This year marks 115 years since the birth of Bucky Idrisovich Urmanche (1897-1990), in honor of the Tretyakov Gallery opens a retrospective exhibition. In order to more fully illuminate his work, which can not fit in the two halls of the Tretyakov Gallery, we have collected his works from private collections in more than half a century old master. Outstanding works of painting and drawing largely biographical and cover all phases of the artist.
Baki Idrisovich Urmanche was a founder of Tatar professional art, a painter, a drawer, a sculptor, a muralist and a theatre designer who managed to make an invaluable contribution to the development of the principal kinds of art of Tatarstan and the Central Asian republics - Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where he lived and worked in the 1940s-1950s. B.I. Urmanche’s works are also a part of the Moscow artistic life of the 1930s. He lived in the capital in 1934-1941 and took part in the major exhibitions of the period as well as in decorating the pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. Baki Urmanche was a truly versatile person. He could have become a professional musician: throughout his life music had played an extremely important role in the artist’s creative work. He played the violin, collected, recorded and performed old folk songs and tales. The whole structure of his works of art is infused with music - the rhythm and melody of national tunes.
Urmanche was a poet, a writer, a historian and a linguist. He created poems striking by their philosophical depth and lyrical feeling. A great number of his articles and essays dedicated to the history of Tatar art, which he witnessed, created and explored, are written in a plain and clear language showing his thorough understanding of the subject.
Urmanche knew several Oriental and European languages, which he had learned at Muhammadia madrasa, at the Oriental Department of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Kazan and independently. It let him master a wide range of knowlege and reach new levels of understanding the world. Urmanche found his main calling in fine arts. While basing on the achievements of the European artistic culture, using the whole range of means of expression and, in fact, creating an art which was new for the Tatar people, Urmanche always remained a truly national artist. In his case the notion “national” was not limited to a choice of a subject and a theme but was enriched through searching for universal methods and techniques for different kinds of Tatar art (decorative and applied art, calligraphy) and possibilities to use them in painting, drawing and sculpture, introducing the traditional principles of forming, colour scheme, rhyme, melody - everything that represents the so-called national spirit - into the structure of a piece of art. However, Urmanche had never been a mere “local” artist: he expressed the general ideas and principles of Russian art in his works.
The last period of Urmanche’s life when he lived in Kazan (1958-1990) was the time of his maturity and most active creative work. He was such a worldly-wise man of integrity that he could afford to stand aloof from official ideological attitudes which determined the art of the Soviet period to a great extent. In the epoch of triumph of “fully-fledged socialism”, of glorifying the “heroism of daily life and feats” Urmanche’s picturesque landscapes, still-lifes and portraits presented a modest beauty of his native land and people, referred to the ancient layers of his people’s history and strove to awake its historical memory.
A unique talent of Urmanche, this spiritual descendant of the century-old Islamic drawing culture, seems to be most fully and properly expressed in his original drawings, which form a large part of his artistic legacy. For Urmanche drawing was primarily a way to depict the very first spontaneous expressions, an intimate world of his family and his social circle. The artist’s whole creative lab unfolds both in a great number of brief sketches and in detailed studies. Urmanche started to do easel drawings already in the 1920s; impression of nature reached a high degree of generalization in them. From this aspect the master’s work approximates the Chinese school of painting, which he took the main techniques of ink-painting from.
Book illustrations always played a significant part in the artist’s work. A series of drawings inspired by the poem “Shurale” by G. Tuqay and made in Chinese ink in the 1980s can be justly considered a climax of this search. In this series drawing lines become strikingly free and dynamic, they fuse into quaint patterns reminding loops of the Arabic script. Urmanche’s universal talent revealed itself in full in this series, where the traditions of Oriental arts - Chinese drawing, Arabic calligraphy and Tatar polychromy - are blended in an absolutely original and distinctive manner. At the anniversary exhibition in the halls of Sovcom Gallery the master’s works are represented by some wonderful specimen: the items from Moscow private collections covering more than half a century of the artist’s life, from the 1930s to the 1980s.
O.L. Ulemnova
The exhibition is open from June 4 to July 9, 2012 at SOVCOM Auction House situated at: No.28 Shchepkina St, Moscow, 10.00 a.m. - 7.00 p.m.
SOVCOM Auction House Address: 129090 Moscow, Shchepkina St, 28 Telephone: +7 (495) 684-91-91 Fax: +7 (495) 684-90-62 Email: art@sovcom.ru Web: www.sovcom.ru
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