Sculptor, painter, engraver and philosopher, Ernst Neizvestny is regarded internationally as one of the finest artists to have left the Soviet Union in recent years. His works include the Lotus Flower monument-the tallest sculpture in the world--atop the Aswan dam in Egypt, a crucifix in the Vatican Museum, a bronze head of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as well as the headstone for the grave of former Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev.
In a recent interview for The World and I, Dr. Albert Weeks, a New York University professor, journalist, and scholar on Soviet affairs who speaks fluent Russian, conversed with Mr. Neizvestny at his Soho gallery in New York's Greenwich Village. While discussing his perspectives on art and society, the artist was asked about an experience with Nikita Khruschev that he was become famous for.
"You may be Premier," Soviet artist Ernst Neizvestny boldly remarked to Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, "but not here in front of my works of art [in the Manezh gallery near Moscow's Red Square]. "Here I am the premier, so we shall have a discussion on that equal basis."
"That really happened?" I inquired. "Ah, yes," Mr. Neizvestny answered, "all this happened at the Manezh twenty-five years ago. But frankly, Dr. Weeks, I'm sick and tired of this story. Khrushchev, after all, was a stupid, stolid Stalinite bureaucrat. As for Gorbachev? His Russian, and what he pronounces with it, are both abominable, too. But, of course, Gorbachev is loved in some western circles because…well, he looks a little different from the Brezhnevs and the Khrushchevs. But they're all the same."
In his spacious Greenwich Village SoHo gallery, Russian sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who emigrated to the West in 1977, warmed up to the subjects that interest him most: society, culture, art and artists. But before that, by accident, the topic was…cats.
"I used to be a dog man," he said as two cats scampered rambunctiously over our feet amid assorted canvases and sculptures, nearly upending my coffee in the process. "But I've learned, from my wife Rachel, and from my own observation, that felix domesticus embraces a deep-thinking tribe, rich in individuation, a genus dedicated to freedom…So, now I am a total cat person."
Independence, freedom, individuation: these may or may not be tangible traits in pets, but they are deeply imbedded in the character and philosophy of art espoused by Ernst Neizvestny.
The sculptor-painter's artistic creativity and personal life-style is a testimony to the universality of humankind's spiritual yearning; the struggle for freedom of expression.
"You know, it really doesn't matter," Neizvestny insisted, "whether that creative man or woman artist technically is a Russian, German, Italian, American, or whatever."
That feeling of universality, Neizvestny maintains, is seldom appreciated where Russian émigrés are concerned. "They are treated by too many journalists and the broadcast media here as pitiful, exotic beings transplanted into a so-called entirely 'alien" cultures. Not
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