It is easy to be the Ivan Marchuk of the last year of the century when the national media rush to be the first to write about him in force-majeure and elevated style, when those in power seek to meet him and artistic colleagues turn away their heads with false indifference, when Marchuk’s self-sufficiency wins over the tried similes with Quindgi, Filonov, or Picasso, when the official recognition of his creative work has become by far the loudest abracadabra in the artistic life of the today’s Ukraine. This could not have happened, for it simply could not be. Still twenty years ago. Maybe ten years. Maybe. Try not to believe it.
Marchuk believes and does not. First of all, a thought arises about the reimbursement of losses the System caused him during the years of collision and persecution. Then came repentance: the artist was bent over until his spine cracked only for the fact that he understood the word, Ukrainian, without allowance for the obligatory additives like “so- called”; he was taken into the cortege of the circle of normal, talented, then (in the sixties) young monumentalists who for some reason decorated the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Academy of Sciences with mosaics of only Ukrainian names (Yaroslav the Wise, Feofan Prokopovych, Hryhory Skovoroda, Mykola Kybalchych, Serhiy Koroliov). A nonmember of the Union of Artists for many years, Ivan Marchuk in the meantime was gaining the artistic world without borders. He, an Australian (or a Canadian — who cares?), was inducted into the Union already in absentia, with all the bureaucratic and moral costs borne by friends (don’t be surprised), artists. Marchuk was in fact co-opted to the Artists’ Union as once upon a time the Bolsheviks where co-opted to the Central Committee (here ends the similarities). Further the nature of late coming could not held but reveal: Ivan Marchuk became a Meritorious Artist of Ukraine at the age when almost all the People’s Artists in Ukraine where getting their title of People’s (a step higher, not that it really means anything — Ed.). Has the State Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine (Ukraine’s highest award for cultural attainment — Ed.), also after several attempts leveled the situation? Nobody knows. Several attempts are in no way the demonstration of the unambiguous (nationwide) love for the artist Marchuk. He, as before, is Marchuk with obstacles.
“I become resilient as a ball: the harder it is thrown on the ground, the higher it bounces up.” Quite an aphorism, as if with a programmed projection at Marchuk: indeed, he got so much and of such different kind, but he (in spite of everything and everybody) saved himself. He went straight ahead, without bowing; it seems that only once he caught himself with a week-willed idea: to marry a Jewish woman and get out of the country (one of the most reliable ways during the Soviet era to get the status of citizen of the Free World). You have to know Marchuk: he would stay in the embrace of his family Laocoon for as long as three months in his youth, and he is still alone.
We mourn not for Marchuk: he was not placed in a CPU (a most interesting abbreviation in Ukraine, meaning both Communist Party of Ukraine and a preliminary detention cell), his studios were not burned down and canvases were not impounded. Finally, Marchuk had a stroke of luck, perhaps due to the fact that despite being inconvenient he did not seek conflicts and avoided politics with a ten foot pole.
What, then, is the reason for his persecution? Was it just to hound him for his tranquillity or seemingly invisible killing of the spirit: after the Institute of Theoretical Physics a whole decade and a half passed without exhibitions and orders, a life in hunger and with no prospects, a vicious circle of creative deadlock and non-recognition, an unconfined detention in the collective stable of the Soviet Union, years filled with emptiness, and suspicion.
Mourn for the lost.
Repentance accepted.
But is Marchuk forgiving?
Marchuk is enjoying life. He has always had work, “Sleeping for three hours and thinking for three others.” This is why it is worth nothing to waste time settling accounts: with his equals, with the power of bureaucratic sovbours (soviet bourgeoisie, the term is from Luna- charsky), and, thank God, with the System itself. For the System, Marchuk was a convenient opponent: quiet in his life and crazy, almost a revolutionary at the easel. Who will take whom? With all his countenance Marchuk shows that he is the winner: for 35 years of creative tension over 1500 canvases have been begotten by his hand. And of what kind!
A connoisseur of trends of the world art after ten years of wandering (and this was Europe, Australia, Canada, the USA, creative contribution to the hundreds of artistic museums, galleries, studios, and artistic bookstores), he could have matched any -ism, in each case having the advantage of knowing other practices and world experience. And what is Marchuk doing, creating his own Marchukism? He is raking up the kilometers in an infinite trek through rural moonlit nights, made wondrous by the precision of illusion (patriarchal Marchuk!), and dives into the mystique of the voice of his own soul, where the torn string of a violin sounds painfully and the miraculous egg is lain, where the cows of his Moskalivka in Ternopil oblast lead an inimitable bovine solo and grown-up Marchuk’s repentance for the destroyed crows’ nests of his childhood (polyphonic Marchuk!), wandering in the whimsical labyrinths of colorful dreams, healthy and carcinogenic abstractions, cyclical fantasies (mistaken Marchuk!), working hard on putting together an orchestra of small parts and the canvas as a whole (a musical Marchuk!). Something has really changed — and fundamentally — in our life: during recent presentation of Ivan Marchuk in the Intellect of the Nation Society two Marchuks where sat side by side in the presidium — Ivan and Yevhen, an artist and a general, both worthy of Ukraine, its citizens and supporters of statehood. Who could have thought it twenty or even ten years ago, even yesterday.
But it happened.
And thank God that the Intellect of the Nation Society has taken up the issue of creating an Ivan Marchuk museum in Kyiv jointly with city’s state administration simultaneously with the retrospective exhibition of over 200 of his works at the National Art Museum of Ukraine.
Marchuk is prickly and rough to some extent, kind and compassionate to no extent: I will always recall how we, while visiting his and my favorite Podillia, caught a slew fish, and then he threw them back, splashing the water and scaring everything he could. Children cling to him, grass and flowers recognize him: once he went out into the woods near one of the villages along the Dnipro and it was useless to try to move him off his carpet of flowers. He had simply lain on his back, gazed (actually flew away) into the sky, spoke to materynka flowers as Shukshin spoke to the birch in Kalyna chervona (The Guelder Rose is Red), and there was no falseness or tear-jerking for the audience there; it was the simple state of relaxation, becoming intoxicated with nature. Not often do the Masters lay naked their nerves and cease to be shy of their own sentimentality. In addition, Marchuk precisely embodied one of his canvases: festive Marchuk in a plethora of flowers, his mustache curved to match the joy of the sky, and a butterfly on the tip of his finger. “The image on the canvas is like what it is in life,” he said, “and the image in life is just like on the canvas.”
Marchuk is always the unexpected. Just comprehend one visage of him, and he is already another. Begun with the complex simplicity of a folk painting (one unforgettable image is the sweet kindness of the nursing cow with the hot sun of her udder), continued (and seems to be going to come back to it again) with the moonlit series a-la Quindgi while developing his own technology of conveying the light in the nighttime (without adding phosphor, caring only about the microscopic relief of the line that, while exposed to the ordinary light, vibrates and radiates the light), practiced the reign of his own spirit for a long time (monochromic Marchuk in his own person in candlelight wherever needed), without stopping to experiment with line, composition, color, or just imagination. There are whole cycles of experiments: “Planet in Bloom,” “New Expressions,” “Weary Melody,” “White Planet I,” “White Planet II,” “Silhouettes,” “Colorful Preludes,” whole rows of new solutions and happily found constructions.
From early childhood he felt that he was not like all the other village boys: he got impressions, inhaled, and memorized them. He imagined himself only as an artist, the only and best in the whole village. The feeling of exclusiveness (“I always wanted to be in the lead”) never left him when he was studying to become an artist in Lviv. Kyiv only made his character more expressive, especially after his mosaics on the wall of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. Marchuk suffered because of, well, Kybalchych and Koroliov. But it could also have been because of the ceramics that he had taken up earlier and which had also been, well, Ukrainian. Such was our existence then.
But how has he finally managed to break through to the clear waters of recognition? He would long and hopelessly have languished in Kyiv but for the occasion that brought him to Moscow: his exhibition on Malaya Gruzinskaya broke for him a window to Ukraine, the signal was heard, however, as it often happens, not by the professional servants of art, but by journalists, writers, just conscientious people of other callings, creative and not. Little by little, Kyiv was awakening: small personal exhibitions at the Writers’ Union, in the medical library, the first careful publication, and surprised silence of the Union of Artists of Ukrainian SSR. Marchuk began to exist.
And thence he plunged to the edge of the world, to Australia, and since then he could not stop: he has quarreled with Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada and America (he has quite justified creative and ethical reasons for this), then settled in New York, renting a small studio- apartment where the only possible thing to do was to work and work. Ukraine’s Customs Service was full of surprise: normally pieces of art are exported from Ukraine, and Marchuk has been importing them, now already for the tenth year. Is he not right when he claims that, by working and exhibiting in America in the 1990s as a Ukrainian artist, he has served the cause of Ukrainian independence more than he would have done had he stayed home, with the parties, movements, manifestations, and breast-beating. His policy is creative work. And creative work is his morality. This is the phenomenon of Marchuk.
He can be as cruel as a torturer when he is unhappy with something. He is not a diplomat in evaluating the creative work of his colleagues. He can be stingy as he has become economical and pragmatic (Western experience), yet astonishes with his generosity and kindness as he has the same mentality as you and me. He has a good memory but he is not vengeful. He is easy to communicate with, but only up to a point when suddenly he is caught with an itch to rush as soon as possible to his studio. Insane!
Oh, this famous studio in Pushkinska Street — the seventh sky of an old building with no elevator. How much creative table- talk, how much sensitive young puerile posturing, how much love experienced — even with bitches and whores: also a learning experience. But this is also the energy of canvases that not all feminine virtue is strong enough to withstand. Marchuk’s biology conquers, as if he is pleading, “put out!” Marchuk’s monsters exaggerate your fear. Marchuk’s winters and moonlit nights make you want to pull the covers over your head. You are hot and then cold again.
Marchuk is in paradise here: all day long (with small breaks for a breath of fresh air) with brush in hand: “I have built my life in such a way that nothing would be an obstacle to me standing in front of the easel.” You can watch for a while, but not offer advice. You will be shaken like a pear-tree.
“I don’t know whether I would treat my children the way I treat my canvases. Because I am fully here. While in the children there is only some portion...”
Marchuk capturing:
“They say they do not understand my canvases but can’t tear themselves away from them. And what do you want: one who enters the spider’s web is not going to get out. It’s the same with my pictures. They embrace you, won’t let you go. It’s the same with a woman in my arms — she feels the energy of my hands and the canvases in the studio. I am igneous, everything is in flames before me.”
Marchuk is a little narcissistic:
“I like myself very much when I am together with somebody. But when I am with myself — not too much...”
Marchuk romantic and ironical:
“Besides being an artist, I would like to be a little bit of a peasant. Just a little bit, because I can’t work with the horses...”
Marchuk generous:
“I am very much amused when somebody tries to decode my canvases. I dislike doing it myself. But I prompt the codes — let people wrack their brains a little, let them take part in my creative work. And I am still more pleased when somebody perceives me intuitively.”
Marchuk self-critical:
“The more you get to know, the more you are convinced that you know less.”
Marchuk jealous because he is restless:
“Once I was captured by some strange condition when you can’t go to sleep: in you head it’s like a crazy movie, there run millions of snapshots — pictures that I have not painted yet and that nobody has seen. I turn around, start running around the room, and the visions are rolling, rolling, and I can’t put the brakes on them in any way. If I had a computer in my head and could fix all this — my God, what locks would be opened, what wealth would pour out... Besides, Picasso was generous enough to leave a legacy of 7,000 paintings and drawings, admiral and seascape painter Aivazovsky left a thousand fewer. You accumulate and accumulate.”
Marchuk will not die of modesty:
“If I am so tortured, maybe I am a marked man.”
And let us leave this to history, including the artist’s following tactful wish: “It would be good for me to live in an ideal world. At least for one day.”
He will not manage it.
Not without the narrow cosmos of his habitual one-room dwellings. Not without his specific way of directing himself toward the eternal search for something. Not without the idyll, obtained with difficulty, of having no other concerns apart from painting: “to peck something: you are painting one picture while ten others are waiting in line.” Not without the fairest internal constitution that reads: “I am my own slave- owner and slave.” Nor without the need to boast in front of people and history. Without stubborn expectation that the state will finally comprehend: no culture — no state. Not without everything that is the essence of Marchuk.
