Hannelore Fobo

Timur Novikov's New Artists Lists (2018 / 2025)

Chapter 8 • The “Mayakovsky Friends Club” and the “Folk Art Lovers Club”

In September 1986, Novikov and some of his New Artists friends would create two such formal associations, the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” (Клуб друзей В.В. Маяковского / Klub druziei V.V.Mayakovskogo) and the “Folk Art Lovers Club” (Клуб любителей народного творчества / Klub liubitelei narodnogo tvorchestva). In the New Artists MMOMA catalogue, the latter was translated as “Club of the Appreciation of Amateur Creativity”, stressing the fact that folk art is not considered as being professional art (The New Artists, 2012, p. 274).

Mimicking the structure of official organisations and adapting succinct labels, the New Artists were hoping that these associations would make them look more respectable in the eyes of those authorities that could provide them with a permanent exhibition space. With two different premises allotted by the City government, the Literature Club 81 had given the example of a successful battle for recognition. The problem was pressing: Novikov’s squat on Woinov st., which functioned as the ASSA Gallery, was expected to be evicted any time; it happened in 1987.

To complete the number of New Artists associations, I should add two more. The Chronicle lists the “Academy of All Sorts” (Академия Всяческих (Всеческих) Искусств / Akademiia Vsiacheskikh (Vsecheskikh) Iskusstv) with 29 December 1985 as the date of its foundation[1], while the “New Creative Association” (Новое творческое объединение / Novoe tvorcheskoe obiedinenie) is documented with an undated charter, signed by G. Bronislavskii (= V. Gutsevich) and Igor Potapov (= Timur Novikov). This document is in Sergey Chubraev’s private archive more>>. I have not seen documents relating to the “Academy of all Sorts“, but I assume that neither the “New Creative Association” nor the “Academy of all Sorts“ became a registered association. They are therefore of lesser interest in the context of this chapter. Documents cited in the following paragraphs are also from Sergey Chubraev’s archive.

The “Mayakovsky Friends Club” (with Bugaev as chairman and Novikov as his deputy) and the “Folk Art Lovers Club“ (chairman: Gutsevich) were both registered with the Vodokanal Club, the Youth Centre of the Dzerzhinsky District (Молодежный центр Джерзинского района, клуб “Водоканал” / Molodezhnii Tsentr Dzerzinskogo raiona, klub “Vodokanal”). Reports on activities as well as task schedules exist only for 1986 and 1987, and their formal existence seems to have been restricted to that period. While there is also an official book of the “Folk Art Lovers Club“ where artists signed in to become members, I cannot say whether such a book existed or exists for the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” – none of the documents I have seen provides a list of members. Likewise, the Chronicle provides a detailed list of members and their functions only for the “Folk Art Lovers Club“, but not for the “Mayakovsky Friends Club”. Since I’m interested in figures and statistics, I will put the focus on the “Folk Art Lovers Club”. The strategy Novikov and his friends pursued with the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” has been the subject of an article from 2021, The New Artists and the Mayakovsky Friends Club (1986-1990) more>>.

As the name suggests, the official mission of the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” was to spread knowledge about this Russian avant-garde poet. The report for the first year from 5 October 1987 starts:

За первый год работы клуба удалось значительно поднять интерес к творчеству В.В. Маяковского и его соратников в среде молодой творческой интеллигенции, что является основной целью клуба more>>.


During its first year of activities the Club has been able to significantly raise interest in the work of V.V. Mayakovsky and his associates in the circles of the young creative intelligentsia, which is the Club’s main goal.

The report states the following sections: literature, music, visual art, scholarly criticism, cinema with photography as a sub-section, theatre, and archive – that is, similar to those of an Academy of Arts. Novikov, Bugaev, Gutsevich, and some others headed the sections. The report also states that because of lack of premises, all activities were carried out through the sections of other organisations, without, however, specifying them further. The New Artists are mentioned only once – as “the main members of the section of visual art”, but the description of the sections coincides with their own activities, which means that New artists must have dominated all other sections, as well. In fact, analysing the activities mentioned in the report for the first year in my article from 2021, I could show that the overwhelming majority of events appear in Ksenia Novikova’s Chronicle with the New Artists label, that is, without any reference to the Mayakovsky Friends Club more>>.

In contrast to the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” with its intellectual profile, the name “Folk Art Lovers Club” corresponds to the traditional Soviet concept of allowing “art lovers” – amateurs – to carry out their hobbies within some type of official structures. We have seen such an example with the Rock Club’s affiliation to “The Leningrad Inter-Union House of Amateur Culture.”

The regulations of the “Folk Art Lovers Club” stated in 1.1.

 

Клуб любителей народного творчества основывается на добровольности, общих творческих интересах и индивидуальности членства участников, и создается с целью удовлетворения многообразных духовных запросов и интересов советских людей в сфере свободного времени.


The “Folk Art Lovers Club” is based on the principle of voluntariness, common interest in creativity and individual membership. Its goal is to meet the manifold spiritual queries and interests the Soviet people experience in the sphere of their leisure time.

In this way, Novikov and his friends had the possibility to use two different labels for their activities – whichever deemed more appropriate — or both at the same time. 

According to Ksenia Novikova’s Chronicle, the “Folk Art Lovers Club” (= Club of the Appreciation of Amateur Creativity) also had seven sections (The New Artists, 2012, pp. 274-275); such sections are, however, not mentioned in the Club’s regulations or in any other document available to me. The seven Chronicle sections display sixty-seven affiliations by a total of forty-one members – 1.63 affiliations per member. On the basis of the Chronicle distribution, I created Table D. (see Chapter 13, Table D>>)

A difficulty arises from the fact that the forty-one Chronicle names are only partly congruent with those forty-six members from the Club’s official book, although they both refer to one and the same institution: the “Folk Art Lovers Club”. The Club’s book demonstrates that all of its forty-six members joined in August and September 1986, around the time of the Club’s registration. The entries are quite detailed. For the association to acquire a legal status, members were required to indicate personal data: year of birth, occupation, workplace, address, telephone number, and date of admission (see Chapter 20>>).

When it comes to the “Mayakovsky Friends Club” members, the only figure I’ve seen is in the report from 5 October 1987: a total seventy-five members (see Chapter 18>>). Yet considering the forty-six names in the member’s book from the “Folk Art Lovers Club”, it is difficult to image that seventy-five people went through the same procedure of registering with the “Mayakovsky Friends Club”, especially if we bear in mind that many would have had to register with both associations.

It is, however, astonishing that among those forty-six members listed in the official “Folk Art Lovers Club” book, there are relatively few New Artists per se – seven, to be exact. Here are their names followed by the registration number in brackets: Gutsevich (1), Ovchinnikov (2), Novikov (3), Sotnikov (5), Kotelnikov (19), Medvedev (45) and Maslov (46). On the other hand, Bugaev, Kozlov, Khazanovich Yufit, Savchenkov, Verichev, Kozin, Alakhov, Krisanov and Guryanov are all missing. Yet all of them are in Ksenia Novikova’s Chronicle lineup of the “Folk Art Lovers Club”.

The situation looks a bit different if we use the term New Artists in the larger sense, as a movement. We may then add some more names from the book – Taratuta, Badalov, Nikolaev – but together, they make up less than a forth of those forty-six entries. Among the other ones – none of them in the Chronicle lineup – are, for instance, Dmitry Shagin and Alexander Florensky from “Mitki”, a group inclined towards Russian folk art, as well as “primitivist” Natalya Batisheva and “neo-expressionist“ Arkady Tager.

I do not know Ksenia Novikova’s source for the “Folk Art Lovers Club” Chronicle lineup – obviously, it cannot have been the official book. One possibility to explain the discrepancies between the two lists is that Novikov might have compiled his own lineup on the basis of New Artists activities, perhaps prior to the actual registration, as a project or wish-list, and that this list was published in the Chronicle.

At any rate, the Chronicle names very much correspond to the situation in 1986 representing the New Artists as a movement. It has most New Artists per se, (although not all of them in the section “visual artist”), many Necrorealists, performers from the New Theatre and from Pop-Mekhanika concerts, and some other visual artists. The “Folk Art Lovers Club” Chronicle lineup can therefore be considered as a type of idealised “administrative branch” of the New Artists movement, as perceived by Novikov in 1986.

At the same time, the New Artists group remained untouched by any formal structure: no formal requirements ever existed to become a member of the New Artists. Novikov didn’t have to ask a specific person whether they wanted to become a New artist or not – he simply included this person into his list. At least this is what the example of Sergey Sergeev suggests.

Sergeev’s name appears in two sections of the Chronicle’s “Folk Art Lovers Club“, with painting and music (but he is not in the official club book). Novikov valued Sergeev’s painting and mentioned him as a New artist in his 1986 text “The New Artists” (text no 4). Sergeev himself declines having been a New artist, although he painted Novikov’s portrait. In a private email from 10 September 2018, he wrote me that he was not a member of the New Artists group (nor of the larger New Artists movement, for that matter), because he rarely ever thought of belonging to any group. He writes that he nevertheless fully supported Timur Novikov as a theoretician and ideologist (“поддерживал Тимура, как теоретика и идеолога во всем”). In other words, Novikov, making Sergeev a member of his group, over-interpreted Sergeev’s appreciation of his, Novikov’s, role. In this context, it is interesting to note that Novikov did not mention Sergeev in his retrospective texts.

It seems that Novikov reconsidered, from time to time, his ideas of who was or should have been a New artist in the context of an artist collective. Although he never changed the lineup radically, this added to it being “fickle“.

Whether or not the Chronicle lineup of the “Folk Art Lovers Club” had any basis in fact, it clearly shows that once a loosely organised group undergoes a process of formalisation, the ambiguities disappear, at least for that precise moment in time. The written form of an organisational chart requires a classification according to well-defined categories.

We will now have a closer look at the distribution of artists to categories or sections, as presented in the “Folk Art Lovers Club” Chronicle lineup (see Chapter 13, Table D>>).

Three artists appear with two names each: Timur Novikov / Igor Potapov, Vladislav Gutsevich / Gennady Bronnislavsky, and A. (Alexander) Nikolaev / Zakhar Nikolaev. I have reduced such double names to one. If I have not overlooked any other double names and if there are no other fictitious names or pseudonyms, we obtain the number of members for each section (indicated in brackets): Scholarly Criticism (3), Literature (7), Theatre (12) Painting (20), Music (12), Cinema and Photography (7), and Fashion (6). (If we compare them with the sections from the “Mayakovsky Friends Club”, we notice a minor difference: the latter has “archive” instead of “fashion”.)

Twenty-four members are affiliated to a single section. The remaining seventeen members hold a total of forty-three affiliations to two or more sections – two and a half per person on average. Their affiliations to the respective sections roughly reflect their artistic activities in various fields. Most of these seventeen members, though not all, are from the New Artists per se.

Some New artists are even omnipresent. (Ideally, each New artist should have mastered all skills, but this might have looked a bit over the top.)

In five sections we find Novikov’s name: Scholarly Criticism (as Igor Potapov), Theatre, Painting, Music, and Fashion – that is, in all sections with the exception of two: Literature, and Cinema and Photography. Oleg Kotelnikov is also in five sections, Vladislav Gutsevich, apart from being chairman, in three sections (also under his pseudonym Gennady Bronnislavsky), Sergei Bugaev and Georgy Guryanov are also in three sections each. Statistically, each of these five artists held 3.8 “offices”.

Twelve members fulfil two functions each, among them five from the New Artists per se: Kirill Khazanovich, Igor Verichev, Yevgeny Yufit, Evgenij Kozlov, and Vadim Ovchinnikov. The other seven are Natalya Pivovarova, Alexander Kan, Natalia Turik, Oleg Kolomeichuk, Sergei Sergeev, Roman Zhigunov, and Alexander Nikolaev (Zakhar).

Seven New artists per se are represented with a single section: Andrei Medvedev, Alexei Kozin, Oleg Maslov, Ivan Sotnikov, Andrei Krisanov, Inal Savchenkov, and Valery Alakhov.

This (5 + 5 + 7) adds up to seventeen of those twenty New Artists per se I defined in my adapted version of Novikov’s autobiography. The missing ones are Valery Cherkasov, which makes sense, because he was no longer alive, Oleg Zaika, which is strange, since he collaborated with Maslov and Kozin, and Viktor Tsoy from the KINO band, who would have been a perfect candidate for the music section.

We can now subtract these seventeen New Artists names from the total of forty-one names in the Chronicle list. The remaining twenty-four members are:

Alexander Kan, Alexei Feoktistov, Inna Lakhmatova, Andrey Kurmayartsev, S. Gubinsky, A. Vasiliev, Rodion Zavernyaev, Natalya Pivovarova, Natalia Turik, Oleg Kolomeichuk, Sergei Sergeev, Alexei Vermichev, Mikhail Taratuta, Yuri Krasev, Roman Zhigunov, A. Bulaev, Nikolaev (Zakhar Nikolaev), Sergei Shutov, Mikhail Malin, German Vinogradov, Alexei Svinarsky-Skoropomoshnik, Tatyana Korneeva, Sergey Sveshnikov, Evgeny Kondratev.[2]

If Novikov actually compiled the list himself, we may regard these twenty-four people as belonging – in Novikov’s view – to the larger New Artists movement. Many were related to the New Artists group through Pop-Mekhanika concerts, New Theatre performances or through the Necrorealists.

I know it is somewhat risky to rely on this Chronicle entry when defining the New Artists movement. We do not know its source, and even if we knew it, we would have to keep in mind that at least Sergey Sergeev does not agree to have been part of the New Artists, whether group or movement. I would therefore consider it to be no more than an approximate or interim list which might be shortened – or enlarged with artists from the late 1980s, for instance with Andrey Khlobystin. Novikov mentions Khlobystin in his lecture about the New Artists from 2002 (text no 11), although in his autobiography he refers to Khlobystin only in relation to the New Academy. Once we have a more comprehensive picture of New Artists activities and lineups, we will be able to complete the picture.

The Chronicle lineup of the “Folk Art Lovers Club” actually displays a particular feature.

With twenty out of forty-one members, the painting section was by far the largest. Among them are twelve New artists per se. But only seven of these twelve are also found in some other section. This distinguishes the “Folk Art Lovers Club” from the New Artists per se who, as quoted above, “Having mastered recomposition […] set about mastering different genres: music, literature, theatrical performance, film”. (Timur, 2013 p. 153, text no 11)

We may resume that here, painting, although still important, is no longer the higher-ranking category from where a New artist sets out to master different genres. What is more, New artists Evgeny Yufit (theatre, cinema and photography), Georgy Guryanov (theatre, music, fashion), Igor Verichev (theatre, music) and Andrei Medvedev (music), all known for their painting, were not even members of the painting section. A certain arbitrariness manifests itself with the distribution of members to sections.

In

to Chapter 9 • Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop-Mekhanika. The principle of reciprocity. >>
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© Hannelore Fobo, 2018 / 2025
uploaded 29 October 2018 / revised version uploaded 13 Juli 2025

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