5 facts about Ernst Neizvestny, The man who dared to argue with Nikita Khrushchev
The famous sculptor would have turned 100 on April 9. We remember one of the most important masters of the Soviet era.
1. He was supposed to be shot & declared dead
When Ernst Neizvestny, a native of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), was 17 years old, he was drafted to the front of the Great Patriotic War. He was trained at a machine gun school in Turkestan and, on his way to the front, he shot an officer who was abusing a girl. He was supposed to have been shot, but was, instead, sent to a penal battalion.
He went through the entire war and, in April 1945, was seriously wounded. By mistake, he was declared dead, a funeral notice was sent home and he was “posthumously” awarded the ‘Order of the Red Star’ and the ‘Za Otvagu’ (‘For Courage’) medal. These awards were physically presented to Neizvestnyy only 25 years later.
2. He dared to argue with Nikita Khrushchev and, later, created his tombstone
After the war, Neisvestny studied to be a painter and sculptor in Riga and Moscow and, in 1955, he became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited an exhibition for the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists in the Manege exhibition hall. In addition to the usual works in the genre of socialist realism, there were also works by nonconformists. Khrushchev was furious and criticized them in the harshest terms. But, the sculptor argued with the General Secretary, defending his views on art.
In the end, the General Secretary told the artist: "You are an interesting person, I like such people, but you have an angel and a devil inside you. If the devil wins, we will destroy you, but if the angel wins, we will help you.”
The sculptor was expelled from the Union of Artists and lost his orders. Ironically, when Khrushchev passed away, it was Neizvestny who was commissioned to create a tombstone for the former ruler.
3. He did incredibly large-scale works himself
Neizvestny did almost all of his large-scale works with his own hands. For example, for five months in 1971, he himself laid out the ‘The Formation of Homo Sapiens’ bas-relief in the library of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology. All 970 square meters.
In the 1990s, he worked on the ‘Triangle of Sorrow’ project – monuments to the memory of victims of repression in Magadan, Yekaterinburg and Vorkuta. For Kuzbass, he made a seven-meter granite monument to the perished miners.
In 2004, ‘The tree of Life’ appeared in Moscow – Neizvestny’s most significant work. He worked on it for 40 years: portraits of historical figures and images of religious symbols are placed in the intertwining of Mobius strips. The sculptor said that he saw the image of the monument in a dream.
4. He left the USSR, but returned during perestroika
In 1976, Neizvestny emigrated to the U.S. He himself explained his decision as follows: “In the USSR, I could do big official things, use my formal techniques, but I couldn’t do what I wanted to do.” A year later, the sculptor settled in New York and began teaching at Columbia University. In the late 1980s, he returned to Russia and, in 1995, received Russian citizenship.
5. The sculptor’s works are installed all over the world
Ernst Neizvestny’s first work abroad, the 97-meter ‘Lotus Flower’ at the Aswan Dam in Egypt, appeared in 1971, during the Soviet period. And then – in many countries around the world. For example, his ‘Great Centaur’ is installed in Ariana Park near the UN headquarters in Geneva, while the ‘Heart of Christ’ sculpture is kept in the Vatican Museums.
