Eduard Steinberg: music on canvas

Psychologies: Eduard Steinberg did not have a special art education – an exceptional case for an artist with a worldwide reputation. How did his encounter with fine arts happen?

Anna Chudetskaya: This meeting took place thanks to his father, Arkady Steinberg. In his younger years, Arkady Akimovich studied at VKhUTEMAS in the class of David Shterenberg, was a poet and translator. Then his fate was not easy. Arkady Akimovich was repressed in 1937 and released from prison before the war. He volunteered for the front, but after the war he was again arrested and released only in 1954. It was then that he became his son’s first mentor both in drawing and in painting from life, and in the understanding of art that can be called a spiritual quest. Thanks to his father, Eduard touched the tradition of painting in the 1920s.

To which direction?

Steinberg’s works from the very beginning of the 1960s are a rare example of the “Vkhutemas” tradition of painting, made from nature. “Urban landscape in the Baumanskaya area” is a nondescript motif: two two-story houses, a passing street, passers-by. An important place in the composition is occupied by snow and sky, which have absorbed many shades of blue, purple, pink, ocher, and in this unity one can already feel that light scale that will dominate Steinberg’s later abstractions. The portrait of the grandmother of 1962 is one of the many portraits that the artist painted during this period of search. The stinginess of gray-black-brown creates a feeling of light sadness. But the “Tree” of 1963, while still remaining within the natural motif, already anticipates the abstract compositions of the later period: the proportion of the conditional increases, the color saturation disappears, and a bluish shimmer appears.

How, when did his interest in non-objective art arise?

Somewhere in the mid 1960s. He saw the works of artists of the “first avant-garde” in the collection of Georgy Costakis, was at an exhibition from the collection of Nikolai Khardzhiev, received a book by Camille Gray “The Great Experiment” as a gift – all this contributed to the fact that Eduard Steinberg gradually moved from natural motifs to geometric abstraction. Steinberg even wrote a letter to Kazimir Malevich. In this “dialogue” Steinberg was an interested party: he devoted his further work to the restoration of continuity with the ideas of Suprematism and the Russian avant-garde as a whole.

In Suprematism, Steinberg saw a synthesis of the mystical ideas of the Russian Silver Age, the plastic structure of Russian icon painting and the painting of early Christians. And his own works of the early 1970s demonstrate this metaphysical desire to go beyond the limits of sensual, empirical experience, to renounce the everyday, vain, to turn to the eternal questions of being. The composition “Skull, jug, maple leaf” of 1971 is a perfect example of such symbolic dematerialization, but more often the artist works with simple geometric shapes. A square, a rectangle, a triangle plunge into space, where their outlines become less defined, and the space “fills up”, becomes more dense. Both objects and space become co-material with each other.

What helps to “read” his abstract works?

Sometimes in the geometry of forms we can guess something figuratively definite: this is how the grandiose image of a bird is seen in the composition “February-March” (1973). The theme of the killed bird very often appeared in Steinberg’s works in the late 1960s, and the stuffed woodpecker was a very important subject for a long time – a kind of guide to the special, speculative space of his works. But sometimes we don’t find any pictorial clues. Then initiations can serve as a clue. The composition “Triangles” of 1976 is dedicated to the memory of the artist’s mother. Two triangles, pink and black: pink rising like a pyramid, black like a warning sign, behind them a shimmering blue space. Human life is perceived by the artist as an elusive mystery that can be comprehended with the help of color, which can thicken matter, or can dissolve it.

His artistic searches were of a religious and philosophical nature?

Yes, but they didn’t fit into traditional theology. In Steinberg’s works, the spiritual and aesthetic were combined with the deeply individual. The metaphysical nature of his art lurked within the pictorial method itself. The subtlest color gradations seemed to become conductors of experiences, reflections, searches for answers. But in the art of Steinberg one cannot find ready-made truths or mystical revelations. He stopped at the point where religious issues are present as a kind of questioning – about feeling, about thought, about meaning, about destiny … The artist’s search turned out to be consonant with the global space of culture.

Eduard Steinberg became one of the few domestic artists who were able to take their rightful place in the artistic life of Europe. The language of geometric abstraction turned out to be relevant for the global cultural context of recent decades.