of Socialist
Realism.
"The centaur has long been a special theme in my work. I have
executed centaurs in various materials -- in sculptures, Reliefs,
paintings and graphics -- which has allowed me with each passing
year to diversify them and to delve more deeply into this enchanting
world of ancient mythology."
You have to be satisfied with that. That is all he ventures. But the
zenith of the contemporary popularity of his
centaurs must have been
Krynsky's retrospective exhibit in the U.S. Senate in Washington,
D.C. some ten years ago in which the
centaurs starred - dancing and
swaying and straining toward the expression of his total art. The
essence of his art seems to lie somewhere in the lonely image of the
prancing centaur depicted on a Senate painting or on a kitchen
cabinet door.
One comes to understand also that the man himself is to be sought
chiefly in his art since it synonymous with his life. You find more
answers about the artist in his
centaurs than in his opinions about
national politics or international events.
Continue...
Reprinted by permission from
Tower of Babel.
Gaither Stewart, correspondent in Italy for the Dutch daily
Algemeen Dagblag, has written widely on European culture and
reported for many years on East Europe for many European
publications. |
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