The Life, Writings and Art of Vasiliy Chekrygin

Vasiliy Chekrygin (1897–1922), friend of the futurist poets Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, became skeptical of futurism and all the other ‘isms’ dominating European and Russian art at the time of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. In his fragmentary and truncated career he tried to preach and practice a ‘synthetic’ art capable of objective expression of reality and, through the journal Makovets, appealed for a return to Goethe’s harmonious attitude to the arts and sciences. Art works shown here include sketches for a huge unrealized mural on ‘The Resurrection’ which, following the thinking of nineteenth-century philosopher Fedorov, Chekrygin conceived of in terms of the Colonization of the Cosmos by an enlightened and transformed humanity. In this article, E. A. Nekrasova gives a brief account of Chekrygin’s life and work by way of introduction to some of the artist’s own written statements.