Mikhnov-Voitenko, Evgeny Grigoryevich

In 1935 - 1939 , after the divorce of his parents, he lived with his grandfather and grandmother in Voronezh , from 1939 with his mother and stepfather in Leningrad , 1941 - 1944 he was evacuated to Semipalatinsk , then returned to Leningrad. He graduated from high school in 1951 in Minsk , entered the Leningrad State Institute of Foreign Languages, the Scandinavian department. At the same time he was engaged in a theater studio.

In 1954 , leaving his studies at the Institute of Foreign Languages, he entered the staging department of the Theater Institute , studied at the course of N.P. Akimov . Undergraduate practice was held at the Bolshoi Drama Theater , headed by G. A. Tovstonogov , and the elements of his diploma project (design of the play “An Ordinary Miracle”) were later used by N. P. Akimov in staging this play at the Comedy Theater . However, Mikhnov-Voitenko refused the offers of both directors for cooperation, and in the future his only works related to the theater were the design of books by G. M. Kozintsev “Our Contemporary William Shakespeare” and G. A. Tovstonogov “Contemporary in the Soviet Theater” .

After graduating from the Theater Institute, Mikhnov-Voitenko enters the Leningrad Combine of Painting and Design Art (KZHOI) as a design artist. Here he performs a number of works, including:

• complex design (panel "White Nights" - woodcarving, 3.5 x 8 m, wrought iron door grills and metal lamps) DK Metallurgov in Cherepovets (1967);
• decorative panel “Music” for the House of Composers;
• a stained-glass relief and a panel made of wood for the dining room at the corner of the 8th line and Sredny Prospect of Vasilyevsky Island ;
• design of the Dubok beer bar on Izmailovsky Prospekt , 20;
• decorative panels from cast glass and a solid wood chandelier for the Moscow restaurant on the corner of Vladimirsky and Nevsky Prospects (1962-1964).

There is a legend that when decorating the restaurant, the artist executed wall paintings for the cafeteria located on the ground floor, which soon went down in the history of the domestic underground under the unofficial name of Saigon . During this period, Mikhnov, who lived in the immediate vicinity of Saigon, on Rubinstein Street , became close to some poets who belonged to the unofficial culture of Leningrad - Oleg Grigoryev , Yuri Galetsky, Gleb Gorbovsky , Alexander Altshuler , Leonid Aronzon . The latter for several years was the closest friend of the artist and dedicated several poems to him.

Since the early 1970s, the plant has ceased to give Mikhnov-Voitenko new orders, despite repeated appeals by the artist to provide him with work. In 1982, Mikhnov-Voitenko received a notice of dismissal from the plant, with the motivation "for absenteeism." After the artist appealed to the prosecutor’s office and the council of trade unions for help, the plant’s management cancels the decision to dismiss as illegal and restores it to work, and a special commission, which included a number of prominent representatives of official art, including Yu. A. Muntyan , I. H. Ural trucks , I. D. Bilibin , after visiting the home workshop Mikhnov-Voitenko and his familiarity with the works of unofficial recommends: "... to attract the artist Mikhnov-Voitenko EG to perform decorative interior solutions in the implementation of Answered Arts Council Art and decoration of public buildings projects, taking into account the individual characteristics of the author's creativity. "

However, another five years passed before Mikhnov was given the first official order after an almost twenty-year hiatus. In March 1988, he was offered the design of two houses of culture on state farms of the Gelendzhik district of Krasnodar Territory and the Saratov Region.

The rapidly progressing cancer does not allow Mikhnov-Voitenko to undertake any of these works. October 2, 1988, he dies in Leningrad from throat cancer.

The first surviving work of E. Mikhnov-Voitenko dated 1954-1955. It is from the early period that all the well-known figurative paintings of the artist belong: portraits, still lifes, landscapes. Since the mid-1960s, he has been focusing entirely on the pointless style.

In 1956-1959, Mikhnov-Voitenko created a series of paintings in technology that had no analogues before. He called it a “tube”, emphasizing pure paint as a source of creativity. The artist covers white primed canvases with geometric figures, combining them with various signs, such as zigzags, dots, arrows, commas, figures of people and animals stylized as archaic, images of simple organisms magnified by a microscope, abstract schemes of labyrinths and rockets in combination with words and numbers. Behind apparent chaos is a conceptual world with many meanings. In the future, this particular feature: meanings under the shell of chaos - will become one of the distinguishing features of the entire work of Mikhnov-Voitenko. Contrary to popular belief about the “spontaneous” method of his work, which was implemented in later paintings, serious preparation preceded the creation of the “tube” cycle. Several hundreds of pencil sketches dating from 1956-1957 have been preserved, showing the variety of variations of compositions tried out by the artist during this period.

According to one of the leading experts in domestic non-conformist art, E. Yu. Andreeva, graffiti paintings like Mikhnov-Voitenko’s “tubes” will appear later in the art of a new wave of the 1980s.

In total for the indicated period, the artist created nine large paintings from the Tube series, which became the basis of the cycle. Three of them are kept in the State Russian Museum, one in the collection of the New Museum (St. Petersburg), three more in foreign collections and two in private collections in Russia. There are also a number of small “tubes” written on paper. The result of the tube cycle was two works: “Points” (“Buddha's Smile”) (1960) and “Magnificat” (“Points No. 2”) (1965) .

In 1956-1959, in parallel with the "tube" cycle, another cycle of compositions (without a name) was created that fully met the distinctive features of the graffiti genre - laconic lines, sharp contrast of the palette. Like the “tubes”, these works were performed in two techniques: “canvas, oil” and “paper, pencil”; meaningfully they are incomparably richer, representing a symbiosis of figurative and non-figurative images.

In the 1960s and 1980s, Evgeni Mikhnov-Voitenko worked in different styles of art, while, unlike other avant-garde artists, he did not focus on any of the techniques he discovered. Achieving virtuosity in the chosen direction, he leaves the previously used language for the sake of inventing a new one. Along with painting, he creates a number of decorative and applied works - brooches, beads, bracelets, chains, lamps, using the technology of thermal processing of foam and the combination of foam with other materials developed by him in the framework of official orders.

In 1959-1963 he created a cycle of compositions written with nitro enamel. The most famous works from them: “Handshake”, “Cross”, “Al-fresco”, “Tutti”, “Hummage Mozart”, “Without a Bottom”, “Butterfly” (1967) .

Beginning in 1960, several cycles of laconic work performed by ink appeared: “Touching,” “Standing,” “Chorale,” “Two,” and others. The most recent cycles of this period ("People-candles" and a number of female and male portraits) are sometimes united by the collective name "Faces" (1968). The last of these was the last cycle of figurative works by Mikhnov-Voitenko.

Among the listed cycles, three stand apart: “Crosses,” “Prayer” and “Trinity” (1966-1968). Reflections on God, on the relationship of religion and creativity, on the place of faith in life were constantly visited by the artist. In his notes, in particular, there are such: “I am a Christian ... but I do it at home ... I try to comprehend, bypassing religious representations, creating my representations - picturesque, and I pray! I pray to paint, pencil, paper, etc., to any material in which my feeling finds support in itself. Art for me is religion in this sense ... What do I do? I create a modern icon. ”

The many creative experiments of the artist, the use of a wide variety of materials and techniques, turned into their own unique style, the peak of which was the work of the 1970-1980s. By this time, Mikhnov-Voitenko completely abandoned the technique of working with oil on canvas, as well as graphics, focusing on tempera. The main format of this period was the square, and most of them were created between 1974 and 1986 . According to the artist, he tried to find in these paintings a way out of the impasse into which the avant-garde Black Square art by K. Malevich was dragging on.

The works of Mikhnov-Voitenko of this period are extremely diverse in the combination of colors, differing in their rich coloristic search and the richness of the composition. They contain dark colors - black, brown - and various shades of blue, green, gray, red, beige.

For its time, Mikhnov-Voitenko is the largest of the masters of Russian abstract art. He came to a peculiar author’s version of the “ new figurativeness ”. Repeatedly declared his non-affiliation to any of the trends or trends in painting. In Mikhnov’s intravital notes, there is a definite entry on this subject: "Everything is" isms ", and I myself." Nevertheless, art historians are still inclined to attribute certain areas of Mikhnov-Voitenko’s creativity to abstract expressionism , tashism or the art of action. In any case, it is obvious that, as a whole, the artist’s work does not fit into any of these areas, it is so multifaceted. Thus, Mikhnov’s early searches partly brought him closer to surrealism and Russian cosmism , and a number of works from the 1950s and 1960s can be attributed to the direction of Suprematism , and in the latter case, the artist used, among other things, pencil drawing techniques that were not previously used in this style.

Currently, the works of Mikhnov-Voitenko are in a number of Russian and foreign museums and private collections. The main fund of his works is kept by the official heir - the artist’s sister.

• 1978 - Palace of Culture. F. Dzerzhinsky, Leningrad
• 1982 - club w.-.s. "Workers of the USSR Academy of Sciences", Moscow
• 1989 - Hagelstam Gallery, Helsinki, Finland
• 1989 - Gallery of the regional center of culture, Leningrad
• 1998 - St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Music
• 2000 - State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
• 2001 - Museum of Non-Conformist Art, St. Petersburg
• 2002 - Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg
• 2003 - Sam Brook Gallery, Vladimir Vysotsky Museum, Moscow
• 2005 - Monaco. Exhibition Hall of the Principality of Monaco on the Promenade of Antoine I. “Search for Truth. The fate and art of Evgeny Mikhnov and Igor Ivanov in Russia "
• 2006 —- Navicula Artis Gallery, 10 Pushkinskaya Art Center, St. Petersburg
• 2007 - Gallery "Art Divazh", Moscow
• 2010 - New Museum, St. Petersburg
• 2013 - DiDi Collection Art Gallery - "Ay Mikhnov!", St. Petersburg
• 2016 - Exhibition Hall ARTLOT 24. Pictures of 1973-1978. from private collections of St. Petersburg collectors, St. Petersburg

• Evgeny Mikhnov. SPb, 2002 (series "Vanguard on the Neva")
• Evgeny Mikhnov. Painting, graphics. Catalog of the exhibition in Monaco. SPb, 2005
• Evgeni Mikhnov-Voitenko. Catalog to the exhibition of Evgeni Mikhnov-Voitenko "Painting, Graphics 1950-1980" (M., 2007, "Art Divazh"). 129 s .; col. illustrations; softly. binding; Language - Russian, English. ISBN 5-86408-264-3
• Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko. New Museum, 2010.
• Mikhnov-Voitenko’s works were used in the design of Svetlana Arro’s collections of poems “Evening on the Rhine” (St. Petersburg, Helikon Plus, 2002) and Parallels (St. Petersburg, Ladoga, 2014).

• Krivulin V. Evgeni Mikhnov, or the Artist in Search of the White Square // He. Mammoth hunt. - St. Petersburg: Russian-Baltic inform. Blitz Center, 1998. C. 158-171.
• Another art. Moscow 1956-1988. - M.: GALART - State Center for Contemporary Art, 2005.
• Mikhnov and about Mikhnov. / comp. Eugene Sorokin. - St. Petersburg: OJSC "Art of Russia"; Publishing House N.I. Novikova, 2006.
• Khozikova L.E. Evgeni Mikhnov-Voitenko: life contrary to the rules. - St. Petersburg, "Business Information"; Beresta printing house, 2008 * Book on the publisher’s website
• Alfonsov Vladimir . Aw, Mikhnov! - Zvezda magazine, April-May 2011. In September 2012, the book was published by the magazine as a separate publication.
• Andreeva E. Yu. Everything and Nothing. Symbolic figures in art of the second half of the 20th century. - SPb, Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2011.
• Andreeva E. Yu. The angle of inconsistency. Schools of non-conformism. Moscow – Leningrad 1946–1991. Art XXI Century, 2012
• German M.Yu. About art and art history. St. Petersburg, Publishing House named after N.I. Novikov, 2014.

• “Magnificat” - a documentary film, 18 min., 2005 (“Russian Art”, St. Petersburg, director Vladimir Kaminsky, composer Alexey Zalivalov )

• Mikhnov-Voitenko on the site ART4.RU
• Evguéni Mikhnov-Voitenko (French)
• Facebook: Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko
• Artist Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko (personal site)