Art teaches art

THE ART OF TEACHING ART

The painter Petr Maltsev is a man out of the ordinary. He will remain in the history of Chuhuiv if only because he essentially created the unique Repin Art School and led it for three decades. We spoke for a long time on a rainy autumn evening, and for me it was a school in which I tried to absorb the wisdom of this simple, open-hearted man. He has lived his life and understood what happiness is.

WHERE ARE ARTISTS BORN?

• The place where the village I was born in stood is now a firing range, - recalls Maltsev. They are still shooting cannons and bursting shells there to this day. I remember how we were evicted from the village in 1931. Soldiers arrived with carts and hooks, loaded our belongings onto wagons, and knocked down the cottages - live wherever you like. I remember we had a mare with a foal. She was taken into the collective farm, and the animal died six months later because they put the wrong collar on her - no one cares about what isn't theirs. We were put up in Bashkirovka at some man's place. That is where I started drawing. I would beg a pencil stub from a soldier - and there was entertainment for a whole day. I was seven years old at the time.

ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MORTAR IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS

Children ask me in class how one becomes an artist. Well, I place a mortar in the middle of the classroom and tell them how millet used to be pounded in it. That is history. I could tell it even to Martians and their eyes would go wide. I lived through that mortar, because I pounded millet in it alongside my grandfather. Those were the thirties, when people were dying like flies. People were carted off to ravines and not even buried in pits. I saw all of this. That, perhaps, is where an artist is born: when he has lived through everything himself, he has something to think about. I remember as though it were today - my father, with swollen legs, was building the Kharkiv Tractor Plant. For one shift worked you were given half a loaf of bread, and for two shifts - a full loaf. And there were ten of us. Four children, and two orphans we had taken in as well. We had a kinsman named Maksym - a fine-looking Cossack. Father said to him: "Pack up, Maksym, come build the tractor plant, they give bread there - we'll survive." And he replied: "I'll die, but I won't go." He died within a week. And his two sons came to us. So much kinfolk around, yet they came to Uncle Kolya. My grandmother "howled like a she-wolf" so that father would not drive them away. And so we survived together.

WHAT IS WAR?

Once I was speaking with a certain pilot. "You know," I said to him, "at the front I was so hungry, especially when we were on the defensive." And he looks at me: "But I lived better at the front than I do now: chocolate, ham, tinned food..." His plane was shot down, he was badly wounded, I respect him, but we see the world differently. Millions of us ordinary soldiers sat starving in trenches. And only when we had driven the Germans back did we begin to eat our fill of captured tinned food. That is what war is. And in Berlin I nearly perished. We were encircled. SS men were already running toward our trenches. Thank God, the pilots came to our aid.... What is the main lesson of the war? One must remember the war. It comes back of its own accord, but one must look ahead, so as to do something good...

I HAVE BEEN ABROAD AS WELL

All my life I dreamed of seeing the great masters of painting. So I go to the district party committee and say: "Give me a posting to France - to see the Louvre." At the district committee they "held their sides laughing": who do you think you are? That is how it all ended cheerfully, and it still makes me laugh today. But I did go abroad - when I was storming Berlin. Afterward I served in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and visited museums. My regimental commander even gave me a room of my own: draw, Maltsev. After demobilisation I tried to enter the Kharkiv Art and Industry Institute. Everyone fell over themselves praising my work, but when the lists of accepted students were posted - my name was not there. And I don't regret it - I enrolled in Lviv, where I studied the craft under the well-known graphic artist Kasian. In short, fame never came easily to me. I was praised a great deal, after every exhibition, but when the time came to purchase my work for a museum - either there was no money, or something else would come up. For a creative person, that is a deep wound. But what stopped me from losing heart, even when I was angry? When I remembered that Arkady Raikin (the celebrated Soviet actor and comedian) was only awarded the title of Hero on his third attempt, and that Maya Plisetskaya (the legendary Soviet ballerina) was given an insulting pension of seventy roubles which she returned, I would ask myself: "Are you any better?" And I rejoiced that I was alive in this world, since my comrades had perished in the war, and I no longer wanted honours or recognition. Besides, I have a school that is known far beyond the borders of Ukraine.

ON AUTHORITY

I tried not to conflict with the authorities. For instance, they summon me to the district party committee: we need you to paint portraits of Heroes of Socialist Labour, they say. What was one to do? And we had no money. I seized the moment to obtain paints, stretcher frames, and canvas for the school. I painted some thirty portraits at one point. Later the head of the propaganda department summons me and poses the question of what useful work I had done for the district, since he saw no evidence of my civic activities. "What about the thirty portraits?" I replied. "Is that all?" the official jabbed his finger at my work. At that point I lost my temper. For this was either a fool or a provocateur, for whom art does not exist. I never wore my decorations. But then I pulled my ribbon bar from my pocket and said: "Look - this is For Valour, For Combat Merit, this one is for Berlin. If you treat people like this, I won't care that you're a superior." The district first secretary called me in over this matter, but that was where it ended. Those portraits gave me no peace later on either. At some point they began to be defaced on the Honour Board. Representatives of the regional security services even came about it and came to me: "Is it you who are damaging your own works?" I felt very hurt. They thought I was slashing them myself in order to get paid for restoration work. When I told them I painted for nothing, their eyes nearly fell out of their heads. It later emerged that it was one envious person who was defacing my work.

ON THE LOVE OF ART, THE ART SCHOOL, AND THE TEACHER'S HEART

I became director of the Repin School while still a student at the Ukrainian Printing Institute named after Ivan Fedorov in Lviv. Each year the intake amounted to some ten or so pupils, whereas to maintain a school one needed to be teaching at least seventy children. My predecessors said to me: "Nothing will come of it - do you think you're smarter than us?"

To begin with, I copied down from the school registers the addresses of those who were doing well in their studies, then went around every courtyard and, in the presence of parents, explained what art is, how fortunate a person will be and how much he will come to know by joining the art school. In the first years, out of a hundred households we visited, seventy-five pupils remained to study.

And in the last decade we need not even announce when enrolment is - the children ask to come to the school themselves. Anyone can learn art. For what is talent? It is colossal capacity for work. If a child draws both at school and at home and cannot live without it, that is talent. Thirty years ago I put forward the principle that all children are talented - one need only find the right approach to them. At first people joked about it: Maltsev has geniuses and talents everywhere. Then they became convinced that it was so. After all, it is not for nothing that in Japan mathematics and visual art are taught on equal terms. And you can see what heights the Japanese have reached.

One can give youth, love, and life to art - I tell my pupils. When you understand this, you will live a full life. Everything else is mere stage scenery. If someone wishes to know art, God opens doors for such a person. And we, the teachers, help them to look beyond those doors. What is the meaning of a teacher's work? It is clear that a person must labour from the soul. A teacher must be sincere with his pupils. At first there were moments when I lost my composure. A pupil cannot grasp the laws of perspective, for instance, and I am already growing nervous. A minute passes, I flush. But the children are watching me. Then I would collect myself: forgive me, I was in the wrong. They were surprised. But by chastening myself in the eyes of the children, I became more careful. I also guided the teachers toward treating the children with feeling. Each year we graduate twenty-five to thirty pupils who are qualified to teach visual art. Only the chosen few become great artists, but all of them will carry in their souls to the end of their days the memory of what is beautiful...

V. Logvinenko