Viktor Pivovarov (born in 1937) is a Russian artist and graphic artist who skillfully combines in his art the things that seemingly cannot be combined in any way - children's illustration and adult conceptualism with complex meanings - a real delight for art historians and fans of thinking about paintings.
Moscow party
Pivovarov's childhood is hard to call happy - he grew up without a father, and during the Great Patriotic War he and his mother were evacuated to a remote Tatar village. At the age of five he created his first "work of art" - a wooden doll dressed up in rags out of sheer boredom, and when he became an adult and famous he said that the essence of his work has not changed since then, it is still the same attempt to escape from the boredom and everyday life, but performed on a completely different level.
Self-portrait in his youth
After graduating from the Moscow Kalinin Art School in 1957, Pivovarov decided to enter the Surikov Art Institute. Surikov. But the attempt was not too successful - he got Ds in all subjects and was pointed at the door. He had to switch from painting to graphics and illustration, which was taught at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. But after his graduation, Pivovarov got a well-paid job as an illustrator of children's books. At that time, payment for drawings and illustrations was based on the circulation of the publication, and children's books and the famous magazines "Murzilka" and "Veselye Kartinki" it was always very high, so the drawings were paid decently.
Logo of the children's magazine "Veselye Kartinki"
Pivovarov married the children's writer and illustrator Irina Pivovarova and together they prepared for the release of many wonderful books, for example, "All treated", "Two very brave rabbits" and others.
Unlike Kabakov Pivovarov loved his official work, and he especially liked to illustrate poems, because there you can always put in the drawings hidden meanings that are not clear to children, but interesting for critically thinking adults, and there was more freedom to interpret the text. The collection of poems "Unusual Pedestrian" with illustrations by Pivovarov became a landmark in this sense.
Illustration for the collection of poems "An Unusual Pedestrian"
In general, there was only to live and be happy, but Pivovarov felt that children's illustration is not what he would like to do for the rest of his life.
He got acquainted with many nonconformist artists and became his own in their creative crowd. Of course, he had to work in a desk, and could not even dream of official exhibitions, but the very opportunity to create something unusual and something that Pivovarov himself liked was worth a lot.
Kabakov's workshop
In the 1960s, it was Pivovarov, together with Ilya Kabakov and other Moscow nonconformist artists, who came up with the foundations of Conceptualism.
Pivovarov's works are a kind of puzzles, written in the style of surrealism with elements of book illustration and a good share of absurdity. They are unlike any other, although some critics say that Pivovarov must have been inspired by the paintings of Salvador Dali and Magritte. But that's the way modern art is - it is rarely in isolation from the processes taking place in painting, from the entire cultural layer; the other question is how talented the artist was in processing all this into his vision of creativity and how original he was.
Reflections
And here there are no questions to Pivovarov's works, although many viewers, accustomed to the "classical" paintings of socialist realists perceive them in the "bayonet" - too strange and incomprehensible, and not as beautiful and decorative as, for example, the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and therefore, well, such art.
My life
But Pivovarov's work is still in demand, his paintings are in the Tretyakov Gallery and many other famous museums around the world, and collectors are willing to pay decent money for them. Now Pivovarov is already 86 years old, but he still continues to work and is probably genuinely happy that his banned and completely unclaimed in the Soviet era paintings have received such wide recognition. Perhaps one should just follow one's own path and be oneself in creativity, not adjusting to the immediate situation, as Viktor Pivovarov has done all his life.
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