Victor Pivovarov

Moscow album

He graduated from the M. I. Kalinin Moscow College of Art and Industry in 1957, and from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute in 1962. In 1963 Viktor Pivovarov met his future wife Irina Pivovarova, the author of verses and stories for children that he went on to illustrate. Together they devised and published such children’s books as ‘I Treated Everyone’, ‘A Little Spider and the Moonlight’, ‘Quiet and Loud’, ‘Tic and Tac’, ‘Two Very Brave Rabbits’, etc. The artist also illustrated Irina Pivovarova’s ‘adult’ lyric poetry such as ‘Words’, ‘The Apple’ and ‘Conversations and Miniatures’.

At the Detskaya Literatura [Children’s Literature] publishing house Pivovarov met representatives of the Lianozovo group Igor Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir, and through them, Ovsey Driz and Ilya Kabakov.

Irina and Viktor Pivovarov’s son Pavel was born in 1966. In 1967 Viktor Pivovarov obtained his own studio through David Kogan, an acquaintance of Ilya Kabakov. During this period the artist first turned to painting and produced a series of monotypes, ‘The Temptation of St. Anthony’, which he sees as the beginning of his creative activity. Among the artist’s first pictures are works such as ‘The Mad Militiaman’s Blue Spectacles’, ‘Ah and Oh!’, ‘Nails and a Hammer’, ‘Moscow Party’, ‘Mad Greta’, etc.

The five years from 1972 to 1976 were important for Moscow Conceptualism as a whole. Erik Bulatov created ‘Horizon’, Ilya Kabakov was working on his first cycle, ‘Ten Characters’, while Viktor Pivovarov painted his pictures ‘The Long Long Arm’ and ‘Projects for a Lonely Man’, as well as the albums ‘Face’, ‘The Garden’, and others.

In 1974 Irina and Viktor Pivovarov divorced, and in 1978 he met his second wife, the Czech art critic Milena Slavická, who had come to Moscow from Prague.

Viktor Pivovarov first exhibited his work in 1979. Many artists took part in the collective exhibition ‘Colour, Form, Space’. Pivovarov presented his cycle ‘Seven Conversations’. This was the artist’s only participation in a public art show before his relocation to Prague. In 1982 Viktor Pivovarov emigrated to Czechoslovakia and settled in Prague.

Six months before Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, a large retrospective exhibition of Viktor Pivovarov’s work opened in Vysočany in May 1989. In 1991 the Union of Artists announced an open competition for artistic direction of one of the Union’s Prague exhibition halls. Viktor Pivovarov and Milena Slavická won this competition, together with Adriena Šimotová and Václav Stratil. The gallery was called Pi-Pi-Art (Prague Project for Art). However, the premises were soon confiscated and Pivovarov’s work for the gallery came to an end.

Pivovarov was also involved in production of the contemporary art magazine Výtvarné Umění, of which Milena Slavická was the editor and later, in 1990, also the publisher.
From 1990 to 1997 Pivovarov unofficially acted as the magazine’s chief artist.

Viktor Pivovarov’s book ‘Agent in Love’ was published in 2001. The publication did not go unnoticed, and in 2004 the exhibition ‘A Mechanic’s Footsteps’ opened at the Tretyakov Gallery. At the same time the ‘Dark Rooms’ exhibition was held at Gallery XL.

In 2002 Viktor Pivovarov’s second book ‘Grey Notebooks’ appeared. The annotation states that ‘if the genre of ‘Agent in Love’ was close to autobiography, the genre of ‘Grey Notebooks’ is much harder to define. Here we have prose fiction, poems and documents’.

The book ‘On the Love of Word and Image’, issued in 2004, features the artist’s texts from various years that had only featured in hard-to-find publications or were previously unpublished.

In 2006 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art staged the exhibition ‘Lemon Eaters’, for which a series of nine large pictures was created, ‘Atlas of Animals and Plants’.

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art also showcased the exhibition ‘THEM’, in 2011. That same year the project ‘Philosophical Notebooks of Olga Serebryanaya’ appeared. Work on the project was conducted by correspondence between Viktor Pivovarov and Olga Serebryanaya. In 2014 this correspondence was issued by the publishing house NLO under the title ‘Duck Standing on One Leg on the Bank of Philosophy’.

The State Museum of Oriental Art held the exhibition ‘Foxes and Holidays’ in 2015.
In 2016 there were two exhibitions of Viktor Pivovarov’s work in Moscow: ‘The Snail’s Trail’ at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and ‘Lost Keys’ at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The same year the publishing house Artguide reissued the book ‘Agent in Love’ with some new chapters.

Work as an illustrator
Apart from his activities in the sphere of nonconformist art, Viktor Pivovarov created illustrations for children’s books as a means of survival that incidentally gained popularity among underground artists of that period. He made his debut in 1964, at the Detskaya Literatura publishing house, and has since illustrated more than 50 books. Since 1969 he has illustrated the children’s magazine Vesyolye Kartinki [Funny Pictures], and in 1979 he designed the magazine’s famous logo composed of letter-men, which remains almost unchanged to this day.

His work on the book ‘An Unusual Pedestrian’, published in 1965, proved a landmark. Pivovarov’s illustrations for this book prompted a wide-reaching reaction, with many accusations that he concealed

ambiguous secret symbols behind simple illustrations. Later Pivovarov himself admitted that he liked to illustrate children’s books because they allow freedom to interpret the text. Thanks to this commission he gained recognition as an illustrator, he was noticed. ‘... Artists and children love what never actually happens — dragons, wizards, wooden boys, gnomes and talking animals, everything born of fantasy and dreaming, everything that seems quite unnecessary for man, but without which he apparently cannot live,’ wrote Pivovarov.

After moving to Prague in 1982 Pivovarov has not abandoned illustration, and he occasionally still illustrates books for children and adults, while encouraging re-publication of his old books.