The works of Russian artist Nikolay Kuk provide a mythical contrast to the neat-looking New England Congregational churches, Colonial homes and pastoral landscapes one finds in abundance throughout the Monadnock region, where he has been living this summer.
His creations substitute objective reality with feeling and imagination — or as he says, “the symbols of everything possible.”
Kuk, 88, who came to the United States following the war in Crimea in 2014, is living on Depot Road in Hancock with Paul Mellion, Glenn Stover and other guests at the Birch Circle Getaway and Retreat. Mellion bought the house and 70 acres of woodland on Depot Road in 1979, the same year he befriended Stover. The pair have committed their lives to bringing people of culturally diverse backgrounds together through various outdoor adventures and artist residencies.
“Kuk’s daughter reached out and we were looking for artists,” Stover said, adding that on top of being an amazing artist Kuk, who has been in Hancock for more than a month, is a good cook. “He prepared me the best borscht I’ve ever eaten!”
This summer, Birch Circle is also hosting artists from Mexico City and France, as well as a traveling doctor from the Philippines. Kuk, who lives in a room in the main house on the property, describes himself as a “nonconformist” Moscow artist who disagrees with “Russia’s aggressive criminal system.”
“The main reason for me coming to the United States was the Crimea occupation in 2014 by Russia,” he said, speaking through his daughter Elsa, who translated for her father. “A nonconformist is a person who does not respect the official approach to art as a career.”
Elsa, who lives in New Jersey, where she ran a telecommunications company until the European Union and its allies’ ban on SWIFT banking transactions left her without the ability to be paid last winter, left Russia when she was 22. She explained her father’s use of the term “nonconformist” as a response to state-controlled censorship for artists that he experienced in the 1960s.
“What I understand from my position was that Russian art was a socialist art. It was a political type of art, only depicting things as they are with no modification,” she said. “Draw what you see. That was the Russian approach to art and what was taught in the art schools. [My father] was against that.”
The statues and posters produced by artists and officials at the time, Elsa pointed out, were very different from what her father began doing in the late 1950s.
“He was underground and many of the exhibitions were started underground,” she said. “One time his art was confiscated and destroyed in the 1960s.”
The style of art that Kuk has embraced and fought for throughout his career as an artist is Suprematism, founded by Kazimir Malevich in the early 20th century and one of the earliest and most radical developments in abstract art according to Kuk.
The term Suprematism is derived from Malevich’s belief that Suprematist art would be superior to all the art of the past, and that it would lead to the “supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.” In his book, “Suprematism” Malevich states the core concept of Suprematism: “Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.”
From 1942 to 1953, Kuk attended Moscow Secondary School and later served in the Air Defense of the Nordic Navy for the former Soviet Union. He then studied at the Moscow Construction Institute to be a construction engineer and then at the Moscow Industrial Technical Centre, where he specialized in ceramics, paint production and waxes. His creative career started in 1959 when his goal, he said, was to create 20 to 30 contour pencil drawings “in order to train [my] hand.”
The 1960s was a monumental period of Kuk’s art, particularly his oil compositions. His “Steps” and other large canvases were produced during this period, and “Steps” is located today at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
In the mid-1960s Kuk served as director of mobile exhibitions for the USSR. The art pieces displayed were official realistic art, part of the socialist realism movement, which was the official style in in the USSR between 1932 and 1988.
But the artwork Kuk was producing at this time was considered noncomformist and illegal. It was during this period that artists such as Kuk were exhibiting in “home exhibitions” only and multiple pieces of his art, purchased by author and collector of Russian avant garde art Yosef Kiblitsky were confiscated.
In 1965, Kuk met the woman he refers to as his “inspirational partner,” Lidia Kirillova, who became his wife. Kirillova, an artist herself, and Kuk then embarked on a career illustrating magazines and as members of the Moscow Committee of Graphic Artists, a nonconformist group of artists also known as the “Moscow 21” group that staged protests and were reported on in the New York Times in 1974 for holding an illegal exhibition.
Throughout his career, Kuk has embraced Suprematism’s focus on symbolism and dream-like exploration of the imagination. The black circles seen throughout much of his work are the symbols of black holes in the cosmos, he said. Suprematism, while employing its focus on symbols, is distinct from constructivism and materialism, other early 20th-century art movements centered around adapting art to the principles of functional organization as seen in Soviet propaganda throughout much of the 20th century.
In his artist statement, Kuk describes ideas flying in the air, transforming into symbols and incarnating into artistic images, “while passing from the invisible, and into the visible world.”
In the 1980s, Kuk held multiple exhibitions in museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, as well as an exhibit sponsored by UNESCO in the United States from 1984 to 1985. By 1989, nonconformist art was made legal in Russia.
Asked what he thinks of his stay in New Hampshire so far, Kuk said he is very interested in the historical background of the state, particularly when Englishmen came here to settle.
“I feel this spirit in the people of New Hampshire,” he said, adding that he is particularly interested and curious about the old churches he has seen. “I feel them as more spiritual and traditional than other churches I have seen.”
Elsa, who studied theater, said that art was her parents’ religion.
“My mom was not religious at all but art was religion to her,” she said. “I grew up knowing I would study art.”
She hopes her father’s work will be appreciated in New Hampshire and said she’s very happy he’s staying in Hancock at the moment. And Stover says he very glad Kuk is in New Hampshire as well.
“The sanctions imposed on Russia have caused great financial stress on [Elsa’s] family, and ironically the U.S. government is financing Kuk’s rent and food through a federal program that grew out of President Johnson’s War on Poverty,” he says, adding that Kuk is also being provided a meal once a day through Meals on Wheels. “So the wheel turns.”
Kuks artwork is being stored in New Jersey at Elsa’s son’s home and in Hancock.
“I feel an endless depth— a most desirable space behind a good painting, while standing in front of it, therefore I do not feel confined in my small art studio,” Kuk stated. “It is the creations that give space and power back to me. When I look at a painting, I either have a good or a bad emotion. Somewhat like a dog, looking at a painting of a cat, unexpectedly started barking until the picture was turned off. On the other side, I record my sight, and tactile feelings and ideas, back into my paintings.”