Ivan Leonidov was an unhappy person. He belonged to the younger generation - those who studied with the avant-garde masters in the 1920s. And he was probably the most gifted and energetic among them. The generation, however, was not lucky - there was very little time left for the free development of those ideas that were produced by the students of VKHUTEMAS. Leonidov's diploma project (the famous Lenin Institute) was completed in 1927, and already in 1930 a campaign against "Leonidovism" began in the press - an article was published in which the architect was accused of sabotage. After that, the journal "Contemporary Architecture" was closed, and Leonidov was forced to quit teaching and soon left for Igarka. He returned to Moscow and even worked a lot, but built catastrophically little. In 2002, when the 100th anniversary of the great dreamer was celebrated here, everyone was basically sure that there was only one, as they say now, implementation of his work - a staircase in the Kislovodsk sanatorium of the People's Commissariat for Tyazhprom.
Now it turned out that this is not entirely true. The Museum of Architecture, as part of the Moscow Biennale, is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the second surviving work of Ivan Leonidov - the interiors of the House of Pioneers in Kalinin. The exhibition is called “The Second Leonids”. In essence, the exhibition is a meticulous study of the little-known works of the famous architect. The study was carried out by two curators - art critic and art historian Sergei Khachaturov and culturologist Sergei Nikitin, the organizer of the Moskultprog, the most popular program of cultural walks in Moscow today.
In essence, an exhibition is like a research paper. The text of the article, by the way, is already ready - it is supposed to be published in the magazine "Project Russia"; excerpts from this text are shown at the exhibition. Unfortunately, the "exhibition-article" was printed on a mirror-like cardboard, which makes it extremely difficult to read and examine it. But the study itself is detailed, careful, it was done according to all the rules, drawing on analogies and analyzing historical circumstances.
From the materials presented, it follows that the interior in question is not so unknown, just the ways of its study turned out to be somehow very winding. In 1941, when it was completed, the architectural historian Mikhail Andreevich Ilyin wrote an article about him in "Architecture of the USSR". The article is very curious - from it it is noticeable that at that moment Ilyin knew Leonidov's work well, in particular, the author compares the shape of the columns in the pioneers' house with a similar motif of the famous Kislovodsk staircase. The kitchen factory is called an example of "box architecture", and the most successful part of the interior is the "room for embroidery" …
Thus, immediately after completion, this interior "sounded". However, after the war, someone reported that the Kalinin house of pioneers was lost - and since then many historians have considered it as such. In the 1980s. the director of the Tver Picture Gallery, Tatyana Kuyukina, discovered that Leonid's interiors were preserved - however, she did not publish the find, but did it only two years ago in a regional publication. Therefore, in the 1990s. only rare experts knew about the existence of these interiors, but were not interested in them, considering them to be an insignificant example of Leonidov's later work.
The authors of the exhibition in the Museum of Architecture are convinced of the opposite - they believe that one should study not only the "heroic" avant-garde period of the architect's work, but also his later works - more precisely, the crumbs that have survived from them.
Consider the crumbs. The research carried out forms the history of Ivan Leonidov in the second half of the 1930s. Curious, although, in my opinion, and sad. Since 1934, he has been the head of one of the brigades in the Ginzburg workshop. During this time (1934-1941), the architect has implemented four projects - three interiors and one staircase in the Kislovodsk sanatorium of the People's Commissariat for Tyazhprom im. Ordzhonikidze. Two interiors - in the houses of the pioneers - first in Moscow in Stopani Lane (Ogorodnaya Sloboda), then in Kalinin - the same hero of the current exhibition.
The designers of the Moscow House of Pioneers were headed by Karo Alabyan, the second in the list of authors (according to the publication in "Architecture of the USSR") was Leonidov - contrary to the alphabet, before Vlasov - which, the curators-researchers rightly conclude, speaks of Leonidov's significant role in the work on the Moscow House of Pioneers … In Kalinin, Leonidov became the head of the team of architects and painters (among painters - Favorsky).
Thus, the authors conclude, Leonidov did not become in the 1930s. "Persona non grata", and carried out important government orders. There is a photograph in which the authors of the Moscow House of Pioneers (including the "disgraced" Leonidov) are captured with Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, who was then the head of the Moscow government. The curators conclude that there was no "disgrace", the architect worked a lot, led a team and even performed ideologically significant work along with the "main characters" of the thirties, with the same Alabyan, for example.
The authors trace a clear connection between the Moscow and Kalinin houses of pioneers - both political and stylistic. Some of the details are simply very similar, and analogies are shown in the exhibition. These are fragments of three types: ceilings, columns and reliefs.
The Moscow House of Pioneers has an openwork luminous ceiling in the living room, made by Alabyan - in the Kalinin house there is a room with an openwork ceiling made by Leonidov. Alabyan's ceiling is more shabby, Leonidov's is harder, but on the whole it looks like the same technique. In a Moscow house there are Red Army stars on the columns, some kind of stuck cockades - they were made by Chaldymov, and Leonidov in Kalinin has stars - on the columns and on the ceiling. It is unclear whether Leonidov in Moscow suggested something, or borrowed from Tver.
The most "Leonid" in this list is the columns and snowflakes. The authors-curators erect the columns (apparently quite rightly) to the shape of one of the skyscrapers of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry - in the form of a cylinder with a "waist" - thinning in the middle. In the home of the pioneers, this form turned into slender chiseled posts, covered with black lacquer and gilded in places. They have not survived - in the 1980s they were lying in the courtyard, and then completely disappeared. There is also a column-flower with a bench at the base and round slots at the top - a very peculiar, some kind of Egyptian column, but in general - the detachment of the "capital" from the ceiling resembles the columns of the metro station "Kropotkinskaya" (a famous masterpiece of the 1930s by Alexei Dushkin and Yakov Likhteberg, built with the name "Palace of Soviets"). By the way, here in Tver in the lobby, which was designed by Igantiy Milinis, there are columns very similar to the Kropotkinskaya.
And finally, snowflakes. Of the 40 known types of snowflakes, 22 types are placed on the ceilings of the house of pioneers, and this is clearly from Leonidov, the architect was fond of crystals of various types. In the same 1930s, he painted a fountain in the form of a crystal very similar to the crystal from Haeckel's book - both are shown in the exhibition.
The detailed comparison made by the authors of the exhibition "The Second Leonids" is very fascinating. The discovery of similar motives and details in Alabyan and Leonidov, Dushkin and Milinis is literally captivating. These details add up to a certain amount of techniques characteristic of architecture (more for interiors of the 1930s and form the most interesting material for research, which in this case differs significantly (and the authors do not hide it, but emphasize)) from most of the well-known books about the avant-garde. It differs in genre - here Leonidov is investigated in the way that Rodion Kazakov or even Antipa Konstantinov can be studied - by digging out interesting details from the piles of garbage (and by the way, the former house of pioneers is in a half-ruined state), then finding analogies for them and making comparisons. This is a "classic" type of magnifying glass study conducted by conscientious historians.
Both the type of study and its results are suggestive of the following. Before us is a very sad exhibition, which visibly, based on material, demonstrates where the pathos of the great Russian avant-garde went in the 1930s. He went into decorative forms and in the hopes of influencing the growing generation through snowflakes on the ceiling. The shape, invented in 1934 in the form of a giant skyscraper for Red Square, became a chiseled column. Passion for the beauty of crystalline forms - turned into plaster rosettes on the ceiling. And the fact that Ivan Leonidov was not sent to a camp or to a settlement, but was photographed with Khrushchev - he, of course, gives reason to be happy for him simply as a person. But not as an architect. As it was written in one book, a happy person cannot create such a thing. This is a documented process of the dying of a creative personality, the transformation of one Leonidov into a “second”.
The exhibition will run until June 22
