(E-E) Ev.g.e.n.i.j ..K.o.z.l.o.     Berlin                                                  


      Leningrad 80s >>

Da Da Majakowski

Dionysus Gallery, Rotterdam, 25 March – 8 April 1988






The reconstruction of Da Da Majakowski

How exactly the works arrived from Leningrad via London to Rotterdam is not entirely clear; we only know that they were “smuggled across the border”, as the Dionysus Gallery press release informs us, and we also know who took them from London to Rotterdam: two of the eleven editors of Nieuwe Weelde, – that is, Paul Vink and Hans Miltenberg – in “a cloak-and-dagger operation”.

The article in Volkskrant (19 March 1988) is somewhat more precise. Paul Vink is quoted saying that the works were smuggled to Stockholm, then flown to London where they were shown in a gallery, and, following that, brought to Rotterdam for a temporary show in “a cloak-and-dagger operation, tucked under the arm, in a manner of speaking”.

The question of who smuggled the works to Stockholm and why they were taken to London before they arrived at Rotterdam has not found an answer yet, but I allow myself to suggest a possible answer.

Peter Sylveire of "Young Unknowns Gallery" visited Leningrad in 1987, where he and Timur Novikov discussed the possibility of a New Artists exhibition in his London gallery. Novikov might have asked Paul Vink for help, and perhaps Vink himself smuggled the works to Stockholm by boat, and then took them to London as personal luggage. A number of works were on textile or plastic; they could be folded and put into a suitcase – because of the material, the Soviet customs wouldn’t have considered them works of art anyway. Works on canvas had to be taken off the stretchers and rolled up into a single, not very long roll. So there was a slight risk that the roll could be confiscated at the Soviet customs, but it wasn’t enormous.

In principle, the term “smuggling” applied to all four borders – Soviet, Swedish, British, and Dutch, because the question was not only to get the works out, but also to get them in – European countries have import sales taxes on works of art which, in those years, still applied to goods crossing the borders between member states of the European Union, and Sweden wasn’t even a member of the European Community in 1988. (I came across this problem in 1992, when works of three Leningrad artists arrived from France in Germany and I had to pay no small amount of import sales taxes.)  In connection with the Soviet customs, however, “smuggling” implied that specific works of art were also forbidden for political reasons, and not only the smuggling as such. This is a misinterpretation to which I will come back in the next chapter of my article.

Be that as it may, the term “smuggle” contributed to the success of the exhibition. Black and white pictures from the opening of Da Da Mayakovsky, kept in the archive of the Dionysus Gallery, show people standing closely together, especially while listening to Geoffrey Douglas Madge’s piano performance.

Pianist and composer Geoffrey Douglas Madge performing at the opening of Da Da Majakowski, Dionysus Gallery, Rotterdam, 25 March, 1988 Courtesy of Dionysus Gallery Archive
Pianist and composer Geoffrey Douglas Madge performing at the opening of Da Da Majakowski, Dionysus Gallery, Rotterdam, 25 March, 1988
Courtesy of Dionysus Gallery Archive



Madge, a famous Australian classical pianist and composer who settled in the Netherlands, played “Forbidden Sounds” from the Soviet twenties on a piano the gallery had arranged for the occasion.

The opening was very well attended by local artists, including Hadriaan-Eyboer, Koos Veerkamp, Gert Rietveld, and Woody van Amen. Arjo Rozendaal from the team of Dionysus is also in the pictures.

Arjo Rozendaal of Dionysus (left) and artists Woody van Amen (with scarf), Koos Veerkamp (right) Gert Rietveld (right, front) at the opening of Da Da Majakowski, Dionysus Gallery, Rotterdam, 25 March, 1988
Arjo Rozendaal of Dionysus (left) and artists Woody van Amen (with scarf), Koos Veerkamp (right) Gert Rietveld (right, front) at the opening of Da Da Majakowski, Dionysus Gallery, Rotterdam, 25 March, 1988. In the background is a work by Andrey Khlobystin.



Enno de Kroon told me that his artist friend Rolf Pauw treated the guests with Russian food and drinks – ten litres of borscht soup and tea from two samovars plus a box of bottles of Russian champagne that he had bought in Limburg, in the South of Holland.

Together with a general exhibition view displaying most works, the pictures from the opening help us reconstruct the exhibition. Since the gallery archive possesses the prints, but not the negatives of the pictures, I photographed the prints with my camera, which reduces the quality of the reproductions published in this article. They are, however, still good enough to allow us to identify the works with the help of those colour pictures from the London exhibition. The London and Rotterdam pictures complete each other: the London pictures display single frames of works (no installation views) while the Rotterdam pictures offer only general views, most of them taken during the opening, therefore displaying the paintings partly covered by visitors. Furthermore, slides from the City of Stockholm archive, Kulturhuset section, show several works in colour; these pictures were taken to establish a selection of works for the New Artists 1988 Kulturhuset exhibtion The New from Lenignrad. I numbered the exhibits clockwise in a Dionysus floor plan that is not entirely true to scale but serves our purpose all the same (see next page).

The numbering of works I used for the London page is different from that of the Rotterdam floor plan; that is to say, one and the same number refers to different paintings in the London and Rotterdam exhibitions, respectively. When referring to the London numbering, I added "London” in brackets, for instance (No. 2 London).

The London pictures document a total of eighteen works of which seventeen can be identified in the Rotterdam show; the one numbered 13 (London), a large collage on textile, was apparently not displayed. Instead, Rotterdam displayed an additional four works, which amounts to a total of twenty-one paintings exhibited, if we assume that those Da Da Majakowski archival pictures cover the entire exhibition. In this case, it makes sense to conclude that the Dionysus Gallery was more spacious than the Young Unknowns Gallery, and that in London, those additional paintings had been kept in a storage. Even so, several works on plastic were not displayed at Rotterdam, because, as Enno de Kroon told me, they were difficult to hang properly.

Two paintings supposedly by Vadim Ovchinnikov
Two paintings supposedly by Vadim Ovchinnikov.
Courtesy of Dionysus Gallery Archive

What can be said about these four “new” works”? One is similar to an abstract composition I ascribed to Vadim Ovchinnikov – no. 5 (London) and no. 16 in the Dionysus floor plan; the “similar” one is no. 17. Admittedly, I‘m now not so sure any more whether no. 16 is indeed a work by Ovchinnikov; someone else might have painted it in the style of Ovchinnikov, and then the same would go for no. 17. (For the sake of completeness, I will just add that obviously, the Rotterdam documentation could not help me to identify those non-identified works at London, although the fact that they were also in Rotterdam helps to draw some other conclusions.)

The other three “new” works, nos. 15, 10 and 11 in the floor plan, are figurative. No. 15 is a portrait of Yuri Gagarin. No. 10 and no. 11 are two paintings presented next to each other, one depicting a worker carrying a digging shovel (no. 10), the other one depicting a pilot pointing into the air; an airplane is flying across his head (no. 11).

With regard to style, all three works are typical for Georgy Guryanov’s works from the late 1980s, his pop-art approach to socialist realism that superseded his earlier cartoon style which is also present in the show with a paining of a father and a son, no. 21 (no. 14 London). Yet with regard to subject matter, only Gagarin and the pilot are typical for Guryanov’s “heroic” period: his idea of masculinity was not that of a proletarian type.

(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov Noli Me Tangere 1982. Tempera, gouache, watercolour and collage on canvas, 93 x 106 cm, 1982
Portrait of Gagarin, a work by (most likely) Georgy Guryanov. Addendum January 2022: In Sara Åkerrén's archive, this work is attributed to Sergei Bugaev and Irena Kuksenaite.
Courtesy of Dionysus Gallery Archive

There is another reason why I hesitate to identify these three paintings as works by Guryanov. Each portrait is combined with the abstract symbol of a square – most likely a reference to Malevich’s black square. Surely, the black square has also become a pop art element in Russia, but it is a rather strange feature for a work by Guryanov, at least to my knowledge. To me, the small black square on the left of Gagarin’s head and the two words ЮРА ОДИН – Yuri is alone – placed below the square vertically look like a kind of exclamation mark. In fact, they look as if some other artist had filled in the empty space near the border of the canvas with their own comment on Guryanov's portrait. Addendum January 2022: In Sara Åkerrén's archive, this work is attributed to Sergei Bugaev and Irena Kuksenaite.

More accomplished in terms of their composition and structure are no. 10 and no. 11, two rather large paintings. Each is divided into two halves, with the figurative part on the right, while on the left, there is a square inside a monochrome surface – a white square inside black surface in the case of the worker (no. 10), and black square inside some lighter colour in the case of the pilot (no. 11).

Two unsigned works, no. 10 and no. 11 – possibly by Georgy Guryanov – presented as a diptych. Two unsigned works, no. 10 and no. 11 – possibly by Georgy Guryanov – presented as a diptych.
Two unsigned works, no. 10 and no. 11 – possibly by Georgy Guryanov – presented as a diptych.
In Sara Åkerrén's archive, both works are attributed to Sergei Bugaev and Irena Kuksenaite.
Courtesy of Dionysus Gallery Archive
Two unsigned works, no. 10 and no. 11 – possibly by Georgy Guryanov – presented as a diptych. Two unsigned works, no. 10 and no. 11 – possibly by Georgy Guryanov – presented as a diptych.
Silde reproductions from 1987 from the archive of the City of Stockholm, Kulturhuset section.




In Menno Schenke’s article “Young Group of Painters from Leningrad “ we read that works were for sale, with prices between 1500 to 4000 Gulden which today, given inflation, would be about the same amount in Euro. According to Schenke, in case a painting sold, the artists wanted a synthesizer, not money – it would serve them better than foreign currency. I would say that this is one of Bugaev’s myth passed on to Paul Vink. Actually, no one was compelled to make a choice, since none of the works sold. Apparently, prices were too high not only for unsigned works of anonymous painters, although, with hindsight, it would have been wise to acquire one of the signed works by Timur Novikov or Andrey Khlobystin. Besides, the fact that Andrey Khlobystin’s work were also signed escaped the press, perhaps because Khlobystin’s curly Cyrillic signature looked like a part of the composition. Volkskrant printed Khlobystin’s painting “Spring” with the caption “Anoniem” – anonymous. 

After the end of Da Da Majakowski, the exhibits went back to Stockholm – if not all, then at least some: in August 1988, three of them were shown at the exhibition De Nya från Leningrad / The New from Leningrad, Kulturhuset, Stockholm: Timur Novikov’s “Rocket”, Oleg Kotelnikov’s “Madonna”, and a work on plastic sheet supposedly by Oleg Kotelnikov and Sergei Bugaev. Also displayed at the Kulturhuset was the “missing” no 13 from the London exhibition mentioned above more >>. Two other works could be seen in Stockholm in December 1988, at the exhibition Ryska Konstnärer från Leningrad / Russian Artists from Leningrad, Pierre Munkeborg Antik & Inredningar: Timur Novikov's red textile work and Georgy Guryanov's pilot or parachutist. Possibly, there were some others, too. more >>

Since neither Ksenia Novikova’s Chronicle nor E-E Kozlov’s personal list of exhibitions have any mention of an exhibition between April and August 1988, this could mean that actually all works went to Stockholm. Together with other Leningrad artists and musicians, Timur Novikov, Sergei Bugaev and Oleg Kotelnikov were invited to participate at the Kulturhuset’s festival programme, which would have given them the possibility to take care of those “Rotterdam” works once more. In this way, they might have selected those four works to join the main part of the Stockholm exhibits that arrived with the Leningrad guests shortly before the opening and the other ones for the exhibition at Pierre Munkeborg's place.

Yet New York as the next step for some of the works, as announced in the Rotterdam press release, is also a possibility. In a private message from 29 October 2020, Andrey Khlobystin wrote me that around 1989, all three of his works exhibited at Rotterdam were acquired by Paul Judelson, when Judelson started his art business with Leningrad artists. Khlobystin couldn’t tell me more about the circumstances of the acquisitions, except for the fact that Judelson had bought them from someone else. Two of these works are documented in pictures from the second exhibition of the Friends of Mayakovsky Club which took place at Judelson’s apartment in May 1990.





Uploaded 12 November 2020
Last updated 26 January 2022