Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
You hear the news, and you see the headlines, and they all say the same thing. One of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art. The man who became the most expensive living Russian artist. And it’s all true, of course. But it doesn’t get you any closer to the man, or to the strange, brilliant power of his work.
Because how do you even begin to explain what Bulatov was doing?
I remember the first time I saw one of his paintings in the flesh. It wasn’t in a book. It was on a gallery wall. And it was a shock. It was a perfectly painted, almost photo-realistic landscape. A beautiful, luminous sky, with clouds. The kind of thing you’d see in a 19th-century painting. But then, slapped right across the middle of it, in huge, red, Soviet-style block letters, were the words (Glory to the CPSU).
And the effect is… jarring. It’s like two different worlds colliding. The timeless, boundless, natural world of the sky, and the brutal, oppressive, man-made world of the slogan. The slogan is right there in the foreground, trying to dominate the picture, trying to block your view. But it can’t. The sky is still there, behind it, through it. You can see both at the same time.
And that, really, is the key to all of it.
Bulatov wasn’t just a political artist. It’s too simple to say he was just taking the piss out of the Soviet Union. He was doing something much deeper, much more philosophical. He was painting about the act of seeing itself. About how we see the world. And in the Soviet Union, you couldn’t see the world without seeing it through the grid of ideology. The slogans, the propaganda, the official language – it was everywhere. It was a kind of visual noise that you couldn’t escape.
His paintings are a perfect representation of that experience. The landscape is what is real. The sky is what is real. But you are forced to see it through this ideological filter. The words are like a fence, a barrier, that has been put up between you and reality. But – and this is the brilliant part – his paintings show you that you can see through the fence. You can acknowledge that it’s there, but you can also see the freedom on the other side. “Space is freedom,” he said. His paintings are a constant search for that space.
At first, you look at his work and you think of Pop Art. Of Warhol. The use of everyday language, of logos and slogans. But it’s not Pop Art. Warhol was celebrating the surface, the beautiful, dumb emptiness of the commercial world. Bulatov was doing the opposite. He was using the language of the surface – the Soviet slogan – to talk about what was underneath. He was digging down.
The thing is, for years, he wasn’t a painter at all, not officially. In the eyes of the Soviet state, he was an illustrator of children’s books. Can you imagine the disconnect? The sheer cognitive dissonance of it? By day, you’re drawing pictures for a story like Puss in Boots. By night, you’re in your studio, creating these huge, complex, philosophically dense, and deeply subversive paintings that you know will never be officially shown. He lived this double life for decades. “Half a year for books, half a year for painting,” was his motto. It’s an incredible act of artistic persistence.
He was part of that whole unofficial art scene in Moscow in the 60s and 70s, with people like Ilya Kabakov. They were the ones who were trying to find a new language, a way to talk about the sheer absurdity of the world they were living in. They couldn’t do it with the old tools of socialist realism. So they had to invent their own.
And what a language Bulatov invented. That constant collision of the picture plane and the text. The way a word like (Entrance) is painted as if it’s a physical barrier in front of a landscape, while the words (No Entrance) are painted on the horizon, as if they are part of the landscape itself. It’s a game with perception, a puzzle. He’s showing you how language constructs, and obstructs, our reality.
Then, of course, the Soviet Union fell. And he moved to New York, then Paris. But he never stopped being a Russian artist. He just turned his attention to new barriers, new slogans. He did a painting of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, with a crowd of tourists in front of it, their backs to us. The picture is called Louvre. Gioconda. And again, it’s about the barrier. You can’t see the famous painting properly because of the wall of people. The crowd has become the new slogan. The experience of the art has been blocked by the industry of tourism.
He was always painting the same thing, in a way. The thing that gets in the way. The thing that stands between us and a moment of pure, unmediated experience. Whether that thing is a Soviet slogan, or a crowd of tourists, or the words (Do Not Lean) on a train door.
He was a master. A quiet, persistent, philosophical master. And his work is more than just a record of a specific time and place. It’s a timeless lesson in how to see. How to look past the noise, through the fence, and find the sky on the other side.
