A Symbol behind the Image: Reading the Painting by Alexander Volkov

Abbasova Galina Leading Specialist in Public Outreach Programmes, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts 119019, Russia, Moscow, Volkhonka str., 12 abbasova_galina@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The image of a teahouse is one of the most common in the visual arts of Central Asia. A teahouse is both a shelter from the scorching midday heat, under the canopy of which you can drink tea and taste pilaf, and a place for meetings and conversations that attracts absolutely dissimilar people of different social origins and levels of wealth. The teahouse is a vivid example of national color, embodied in traditional architecture and ancient utensils, colorful carpets and clothes of guests. The teahouse was one of those oriental dreams that inevitably attracted European travelers. Viktor Ufimtsev described his first impressions of Samarkand as follows: "No, I could not believe that this was life. Here sits Khan from the opera “Prince Igor”, and there, look, ? Barakh from “Turandot" sells melons. And the teahouses! There we also sat for hours on colored palas, swallowing a new, unknown life together with green tea" ^{[23, p. 44]}.

A.V. Isupov. Teahouse. 1920-1921Vyatka Art Museum named after V.M. and A.M. Vasnetsov 

A.V. Isupov.

Teahouse. 1920-1921.The Vasnetsov Brothers Art Museum

The teahouse was associated with the coolness of fountains and gardens, where one could taste fragrant tea in the shade of elms and plane trees.

  When M.A. Bulgakov visited the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industrial Exhibition of 1923, it was the Central Asian teahouse recreated on the banks of the Moskva River that attracted his attention: "Behind the Turkestan cunning, painted house there is some kind of biblical arba <...> Then along the shore, along the road, under the trees there are wooden canopies and low decking covered with oriental carpets. The smell of Muscovites' barbecue beckons here, and white Moscow young ladies, guys, men in European jackets, legs tucked up in pointed shoes, with blurred smiles on their faces, sit on colorful thick fabrics" ^{[6, p. 342]}.But a teahouse is also a place where stories are told, destinies change.

A tragic story once heard by A.V. Nikolayev (Usto Mumin) from an old teahouse in Samarkand, laid the foundation for a whole series of works dedicated to beautiful young men ^[14].  The teahouse also became an unexpected source of inspiration for M.M. Filippovich, who described such an incident that happened to him near Tashkent: looking for salvation from the heat, he wandered into a small teahouse, where he was served tea and a piece of black bread, which turned out to be half-baked and sticky so much that the artist fashioned a figure of a woman lifting a burqa out of it. The old men sitting next to him began to shake their heads disapprovingly, one of them explained to him in broken Russian that it was a sin to portray a woman, especially with an open face. This incident, as well as numerous tragic stories about women who decided to remove the burqa, inspired Filippovich to write a sketch "Nationwide burqa burning" ^[24].

A.V. Nikolaev (Usto Mumin). The Red teahouse.Mu?tum magazine. 1933. No. 8

A.V. Nikolaev (Usto Mumin).

The Red teahouse.Journal «Mu?tum». 1933. № 8

The fact that the teahouse was a constant place of mass attraction of urban residents, a kind of traditional "club", was very quickly adopted by the Soviet government, which sought to include teahouses in the sphere of ideological propaganda, placing propaganda literature, portraits of party leaders, etc. In them, for example, in 1924 in Tashkent in the Sibzar part of the mahalla A red teahouse with a library and a stage was opened at Mahvata, and groups of singers, musicians and lovers of dramatic art were organized.

The daily attendance of the teahouse club was up to 150 men and, significantly for Soviet teahouses, up to 30 Uzbek women ^[15]. Photographs of Soviet, so–called red teahouses were widely distributed - the Red Teahouse in the village of Galya-Tigermon (1930, Samarkand State Museum-Reserve); the Red Teahouse in the Vostok quarter (1931, Samarkand State Museum-Reserve); the Red Teahouse in old Samarkand (1931, Kunstkamera), etc. One of the characteristic elements of these Soviet clubs were posters, drawings and paintings by artists designed to formalize the new way of life of workers and peasants. When a circle of young artists formed around A.N. Volkov, including N.G. Karakhan, U.T. Tansykbayev, P. Shchegolev, and others, one of the directions of their activity was the collective work on painting Soviet clubs and teahouses.

Red teahouse in old Samarkand. onethousandninehundredthirtyoneMuseum of Anthropology and Ethnography named after

Peter the Great (Kunstkamera), St. PetersburgRed teahouse in old Samarkand. 1931.

Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), Saint-PetersburgThe image of the red teahouse has firmly entered the repertoire of artists of the Soviet East, it can be found among the paintings and graphic works of such masters as A.V. Nikolaev, M.I. Kurzin, B.K. Hamdami, A. Tashkent, etc.

A.N. Volkov, who was at the origins of the formation of the art school of Soviet Uzbekistan, has repeatedly addressed this topic. One of his most revealing works dedicated to the red teahouse is "In the Teahouse", or "Teahouse with a Portrait of Lenin" (1928, I.V. Savitsky State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan). The idea of the painting is strictly verified. It does not seem accidental that the artist placed the portrait image of V.I. Lenin precisely in the upper left corner of the canvas: the portrait, although located in the background, as if in the shadow of the room, is an extremely important compositional and semantic element. Recall that the painting was painted in 1928, that is, Lenin has not been among the living for four years, but his image is visibly present and, as it were, introduced into the circle of communication of the Uzbeks depicted on the canvas. Moreover, the portrait is compositionally included in the circle of characters that completely occupy the center of the canvas.

A.N. Volkov. "A teahouse with a portrait of Lenin". onethousandninehundredtwentyeightI.V. Savitsky State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Nukus

A.N. Volkov.

"A teahouse with a portrait of Lenin". 1928.The Karakalpakstan State Museum of Art, Nukus

Four dehkans (peasants) are represented in the painting, which is definitely indicated by the nature of the clothes, and especially by the traditional labor tool depicted in the lower right corner of the picture, which is held in the hands of a character in a green robe.

This ketmen is an instrument of the Uzbek farmer, as inseparable from his image as, for example, a sickle for the Russian peasantry. Ketmen is shown not just as an iconic element, as a symbol, but is included in a certain process – a dehkan sharpens its blade with a bar. With this technique, the artist purposefully achieves the formation of an expressive and significant compositional diagonal axis: in the upper left corner is the image of Lenin, in the lower right corner, that is, diagonally from him is ketmen, being prepared for the start of work. A figure in a dark robe, placed in the background at the left edge of the picture, but also inscribed in the circle of the main characters, performs a rather important function: the gaze of this peasant is directed to the lower right corner of the picture at ketmen. With this technique, the artist visually emphasizes and strengthens the diagonal axis of the composition, emphasizing that the dehkans depicted on the canvas are not idlers who spend whole days in a teahouse, they only took a short break in their work.

At the same time, the semantic load associated with the idea of creative work is enhanced by the background of the painting, which is interrupted by two rectangular openings with a view of the sunlit landscape under a narrow strip of blue cloudless sky. The components that form the landscape – hills, thickets of trees, dense buildings, create a conditional image of a garden city, denoting not a mathematical, but a historical perspective, an opportunity to see the future and the result of labor. The artist thus finds an amazing opportunity to depict not the serene rest inherent in the East, not a fiesta endlessly lasting in the cool shade of a teahouse, not the traditionally "dormant" East, but the new East, in which the actors – in this case, the dehkans – only briefly interrupted their hard work for a short respite and are already preparing to continue it.

The analysis of the compositional structure and the plot of the painting leads to reflections on the color palette. It seems that this most important element of the picture is designed to convey to the viewer a deep hidden meaning. First of all, attention is drawn to the fact that the artist uses a natural color scheme characteristic of the local nature, conveying shades of earth, greenery and water. This triad is a symbol of the eternal rebirth of nature, one of the elements of which is a person who puts his work into its renewal. By dressing the characters of the painting in robes of three different colors, the artist gives them a special additional meaning. The central composition circle includes dehkans in clothes of the color of reddish soil, vegetation and water. At the same time, the idea of water is accentuated in the objects of tea drinking, represented by a teapot and two bowls. The significance of these objects is emphasized by their position – in the center of the composition against the background of blue clothes, in which a figure is dressed, symbolizing the element of water. In this regard, it is especially significant that a bowl of tea (water) is brought to the lips by a character whose color of clothes symbolizes the earth. That is, there is a semantic connection: water irrigates the earth. And then – the character occupying the entire right part of the canvas and dressed in a green chapan (robe), symbolizing vegetation and fertility, holds a ketmen in his hand. A compositionally linked triad is being formed: water gives life to the earth, the earth bears fruit, and this whole process is in the hands of the working dehkans working on the land of Uzbekistan.

M.I. Kurzin. The Red teahouse. The 1930s.The State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, Tashkent

M.I. Kurzin.

The Red teahouse. 1930s

Fine Arts Museum of Uzbekistan, TashkentThe symbolic structure of the "Teahouse with a portrait of Lenin" stands out against the background of thematically close works of both the artist himself ("Red Teahouse", 1933, Samarkand State Museum-Reserve) and his colleagues in the workshop – M.I. Kurzin ("Red Teahouse", 1930s, the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, Tashkent; "Teahouse and house with a bridge", 1932, I.V. Savitsky State Museum of Arts of the Republic of Karakalpakstan); A.V. Nikolaeva (Usto Mumin) ("Red Teahouse", Mu?tum. 1933. No. 8), etc.

Kurzin played the theme of the red teahouse in his characteristic ironic manner, literally painting his sheets red. Nikolayev created refined graphic compositions, contrasting the old and new way of life. However, for the most part, such works recreate a specific situation, are filled with everyday details; they are "tied to the ground", while the "Teahouse with a portrait of Lenin" has a timeless character. In this picture, the objective world, devoid of any detail, complements the heroic image of the man-creator. A.N. Volkov, using exclusively formal artistic techniques (not counting the portrait of Lenin included in the work), conveys to the viewer not only the creative pathos of the Soviet power established in Uzbekistan, but also the idea of the greatness of a man capable of turning a desert into the blooming garden. Without slogans, banners, pathetic gestures. Subtly elegant, with unsurpassed skill. This ideological component is joined by a deeper symbolic layer, expressed both through a compositional and coloristic solution, and through objects-attributes placed on the canvas, which together testifies to the artist's brilliant knowledge of European and Eastern cultural traditions.