Nikolai Chernyshev

The “Makovets” Artists: A Luminous Reality of Imagery

Yelizaveta Yefremova

Article: 
HERITAGE
Magazine issue: 
#2 2008 (19)

As Pavel Florensky imaginatively said, the legendary Makovets knoll, on which St. Sergius of Radonezh founded his monastery, became “a focused elevation of Russian culture”. Thus it was no accident that the founders of “Art and Life”, an association of artists and writers established in the spring of 1921, chose this old name as the title for their magazine, and later it became the official name of the group itself.

The “Makovets” Artists: A Luminous Reality of Imagery

As Pavel Florensky imaginatively said, the legendary Makovets knoll, on which St. Sergius of Radonezh founded his monastery, became “a focused elevation of Russian culture”. Thus it was no accident that the founders of “Art and Life”, an association of artists and writers established in the spring of 1921, chose this old name as the title for their magazine, and later it became the official name of the group itself.

Nikolai Chernyshev "Worked only with delight..."

Polina Chernysheva

Article: 
ARTISTS ON ARTISTS
Magazine issue: 
#1 2009 (22)

Fate gave Nikolai Mikhailovich Chernyshev a long life — 88 years. He started his creative work at the turn of the 20th century and lived a life that is an example of selfless service to his motherland and faith in the spiritual ideals of Russian art. Chernyshev was a man with many titles: People’s Artist of Russia, professor, painter, graphic artist, creator of monumental works, theoretician, and teacher.

Nikolai Chernyshev "Worked only with delight..."

“The goal of my life is to find the connecting link between the grand heritage of ancient Russian art and the tasks of today, not to reconstruct the old to make a stylized, dead, inorganic version of it, but to create a new harmonious art for our time, which everyone would believe in, abandoning arguments and divisions...”
Nikolai Chernyshev

VEHEMENT WISDOM OF THE INSPIRED. Nikolai Chernyshev and the “Makovets” Society

Yelena Krylova

Article: 
HERITAGE
Magazine issue: 
#3 2016 (52)

One of the luminaries of the Russian visual arts, “the last of the Mohicans” as he was referred to by his contemporaries in the late 1960s, Nikolai Chernyshev lived a long life filled with great events and rich in artistic impressions. The beginning of the 20th century saw him move, with his family, from a remote region of the Russian Empire to Moscow. He displayed considerable enthusiasm for drawing, submitting his sketches for the entry examinations to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. When, to general surprise, he was accepted, he immersed himself passionately in his studies there.

VEHEMENT WISDOM OF THE INSPIRED Nikolai Chernyshev and the “Makovets” Society

“We believe that the revival of art is possible only given strict continuity with the great masters of the past and the definitive resurrection of the living and eternal basis within art.

“Our art does not proceed from creative fantasies or only from the feeling of form, which is unavoidable for an artist. We value that sublime feeling that generates monumental art. We know that art becomes monumental only if the artist achieves a high degree of artistic skill...

The Call of the Future

Tatiana Plastova

Article: 
ARTISTIC DYNASTY
Magazine issue: 
#4 2012 (37)

For nearly 50 years the Chernyshev-Gorsky family has played a vital role in the Russian visual arts. In 1969 Dmitry Zhilinsky, a student and associate of Nikolai Chernyshev, painted "The Artist's Family. The Chernyshevs" (Russian Museum), and a year later "The Chernyshev Family" (Tretyakov Gallery), thus completing the family's image. He wrote of the works: "I imagined all the Chernyshevs walking in an autumnal forest. Nikolai Mikhailovich, in profile, against Antonina Alexandrovna, full-face; further on, young oak trees, branching out, and between them the trio: daughters Katerina and Natasha, and son-in-law Andrei Gorsky. To the left, grandson Kolenka hopping around like a grasshopper, daughter Polina to the right, behind the trees. The composition and the colour seem to have been decided. A golden autumnal background. Chernyshev in a light-coloured raincoat, nearly weightless. Behind him, Antonina Alexandrovna, serious and close to the earth, stands quietly, holding a bunch of autumnal flowers. He is narrow and light-coloured — an incarnation of spirit; she is wide, quiet, beautiful — his support." Many years later, in the picture "Paths of Childhood" by Nikolai Chernyshev's grandson Nikolai Gorsky-Chernyshev, this chain of times would be looped back: the boy (Kolenka from the Zhilinsky painting) running along the road to a church and Nikolai and Antonina, supporting each other as they walk behind him, embody that continuous, endless road of spiritual quest which the members of this admirable Russian family have been treading for a century.

The Call of the Future

Try not to live as a pretender,
But so to manage your affairs
That you are loved by wide expanses,
And hear the call of future years.

Boris Pasternak

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