He was 90 years old
Avant-garde artist Boris Zhutovsky died on March 8. His friend, political scientist Arkady Dubnov wrote about this on Facebook*.
The circumstances and cause of the death of the artist are not reported. Playwright Alexander Gelman, in the comments under Dubnov’s post, noted that Zhutovsky visited him a week ago: “He had a lively, even cheerful mood.”
Boris Zhutovsky began exhibiting in 1959. In December 1963, the Moscow Manezh hosted the exhibition “30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists”, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR. At the opening, Nikita Khrushchev criticized the work and demanded that the avant-garde artists be sent to logging.
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Who has the artist portrayed? Freak! How is it that a person graduated from a Soviet high school, an institute, people’s money was spent on him, he eats people’s bread. And how does he repay the people, the workers and peasants for the money they spent on his education, with such a self-portrait, with this abomination and horror? It’s disgusting to look at such a dirty daub…,” the leader of the USSR told Zhutovsky at the time.
After that, Zhutovsky was not allowed to participate in exhibitions on the territory of the USSR, since 1979 his paintings began to be shown in Moscow. In 2011, Zhutovsky told Rossiyskaya Gazeta that after Khrushchev’s resignation, he apologized to him for the scandal at the Manege.
One of Zhutovsky’s most famous works is the portrait series of outstanding representatives of the USSR and Russia of the 20th century, The Last People of the Empire. It consists of more than 300 paintings, including portraits of Nikita Khrushchev, poet Bulat Okudzhava, writer Andrei Bitov and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov.
* The social network is owned by Meta, an extremist organization banned in Russia
