from
The Russian Museum
Alexander Baturin was born in 1914 in Helsinki (Finland). Till 1930 he lived
in Shandrinsk, then moved to Leningrad. In 1931 he met one of Malevich's
students, Vladimir Sterligov, and this determined his way for good, both in art
and in life.
Sterligov's workshop was one of informal centres of art culture of Leningrad in
1960-1970. Sterligov influenced his students greatly because he went on after
Malevich developing plastic form. Only instead of the straight line of
suprematic universe of Malevich, in his universe form was built with S-like
curve.
Having taken much from his teacher, Baturin found his own way to express things.
According to his words, the main thing in his creative work is nature and
mastering of its plastic forms. He does not look for dramatic scenes in it,
Baturin finds harmony and equilibrium. His main and favourite genre is
landscape.
In 1995 in Paris Baturin Institute was founded. In 2002 the artist was rewarded
with order Druzhby.
The exhibition in the Marble palace shows 30 works of the artist (drawings,
pastel, paintings) from the collection of the Russian Museum."
from
http://www.russkialbum.ru/e/catalog/painting/pers2.shtml
"Alexander Baturin was born in 1914 in Helsingfors (Helsinki). He came to
Leningrad to continue his studies, in 1931 he made acquaintance of Vladimir
Vassilievich Sterligov, MalevichТs disciple, and attended his studio.
SterligovТs system Ц the conception of a special globular (Уdomical globularФ)
space, a complex system that synthesizes irrefutable logic and poetic belief in
the initial ordering and rationality of the universe. The Universe is understood
as a formula, striking in its simplicity, yet this formula is revealed only to
those dedicated.
Sterligov was repressed. His pupil, Baturin, also spent long years in labor
camps and in exile. But he managed to preserve optimism and his dedication to
art, he also remained true to the ideas of his teacher. A genuine Sterligovian,
he paints from life bearing in mind a clear-cut structure of composition.
Baturin sees Nature as the simplicity of the complex and the complexity of the
seemingly simple. He organizes his pictures with the help of powerful and quiet
color planes gently cutting through one another. It feels as if his universe had
more than three dimensions, but this does not disagree with the two-dimensional
canvass, on the contrary, it reconciles space with him while he creates an
amazing combination of almost mathematical calculation and mystical divination.
The artist is endowed with a rare ability to harmonize the alien: thus, in the
well-nigh monochrome plane of the sky he finds and accentuates a huge variety of
nuances, while reducing the complicating volume of leafage to the minimum. And
the spectator, guided by the piercing sharpness of his eye, arms his own eye
with different, artistic, optics.
Much in the art of Baturin is determined by his universality. He has worked in
industrial design, his ability to draw upon structural plastic formulas and to
shun pettiness did a lot of good for his laconism.
Alexander Baturin is a laureate of the Punin prize, an acknowledged Master, his
works are represented in the major museums of Russia, he exhibited his pictures
not only at home, but also in the U.S.A. and France, his pictures belong to
various private collections in many countries. By rights, he symbolizes both the
victory of his own creative personality and the fruitfulness of SterligovТs
method, which he has been developing."
(M. Hermann)
from
http://www.frantsgallery.com/page1.htm#baturin
"Baturin (b. 1914) is the oldest of Vladimir Sterligov's students and
disciples. An artist with a heroic destiny of his own who spent long years in
Stalin's camps, he is entirely uninterested (as is often the case with many
worthy people) in turning his former suffering into a stepping-stone to
present-day success. An amazing love of life and faithfulness t artistic
principles helped him endure terrible ordeals, and even in the gulag he was able
to observe the beauty of the surrounding nature.
Baturin first got to know Sterligov in 1931, when the latter's teacher, Kazimir
Malevich, was still living, but their next meeting, after all their
misadventures, took place a quarter of a century later. There was only one way
to grasp the teacher's principles and stay true to them as deeply as Baturin
did: to make them completely his own, to fuse them with his own individuality.
The school of Malevich and Sterligov equipped but did not enslave Baturin's
eyes. The harmonic logic of the world, indiscernible to the ordinary observer,
is an open book to him. He possesses the ability to slow down time in his
pictures to such a degree that at times it seems to have stopped altogether. The
artist sees in nature the simplicity of the complex and the complexity of what
appears to be simple. The smooth surface of water reflecting a calm sky may be
nuanced in the subtlest way, while the intricate bulk of the crown of a tree is
rendered with the crudest visual formula. The artist reveals to the spectator
the true possibilities of the human eye and mind, its particular intellectual an
aesthetic optics, attainable only by a «happy few», to use Stendhal's favorite
expression. Baturin's paintings are constructed delicately and powerfully with
colored planes defined in space, sometimes smoothly intersecting one another. In
his universe there are more than three dimensions, but this does not fight with
the canvas; on the contrary, the space makes peace with it. Concentrated
volumes, vacillating, semitransparent planes, calm colors – warm ashes, darkened
gold's, umber rusts, specific, extended splotches like color «swimming» to the
canvas – all of these produce the impression of an unprecedented combination of
logical calculation and secret, sorcerous wizardry. "
