THE TSUKANOV ART COLLECTION

Vladimir Grigorevich Veisberg was a Russian artist and art theorist, one of the distinctive masters of ‘alternative’ Russian painting of the second half of the 20th century, confirming his right to the avant-garde experiment. Since he was not in the strictest sense an ‘unofficial’ master, he became affiliated with the liberal wing of the Union of artists, the so-called Moscow Organisation of the Union of Artists. As a member of the group ‘Eight’, Vladimir Veisberg successfully worked as a portrait painter, although his paintings are considerably more famous. He worked at the edge of symbolism and surrealism and continued the line of ‘metaphysical still-life’ in the direction of an ever increasing dematerialisation and dissolution of objects into elements of light. By limiting his motifs through the selection of simple geometrical figures (cones, cubes, spheres and pyramids), Veisberg reduced the contrasts in colour to a minimum, replacing them with subtle, almost phosphorescent tonal ‘looming’. For this reason, his still-life arrangements, for example, cylindrical columns, which he often depicted in later pieces, are perceived as a sort of revelation, transferring the inner vision as a type of meditation. Defining his latter style as ‘white on white’, Veisberg also justified it in theoretical terms by creating his own system of colouristic perception and embodiment, a sort of ‘metaphysical-colour’ understanding of the world (article entitled ‘Classification of the main types of artistic perception’ in the collection entitled ‘Symposium on the structural studying of sign systems’, M. 1962