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| SOME LANDMARKS IN THE TOPOGRAPHY. Leo Mauriņš Pēteris Bankovskis | |
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Like an unconscious memory from ancient times, when quantity was still described in binary terms, there is the wish to say quickly that there are two kinds of anything: right and left, positive and negative, and so on. So too on the subject of artists: I'm now going to assert, without presenting any proofs and without citing authorities, that there are two kinds of artists. One kind are those constantly in need of being reminded of themselves, changing starkly and sometimes quite without foundation their means of expression, their individual style or the medium in which they work. Or else, if the style and the "deeper essence" are retained, then at least they draw attention to themselves through various personal activities, events, statements or even scandals. And there are artists of the other kind: those who, once they have recreated, through their inimitable individuality, what they have learned or tried to understand, continue in this way for the rest of their lives, regardless of whether they are at the pinnacle of acclaim and popularity or whether they are at the periphery of public attention. For youth and for the quite restricted company of oddballs who service the industry and "process" of art, all those whose "world view" generally changes along with the appearance on the scene of one popculture figure or another, tend to favour artists of the first group. When people become older and gradually come to feel the cold attraction of "eternity" behind the splash of momentary events in the present, they often tend to seek something more lasting and stable.
In Latvian painting created during the lives of living generations, Leonīds Mauriņš is definitely a value of the "second kind": lasting and stable. On 4 May, Leonīds will mark his sixtieth birthday, an occasion that in many other cases would have been trumpeted in the papers and magazines, shown on TV and deliberated on the radio. There'd be major exhibitions with lavish catalogues (possibly even good ones), since, even if we exclude his time at the Rozentāls School and the Academy of Art, he has spent thirty-five years in painting. And there is a quiet place, invisible to society at large, where his painting has been noticed and recognised - these are the museum collections. The Museum of the Artists' Union of Latvia (the former Latvian SSR Art Foundation Collection) has 20 of Mauriņš' paintings, and the State Museum of Art has 11. His works, starting with "Summer", painted in 1969 and ending with "A Youth and a Young Lady" from 1998, sleep there in the dusk and drabness among hundreds of others, and on the frames with stretched canvases or nailed-down cardboard, the only conversation is taking place at virtually a molecular level, between the colour pigments, the binders and the base, under the influence of temperature and humidity changes in the repository. Yes, and the keepers of the collections have at their disposal more or less complete information indicating that from time to time one or other of the paintings has been brought out into the daylight and shown at some exhibition in our country or abroad. I don't know (didn't ask) how Leonīds marked this big occasion, whether he was home at all, and if he was, then at which home - his Riga studio on Grīvas Street or at Promulti farmstead in Mazsalaca, where, it seems, he spends most of his time. Possibly, if there was anyone to listen, then he talked of painting, of the things that engage his mind. Like what he told me in his studio on 29 October. Seen here were his latest works, from this year, and partially realised was the idea of preserving as paintings the murals he once created, which have either been destroyed (the café Allegro, the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Youth), or else hard to reach, even if they are still in existence (in Russia and elsewhere in the former USSR). Possibly, some may question why we should bring up old episodes from a different age. Those who don't know or have forgotten I would like to remind that such "monumental painting" in clubs, kindergartens, schools and administrative institutions was during the Soviet era a great opportunity of paid work for many professional artists. Provided, of course, that they could make it past the juries - the artistic councils of the Decorative Art Workshop, bogged down by intrigue, interest groups and subjective appraisal. In his years at the Academy of Art and later too, it seems that Mauriņš took a stance typical for the Soviet era: at the academy he was a Communist Youth activist, but this formal, official activity did not prevent him from seriously developing and truly sensing and realising his nascent artistic programme. Duplicity? Maybe. But duplicity (this is often forgotten) was also present on the "opposing side", as in the Central Committee of the Communist Youth: many functionaries preached the official teaching, but they themselves were secretly preparing, maybe even subconsciously, for a career in business and privately recognised as good that which they truly liked. This is the only way to explain how the bulls painted by Mauriņš in a manner that was not at all realistic, let alone ideological, could be permitted to work up a storm on the walls of the Allegro café, so popular with the Young Communists. It seems that in officialdom this might have been regarded as quite scandalous. But so much for all that. In the studio, I was also able to view this summer's sketches and small, postcard-size drawings and paintings, among them entirely Photorealist depictions of his own country house. Mauriņš has worked in this manner since youth, and in the casual atmosphere of today has even caused surprise, as we may read, for example, in the only book devoted to him, the album compiled by Ilze Konstante and published in 1992. The album's polygraphic quality is quite dreadful, since it was printed at a time when the old, stable polygraphic system, poor in quality though it was, had virtually collapsed, while the high quality polygraphy nowadays accessible to all was undreamed of. This should be mentioned because even the "conditions of production" have contributed to Mauriņš not being been recognised widely enough today. Is this a kind of hint from fate? Let's return to the sketches. Leonīds showed me these and talked, his voice gradually assuming a metallic ring, not permitting any questions or interjections. He told me how he sees a country house full of what seems to be Baroque old-time furniture, how he records this and then tries to break it up, seemingly showing it from different viewpoints simultaneously. This - the transformation of space - has been a lifelong preoccupation. But this is a secondary issue. The first, even more essential, is harmony, the harmony of ochre, as he says, and adds straight away that you can't simply put on the colour, since then it seems that the harmony is stifled. That's why (he points to a recent painting dominated by yellow-brown ochre tones) those green accents must be added to the grass; otherwise it would seem somehow strange. Looking at some of his early works, such as "Summer" from 1969, already mentioned, where Leonīds' wife Daina and her best friend are depicted almost recognisably, as well as the 1974 painting "Story of a Life", I see textures produced by various materials glued onto the canvas (threads, beads, textiles etc.), as well as thick application of paint direct from the tube. I just had to pose the question of whether he was influenced at this time by his mother, painter Lidija Auza, who most likely remains in the memory of the viewer of Latvian paintings precisely with such drastic, effective surfaces, having their own, autonomous emotive content. Leonīds' answer did not demonstrate any wish or duty to recognise his mother's merits in this regard. He said that both his mother and he himself had one and the same teacher - Georges Braque. It is directly from him that both learned to construct harmony. Leonīds even calls Braque the Mozart of painting. Though it is Pablo Picasso that he regards as the 20th century's greatest artist and his own second teacher. I ponder to myself that the idea of the changeable chameleon-showman Picasso seems somehow... But for Mauriņš, Picasso is not important as a type or anything like that. He told me quite simply: if Picasso had not been ahead of him, then he would never have dared to break up space. And added that precisely the breaking up of space renders a painting mysterious and indecipherable. I wanted to know what he hoped that viewers, the "consumers" of his painting, would gain from his works. He answered, "I offer them the same colour harmony seen in nature, only without that which is incidental. Yes, nowadays you can get many colours from the colour TV, but this is not the same thing. In order to attain these harmonies, one must work very slowly and painstakingly. The work is dull, even boring. I do a lot of glazing, lay thin layers one on top of another, and this is an advantage of oils, that one tone shows through another. I don't like matt colour. This gives an impression of glue paints. And synthetic colours I now only use for sketches, my paintings being in oil on canvas. It is a kind of royal technique." I also wanted to know why the viewer needs to receive and perceive the colour harmonies that he offers. "The joy of existence", he repeated three times in the course of a conversation lasting an hour and a half. "The joy of existence, like when on a hot summer's day you put to your lips a glass of frothing beer." I decide that probably he is right - truly, what other purpose might painting and contemplation of painting serve. Surely not the study of nature or the revelation of "human psychology". He also added that one must paint without complexes. If you paint to satisfy your complexes, nothing will come of it. Also, one must paint when one is healthy. If a person is ill, then nothing will come of it either. He has had years, more than one, which have produced nothing, since nothing works, since... "But now it attracts me again, and I paint as much as I like. Altogether, I have been interested in three things: fishing, painting and women." Whatever the case with harmonies and the joy of existence, many do however give their attention to what is "depicted" on the painted surface. For Mauriņš, it is the Latvian countryside that lives and moves there throughout the years in his self-created geometry of space: elements of houses, parts of the outlines of furniture and furnishings, the lines of the female body and the silhouettes of domestic animals, the daily rhythm of light and the colours of the seasons, and all of this in a kind of unending, ornamental flow of dreams. At the centre of this current are hints of a man bent down or often asleep, wearing an old, creased wide-brimmed hat. This man, appearing again and again, is of no interest or concern to the viewing public. But he, along with his foster-grandmother Rute Grīnberga, who helped him through those hard years at the Rozentāls School and at other times too, are perhaps Leonīds' only true conversation partners. The man is his father Juris. Many residents of the town of Rūjiena probably remember his lone daily walks, how he visited local painter Arvīds Strauja. He was different. From the Mauriņš family that has ancient roots in northern Vidzeme. (Leonīds has found cast-iron crosses dating back more than two centuries at Mauriņš family burial places). He was born out of wedlock in Italy. His mother, Leonīds' grandmother, probably in order to add a touch of nobility to the "disgrace", maintained a legend that the child's father was an Italian aristocrat. After studying engineering and some years of work, Juris gradually set off on a journey, the route of which I cannot trace and have no right to. Evidence of this journey survives in the many notebooks he left behind. These contain calculations and schemes for some sort of mechanics guiding the elements, the personality and maybe the Heavens too. Leonīds Mauriņš didn't have any real contact with his enthusiastically creative mother and her relatives (his foster-grandmother being an exception), and no such contact developed with the land of her birth - the proud Kurzeme, the area of Cīrava. It is a completely different matter with northern Vidzeme: the light, the topography and the spatial relationships of that area live in his paintings, and the people there, in the first place his father Juris, represent the dynamic axis of these paintings. And it is probable that the mechanics of his painted world are bound by some of those laws his father indicated in his travel notes. When I visited Leonīds in his studio on 29 October, it seemed that nothing had changed since my previous visit, which was apparently about a decade earlier: that same salad-green Art Nouveau sideboard with its shining glass, those same curving feminine shapes, distorted in the ornamental style of his paintings, within their multi-tiered spatial geometry. And in fact what changes should there be within a limited segment of space and time, if humanly perceptible scales end immediately beyond individual life (the frame of the painting), so that about all the rest, as has oft been said, one should remain silent? | |
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