Igor Tulipanov

Exhibitions

Family History

Igor's father, Vissarion Sergeyevich Tulipanov was killed in 1941 during World War II. Tulipanov's grandfather was a General in the White Army. Vissarion Tulipanov served in the same regiment with the famous Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev. The Tulipanov family lived in Tsarskoe Selo, a former residence of the Russian imperial family. The poet Anna Akhmatova resided in the same house with the Tulipanovs. Akhmatova was a close friend of Valeria Sreznevskaya, a great aunt of Igor Tulipanov. These circumstances resulted in the meeting of Akhmatova and Gumilev in Tulipanovs' house. Igor's grandfather was killed in September 1914 shortly after the beginning of World War I.

Early life

Igor Tulipanov started to paint in his early childhood. He was a student at M. Gorohova's paint shop. He studied at Admiral Makarov State Maritime Academy, St. Petersburg for a year. Later he was enrolled at St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute for four years. After that, Igor studied at Repin State Academic Institute of Painting Sculpture and Architecture, St. Petersburg. He had not graduated from these institutions.

In 1959, Igor Tulipanov became a student of Nikolai Akimov, artist, critic, stage director and teacher. It was under his guidance that Igor Tulipanov received his art education. In 1964, Tulipanov had graduated from Ostrovsky St.Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy. After the graduation, Tulipanov started a career of a production designer. He used to work at the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg until 1968. Igor's early exhibitions usually provoked scandals, early terminations, and scathing publications in the Soviet mass media. Nikolai Akimov had to protect his student in these cases.

Personality

Igor Tulipanov is a cultured individual who enjoys literature, music, art, and cinema from many diverse cultures both past and present. He illustrates Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as Gogol's Dead Souls. Igor enjoys intellectual simulation and usually has some philosophical theory or idea to discuss. His creativity and his intellect are vivacious. He is characterized by the depth of his artistic genius, his easy demeanor, his good humor and his cultured refinement

Techniques

Igor Tulipanov is a master with both oil and acrylic. Tulipanov is also a master with black and colored ink point drawings and watercolor. Igor is a virtuoso with colored pencils which is perhaps his favorite medium. Igor Tulipanov chooses to use colored pencils for many of his monumental works such as the twenty large panels of The Magnificent 47 Series, his Double Self-Portrait that he did for the United Nations contest and his mammoth Apocalypse of Perestroika painting. Tulipanov has an acute intuitive sense that assists him in forming his compositions. He usually works directly onto canvas or paper without preparatory sketches. He is able to conceive of the whole composition from the outset and then go about depicting it entirely. Tulipanov has the rare gift of perceiving the imperfections when listening to music or looking at visual stimuli. This ability to perceive mistakes enables Tulipvanov to create his compositions without making many errors while doing so. His innate sense of order and harmony also enables him to take disparate forms and objects and to find the key to combine them with a perfect balance in his paintings.

Paintings

In the hands of the Surrealists—René Magritte, for example—illusionistic painting became a vehicle for metaphysical speculation. If the images produced by the painter on canvas are only an illusion—no more than skin deep—are the retinal images that we rely on in everyday life any more trustworthy? Does what we see, or think we see, have any more claim to reality than the images that appear on the artist's canvas? Tulipanov continues this tradition but with an aestheticizing twist of his own. His use of a self-consciously "beautiful" technique of painting and his many references to past art elevate painting itself to the status of an enduring value. Even though its images belong to a world of illusion, art has a beauty and dignity that mundane reality lacks.

Igor Tulipanov's paintings are always pleasant to look at; there are never any horrible images, nor are there images of horror. The viewer is able to enjoy each painting for the color, the cleverness of composition, the beauty of the draftsmanship and patterning and for the originality and perplexities of the subject matter and imagery. Tulipanov's imagery contains surprising juxtapositions, humor, familiarity, mysteriousness and a wide variety of objects and characters drawn from the artist's vast knowledge of art history, architecture and the world around him. The artist draws imagery and personages from various cultures such as Western civilization, Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Russian and Greco-Roman. However, Tulipanov always incorporates these images into his own personal vision and never merely copies them. The Japanese Triangles series, for example, that the artist worked on for about two decades in the 1980s and 90's consists of delicately drawn and colored images derived from 17th century images of the Floating World.

Fine Art Business

According to the Jewish Advocate newspaper, Igor Tulipanov's paintings were sold for as much as $120,000 in the 1980s by Edward Nahkamkin, a fine art connoisseur and dealer at that time.

Wife Elena Tulipanov

Igor Tulipanov is blessed with Elena, his beautiful wife and companion, who is cultured and talented. Elena often helps with the production of some of the painstaking detailing in the patterns and designs in the acrylic paintings. The "E" next to Igor Tulipanov's trademark signature of an "IT" monogram signifies that Elena assisted with the making of the painting. Igor also dates his pieces.

Color Palettes

The originality and the tremendous variety of color palettes that Tulipanov created are wonderful and enhance the beauty of his work. The color harmonies and resonances are original and usually non-traditional. Intense turquoises and blues provide a field in which tangerines and yellows glow in one painting and in another painting reds and greens interact and bespeak themselves with each other to create a harmonious palette. In other palettes, areas of black, grey and white daringly coexist amidst a kaleidoscope of colors. Sometimes a vivid flat red field forms a backdrop for traditional Dutch-like still lives or interior scenes with their traditional palettes of warm browns and jewel-like colors. Tulipanov's palettes are sometimes soft and sometimes vivid, and wonderfully variegated from painting to painting and always creatively echoing the subject matter.

Absolutism

Absolutism - the ultimate, all embracing, unconditioned reality, postulated by certain idealist metaphysicians, and understood to have something like the explanatory power of God. Seemingly organic and conscious, though impersonal, it was also conceived as a diversity-in-unity. It generates, contains, and transmutes into a higher synthesis the fragmentariness, diversity and contradictions of finite existence. This definition which is taken from the glossary of a book of philosophy is written verbatim in Igor Tulipanov's Mozart and Mona Lisa panel from his Magnificent 47 Series. Absolutism tells us that an object does not have to palpably exist in physical reality in order to actually exist. F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854) states in his System of Transcendental Idealism that "The eternal, timeless act of self-consciousness which we call 'self' is that which gives all things existence." Perhaps the purpose of the definition of Absolutism in the Mozart and Mona Lisa panel is for the viewer to be provided with stimulus thought; perhaps the viewer should simply derive enjoyment from his speculations on the meaning of Absolutism, in the way that the rest of the painting should be visually tasted and enjoyed-for the colors, the shapes, the lines, the patterns, and the images, without the need to extract hidden symbolic meanings and philosophies from it. It is fair to deduce however, that Tulipanov does not rely on empirical fact alone to believe in the reality of an object or image.

Elements

Tulipanov's colored ink representations of courtesans and kabuki actors all have a triangle as their major compositional element which is noteworthy because this triangular element was not present at all in the original Japanese scenes that were used as the source. The enormous varieties of objects that are displayed in Tulipanov's work such as minerals, flowers, birds, cats, glass paperweights, plants, landscapes, clothing, and other paraphernalia are drawn from the artist's rich experience with his surroundings and with the decorative arts. The worlds that Tulipanov creates in his paintings are richly illustrated with objects and subject matter that the viewer can experience and enjoy. Igor Tulipanov's sense of composition echoes his other artistic sensibilities in its originality and its simplistic complexity. His arrangements of forms and shapes are always harmonious and balanced although he often sets up complex puzzles for himself to solve in order to achieve the classically peaceful end result.

The Red Room

In The Red Room, 1968, Igor Tulipanov makes us aware of his artifice even as he creates a near-perfect illusion of folded pieces of paper, or objects, hanging on the wall. The painting as a whole is constructed in such a way as to remind us that it is no more than a thin layer of pigment on a two-dimensional support. In the corners of the painting, for example, we find painted stretcher bars, which suggest that we are "really" looking at the back of the canvas. This reversal of front and back immediately makes the viewer aware of the material nature of the canvas support; the painting is not a window onto space, but a flat surface covered by a layer of paint. There are other reminders, too, of the thinness of the painted surface: for example, the way the leather of the chair in the foreground appears to be peeled back, revealing red floral upholstery underneath—just so, we imagine, the painted surface of Tulipanov's painting might be peeled away in order to reveal something else underneath.

The Red Room is full of curious details: the flowers that appear to be sprouting from the floor, the tiny grotesque head with a protruding pin-filled tongue, the stretcher frame through which we see both the corner of the room and a surprising out-of-scale head. It is impossible to decide which objects are "real" and which are products of Tulipanov's imagination. (One notably "surreal" touch is the severed arm with a metal "bone" projecting from it—presumably this is a prosthesis.) Many of the objects Tulipanov depicts are deliberately confusing. The convoluted gray mass on the seat of the chair is organic in shape but metallic in texture; its folds seem almost ready to coalesce into something recognizable (an animal's face perhaps), but never do so. There is even something unsettling in the combination of textures it presents—a pitted metal object resting on a delicate lace-edged cloth.

In the canonization of art, Tulipanov parts company with the Surrealists, who tended to deny a privileged status to the artwork. He is in tune, however, with the work of the semidesiatniki, a group of younger, officially accepted Soviet artists who came to the fore in the 1970s. The space that Tulipanov represents in The Red Room is not, strictly speaking, his studio (according to the artist, it is the interior of his apartment). Still, The Red Room is clearly an artist's space and as such can be associated with the studio theme prevalent among the semidesiatniki. Tulipanov's red room, we might note, is located like saints' chambers in fifteenth-century paintings, high above ground level, away from worldly distractions; through its windows we see a landscape that seems to belong in an early Netherlandish painting.

Most of the objects depicted belong to the past rather than the present (the ink well, the antique furniture, the old toys on the shelves); they evoke a vanished world in which art was more highly esteemed and utilitarian values had not yet emerged triumphant. In this respect, Tulipanov's painting is a vote of no confidence in a present-day world from which the aesthetic, the metaphysical, the playful, and the excessive are excluded. Only a few of the items presented in his paintings could be called necessities of life; but, as the Bible tells us, man does not live by bread alone. This fact is highlighted when we actually see in The Red Room a partly eaten piece of coarse brown bread resting on top of a shiny gold box in the foreground. It is the only utilitarian object depicted.

The Mystery

In Tulipanov's The Mystery, 1975–76, the painter's meticulous illusionistic effects take on an even more complex form. The expected separation of indoors and outdoors completely dissolves, so that it is difficult to say if the three figures in the painting are inside or outside. The painting seems to demand a symbolic reading: the interior and exterior spaces might, for example, be associated with the conscious and unconscious, and Tulipanov supports the idea of unconscious content in this painting. However, the artist has so thoroughly intermingled the interior and exterior spaces that we can no longer be certain the distinction holds.

There are religious images in the painting (a crucifix, a weeping angel), and Tulipanov tells us that the painting has a religious theme, the weighing in the balance of good and evil. However, its most obvious message lies in a different area. A high proportion of the images allude to the senses. Sight is represented by the pair of glasses and the monocle; taste by the cup of coffee; smell by the flowers and the smoking pipe; and touch by the various textured surfaces. Only sound seems to be missing, until we imagine the voice of poet Konstantin Kuzminsky (the figure nearest the center). The overall effect is to produce a keen state of sensory awareness in the viewer (there is even erotic suggestiveness in some of the plant forms). This heightened sensory awareness might be seen as an antidote to the drabness and anaesthetic quality of Soviet daily life. Tulipanov is no doubt aware of the symbolic language of the traditional still life, in which images of food, flowers, and so forth were meant to remind the viewer of the transience of worldly things. Indeed, transience is suggested in this painting by the worm-eaten apple at the far right (in fact, the painting's entire surface seems to be eaten away by a mysterious process of decay). In the end, however, the moralizing message is far less powerful than Tulipanov's vivid and precise evocation of physical sensation.