Painting of Soviet Turkmenia [antikvár]

The Turkmen people have co uributed to the treasury of world art various kinds of decorative and applied art, especially their world-famous carpets. The art of carpet design originated in Turkmenistan in the distant past. Its rich and strictly regulated system of ornamental composition was viewed as a poetic incarnation of man's surroundings. The symbolism of the designs revealed the artistic thinking and aesthetic ideals peculiar to the Turkmen people. Representations of human figures were rarely found in Turkmenistan, as was the case with all nations professing Islam. Until the 1920s -that is until the establishment of Soviet Power - neither painting, drawing nor sculpture existed there. For the modern culture which was just beginning to evolve at that time, the very appearance of realistic fine arts, particularly painting, was an entirely new and adventurous phenomenon. In this respect Turkmenistan underwent in the 1920s and 1930s the same specific historical process as did the other Soviet Republics of Central Asia. An artist who was active at the turn of the century, a Turkmen by nationality, was Nazar Iomudsky (Nikolay Nikolayevich Yumudsky, 1860-1897). His work, however, was not and could not have been directly connected with Turkmenistan. He was born in Russia, studied and lived there permanently, and his work was channelled entirely in the direction of Russian culture and art. An important part of Iomudsky's artistic legacy consists of a series of drawings, watercolours and etchings on Turkmen themes. His Bazaar in Merua, Turkmen Wedding and Turkmen Djigits were based on personal impressions formed during his travels. In essence they are close to the works of V. Vereshchagin and other Russian artists who visited the area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before the Revolution a lesser known Russian artist, K. Mishin, whose work may best be characterized as "ethnographic ornamental ism", lived in provincial Ashkhabad, which is now the capital of the Republic. His drawings of Turkmen carpets for the album Carpet-Weaving in Central Asia were exquisitely reproduced around the 1910s in St. Petersburg. However, Mishin's painting and drawing had no influence on the birth of a professional Turkmen fine-arts tradition. The organizational and educational talents of three artists, R. Mazel, M. Libakov and V. Vladychuk, who happened to visit Ashkhabad in 1916 during their army service, played an important part in the development of fine arts there. In 1918, thanks to Mazel's efforts, an art studio was founded in Ashkhabad under the auspices of the Revolutionary War Council, but the Civil War interrupted its activities. It was only in 1920, after the consolidation of Soviet Power in Turkmenistan, that the studio began active work under the sponsorship of the First Army's political sector. In 1922 it was renamed the Shock School of the East, and the three above-mentioned artists became its first instructors. The Soviet Union's modern, multinational culture could only have been founded on a common system of artistic thought, and no such thing existed until the Revolution; the system came into being and developed as a result of the interaction and mutual enrichment of the revitalized national cultures in the Soviet