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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Letter G (September 1984) – New Wave Expectations Letter G, dated 28 September 84, is an answer to Catherine Mannick’s Letter 23, which Kozlov received on 18 August. In her letter, Mannick sent him her birthday wishes and hinted at her forthcoming visit to the Soviet Union. She had already spoken of it in Letter 22, announcing her trip for the beginning of October with one week in Moscow followed by another week in Leningrad. Kozlov’s answer makes it clear how important her visit was to him.
Furthermore, he wrote that he took a two-week holiday from work at the beginning of October – “the first holiday in my life”. It was his first holiday for a reason. All his previous jobs had lasted for several months at the most, not long enough to apply for a holiday, but between September 1983 and August 1986, he kept a job for a full three years: he was employed at the Petrodvorets Canteen Combine (Трест столовых г. Петродворца), where he was in charge of designing visual propaganda, that is, sign boards and banners more >>. Looking forward to his holiday, Kozlov wrote that he very much hoped his reunion with his friend would remove his uncertainty about a common future. But he also simply wanted “to rest, do something only for myself, not for the state” (page 4). Considering that on average, a letter from Peterhof to Boston took three weeks to arrive at its destination, this makes it highly improbable that Mannick got Letter G before she left to Moscow – unless Kozlov was able to give the letter to some private “courier”. Letter 23a, of which an empty envelope has remained, stamped Moscow 9 October and Petrodvorets 13 October, probably announced further details about Mannick’s Leningrad stay. It took place, in all likelihood, between 12 and 19 October. Judging by the letters that followed, it was a happy meeting, although Kozlov’s uncertainty about a common future was not resolved, which led to some tensions (see introduction). As in all of his letters, there are also some entertaining topics in Letter G – Kozlov’s birthday party and the forthcoming wedding of his friend Andrey. Last but not least, Kozlov took care in promoting contemporary Russian art:
Although he did not specifically mention his own art group, the New Artists, the sentence “The fine art of Russian culture is alive” implicitly refers to this very group. Firstly, the New Artists consolidated as a group around 1984 with a number of performances and actions, such as “Fashion Show” more >>, but also with a first important group exhibition at Timur Novikov’s squat (“Assa Gallery”) that Kozlov tried to promote later (see below). Secondly, Kozlov emphasised, at the end of his letter, the gap between two generations of Leningrad artists, writing of a group exhibition that included three of his paintings. It was Facets of Portraiture, The Fifth Exhibition of the Society for Experimental Visual Art (TEII), which took place at the Kirov Palace of Culture, Leningrad from 17 September to 8 October 1984 more >>. Two of Kozlov’s paintings were documented with exhibition views, “Noli Me Tangere” (1982) and “Commissars” (1983).
 The artist couldn’t resist a sideswipe at the elder generation of artists who dominated the TEII:
With their modern artistic features, Kozlov’s paintings indeed stood out from all others. In the following years, he would present his works mainly in the context of the New Artists’ activities. The group quickly attracted new members more >>, and by the end of the nineteen-eighties had established itself as the leading Leningrad underground art group, with full-scale international exhibitions where Kozlov’s paintings could be seen on posters and catalogue covers more >> • more >>.
New Wave Kozlov used five painted black and white photographic prints as background for his text. Accordingly, he wrote the text on five pieces of paper, numbering them one to five, and pasted each to the reverse of a print. Although these pictures are an essential contribution to the letter, they are not mentioned in the text. All pictures belong to the same series. Four of them show different views of a domed wooden church with a bell tower in a rural settlement, and the fifth shows a wooden cottage. Kozlov didn’t take the pictures himself, and the location of this particular church and village is unknown, although it might be possible to identify it. The church looks rather extravagant – the dome of the main building is reminiscent of a Chinese pagoda, while the bell tower resembles a defence tower crowned with an onion dome. The artist coloured these images with pastel shades, similar to those used by photographic studios for hand-colouring black and white portraits – a retouch technique still en vogue at that time in the Soviet Union more >>.[1] While the subject matter of these images is rather traditional, Kozlov’s artistic transformation isn’t, especially in the pictures from pages one and five. In the first image, he stuck to the original colours only in places. Therefore, trees are not only green, but also blue, yellow and pink. In addition, he introduced some “strange” elements – white polygons resulting from colouring specific areas contoured by branches and twigs. Standing out against the sky, they remind the viewer of glass shards or wings of huge dragonflies. In picture five, coloured dotted lines zigzagging through the sky dominate the composition. They look like those entangled lines on elaborate pattern sheets from vintage sewing magazines, where a specific pattern has to be transferred with the help of a tracing wheel.
The same year, Kozlov started creating collages, assembling paper clippings, maps, postcards and other artefacts, but most importantly, his own photographs, which he often coloured (see letter H footnote 4). Among the works from 1984, and probably the best-known collage from that period, is his record sleeve for the album Nachalnik Kamchatki, the third studio album of Leningrad’s legendary band KINO.[2]
The central part of the album cover displays the four band members, cut out from one of the pictures taken during Kozlov’s photo shoot more >>. The artist coloured the figures and placed them on a landscape with mountains partly covered with (painted) snow. Although the subject matter is quite different from that of Letter G, its transformation follows a similar approach through the use of the pastel shades and zigzagging (dotted) lines. More than anything else, zigzagging lines and a geometric design of volume characterises Kozlov’s refined New Wave style from 1984/1985.[3] The artist didn’t label the style himself, but its elegant, stylish elements, as well as the fashionable attributes in figurative painting allow designating it as his New Wave style. New Wave music hit the Leningrad scene in the beginning of the nineteen eighties. In 1983, Kozlov noted the names of several international New Wave bands in his diary, among them Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, Devo, and Kraftwerk (Diary IV, p. 4-74 more >>). Their animated dance beat went along with a bright and experimental post-punk attitude to fashion. In Leningrad, the term New Wave was actually used in a broader sense – as a new approach to creativity, which also included a more punkish concept, especially in the case of Oleg Kotelnikov’s painting more >>. In late 1984, the term New Wave appears for the first time in Mannick’s letter in in the context of a photo collage from 1984, Kozlov’s self-portrait:
The following year, there are multiple references to New Wave in the correspondence. That year, Kozlov sent his friend a New Wave T-shirt (see Letter L). Mannick answered:
Still the painted postcards from Letter G, with their combination of traditional motifs and New Wave attributes, remain quite unique in Kozlov’s body of work.
Pictures relating to Catherine Mannick’s 1984 Leningrad visit It was the first time Mannick came to Kozlov’s Peterhof flat, and her colour slides as well as Kozlov’s black and white prints pictures show her in the company of his mother and friends.
Several slides display Kozlov’s art – works on paper from 1984 that are not documented otherwise. They show Kozlov’s interest in fashion. One is a collage for a for the fashion section of an unedited New Artists illustrated magazine more >>. Three coloured pencil drawings from 1984 with genre scenes evoke the (cabaret and ballroom) spirit of the 1920s, with palm trees setting it in a southern atmosphere.
The palm trees caught Mannick’s attention. Shortly after Leningrad, she went to Brazil on a business trip and sent her friend a postcard from the beach at Ipanema:
In Leningrad, a memorable event was “our adventure on the square in front of the Hermitage” (Letter 26, 1985). Mannick, Kozlov, and his friend Andrey persuaded a soldier to lend them his marching drums, a large bass drum and a smaller snare drum, and they pretended to play them with drumsticks. Kozlov called the action “Repetition for the Parade on Palace Square”, an ironic allusion to the forthcoming anniversary of the October Revolution (October Revolution Day).
Most likely on the occasion of this visit, Kozlov gave his friend thirty-two colour slides with works by the New Artists – Alexander Boyko’s reproductions of paintings and collages by Kirill Khazanovich, Oleg Kotelnikov, (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Timur Novikov, Ivan Sotnikov. Boyko shot them at Timur Novikov’s squat (“ASSA Gallery”), where the majority of these works were on display during the first comprehensive New Artists group show in the summer of 1984 more >>. The colours of the photographs are remarkably true, especially of those shot in the courtyard of the building. Boyko used an East-German Orwo film, as Orwo films yielded much better results than Soviet colour reversal films, provided they were not ruined while being processed more >>.
In those years, quality colour reproductions were extremely rare more >>, and in this way, Boyko supported Kozlov’s attempt to promote his art group. Today, many of these works are in the collection of the Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, and in private collections.
It was actually the third time Kozlov gave Mannick slide reproductions of artwork. In 1982 and 1983, respectively, he documented his own works, but the quality of these slides – especially of those from 1983 – is poorer than that of Boyko’s, although they still help to reconstruct Kozlov’s body of works. Hannelore Fobo, 20 May 2023 [1] I remember having seen a sixth, uncoloured photograph from the same series in Kozlov’s archive but was unable to locate it. The quality of the paper, so it seems, was rather heavy, like that of postcards, but the reverse was blank, which means that these images weren’t printed commercially. [2] At that time, KINO albums were released on reel-to-reel tapes as “magnitizdat” albums, since underground bands did not get a contract with the Soviet monopolist Melodiya until 1987. http://www.e-e.eu/Aquarium/index.htm Kozlov, however, created a full-size design which was first reproduced for a Nachalnik Kamchatki double LP released in 2021. [3] In 1985, he eventually changed to graffiti art art he called B(L)ack art. See Letter L, 1986..
see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University >> |
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Published 22 May 2023 |
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![Reverse of the collage, detail with signature and dedication "для [for ]Katherine Mannick".](E-E-pho-LP12-opc-r-detail.jpg)
