online exhibitions:
Canyon
Landscapes
Italy Revisited
Stonehenge
Landscapes
online
retrospectives:
Blue and Red
Centaur
Series
Central Park Landscapes
Clownade
Duality
Face to Face
Human Kind
Masks
Neo Cubo-Futurism
Princess
Sculptural
Sand Reliefs
Song of Love
Still Life
Time of Beauty
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the artist:
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"Anatoly Krynsky
- A Life of Art" by Gaither Stewart |
"Yet once they are
committed to the canvas or the press, my subjects seem to abandon
me. They can never again be retrieved. And I know that I too must
abandon them. If the subjects in 'The World of Dolls'" have
abandoned me, I also have abandoned my subjects. Those silent stone
figures now stand there alone as they have for centuries.
"That's double loneliness. Once they were united, creator and
subject, in the Eden of the my fantasy. But after the act of
creation they are destined to be forever separate, proud and
independent like man vis-a-vis God -- yet lonely and longing for
reunion."
Dürer's winged genius too sits in a reflective pose surrounded by
various tools -- a compass, scales, an hourglass and a magic square
of 16 numbers, each row of which totals 34. The desperate artist
languishes under the observation of a dog, a cherub and a bat
holding the inscription "Melencolia I."
If the meaning of Durer's work is uncertain, you might sense that
the interpretation concerns the relationship between melancholy and
creativity: the conclusion is that melancholy is essential to
creativity. For what greater melancholy than that in the couple in
Picasso's "The Frugal Meal" -- the haggard man with an arm draped
around the bony shoulders of his woman companion, each looking in
opposite directions, each alone in their common solitude. Hopeless
yet assailed by nostalgia -- Picasso's natural nostalgia for another
existence. A nostalgia that leads the artist back to his natural
loneliness, for one thing he knows: he knows where creativity
resides.
From Goya's deafness and exile like from Dürer's meditation in
"Melencolia I" emerges a formula:
solitude>melancholy>desperation>inspiration>originality>creativity.
But also the converse is suggested: sociability > enjoyment >
exhilaration > fashion > imitation > non-creativity.
Krynsky: "I know -- I think it's instinctive -- that I need that
solitude. Somehow I know that truth lives there."
No less than the mature Goya of "3 May 1808"! Aloof, lonely and
depressed in his deafness, Goya has acquired total freedom and can
now follow every caprice of his imagination to express himself --
not the dictates of fashion. His freedom and expression are nurtured
in his solitude, in his isolation and melancholy.
Krynsky's summarization is instead reductive and disconcerting: "For
the 'World of Dolls' series I am also indebted to my daughter's
extraordinarily big collection of dolls and decided to fix in time
some of these dolls and the magic world of children's imagination."
Yet, in Krynsky's works the solitude of the clowns of his "Clownad"
series and of all those ancient statues seem to exude the mystery of
eternity. The menhirs and dolmens of Stonehenge and Carnac, the
sculpted Mayan and Olmec deities and the Polevetskiye Women of the
Ukraine, the stone sculptures of Siberia and the Stoanere Mandlin --
the stone men -- of Tyrolean regions and the silent men of stone in
Anatoly Krynsky's "The World of Dolls" again appear to us as the
inner side of the artist's perception.
Continue...
Reprinted by permission from
Tower of Babel.
Gaither Stewart, correspondent in Italy for the Dutch daily
Algemeen Dagblag, has written widely on European culture and
reported for many years on East Europe for many European
publications. |
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