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. "