Eduard Puterbrot: Between my East and my West

This exhibition was accompanied by a booklet with a foreward written by Eduard Puterbrot's wife, Ludmila Peterbrot.

This text was written by Eduard Puterbrot's wife, Ludmila Puterbrot.

'Not every woman, mother or wife can say that she was happy to have had not only a husband and a father for her children at her side, but also a spiritual teacher throughout life.

I spent an invaluable 26 years of my life with Eduard. Thanks to him, I learned to understand many of the world’s mysteries, and to find solutions and answers to the questions that arose during deep explorations of the multi-faceted pages of his creative work.

My foremost purpose became to find a way to immortalise his name, to continue his originality and unique identity as a multi-faceted artist. His creative word has always been and still remains a mystery for many art connoisseurs. Eduard is in the very spotlight of research not only on Dagestani culture, but on global culture as well. He remains a leader in the shaping of the national school of visual arts.

He was not afraid of seeing and painting the world in a new way, and he infected everyone around him with his spirit. He was a happy man; an irrepressible spirit of learning was alive in him – a spirit that amazed with its insatiability.

Eduard was a born erudite person. He had a superb command of words, was an expert in symbolism, experimented with many styles, composed new paint recipes, wasn’t afraid of mixed techniques, and constantly practised the calligraphy of a language he chose. He discovered newer and newer possibilities of perception within himself. His painting style is unlike any other. He never imitated anyone and was filled with the world of his own ideas.

‘The painted graphical art of Puterbrot and his drawn paintings are not simply casuistry. They are the real practice of a specific artist, who was able to implement any graphical technique to solve the tasks of painting art.

Eduard always reiterated these words to his students: 'If any surprise interrupts a master during his work, the work must remain perfect at any stage, and nobody but the master can complete it. At all the stages it is essential to strive for the most important in one’s work – for its preciousness'.

He was distinguished from many others by his sincerity, his sense of the world and a keenness of expression in his painting style. He exposed the beauty of the elements in his own unique way and conveyed the unexplainable energy of throbbing strokes on his canvases. In a similar way, he conveyed thoughts, explaining that a trifle should 'explode' the viewer, and he tried to surround his audience with the 'smoke of images'. His works are intended for a thinking audience. He wanted to involve the viewer and make him/her an active participator in the creative process, because the viewer, as Eduard said, is looking for the meaning that he/she is afraid of discovering. 'Let the "viewer" leave intoxicated, maybe having not understood anything, but having touched on the raw, although not humiliated by the understanding and perspicuity'.

'Me, Eduard Puterbrot, I think myself to be first of all an artist of the given place, present country. I’ve been searching for my path between my East and my West, between your East and your West. I’ve found it in attempts to read the signs and lines that were handed to humans before me. Their ambiguity presents the possibility to read the book of meanings within time, within experience, within communication, while trying to compose the symbols, their combinations, and to improvise on their topics. In the work I only provide an impetus, a provocation. In each viewer his/her own story should unfold.'

Eduard loved to impart a complexity of flavours through his works. He did so through his mysterious and abstract calligraphy. He worked on translating the symbols of ancient rituals, sacral images and legends of Dagestan, into the language of modern art. 'It seems to me that I’m practising shamanism... drawing the ritual images, in order to define the good and evil, and through this to assert or to destroy it. My paintings are in front of you... what will they tell? About life in other lands? What do they love there? What do they hope for? About terrible and gory history? About mountains and winds? Most likely they will tell about the artist himself... Although, all else can be discovered in these paintings by an idle observer as well. Because every man carries his home with him. The rain and the snow are outside. All else is inside us'. Eduard lived in a special country: in a kaleidoscope of tongues, beliefs, rites, in the blending of time and space.

He never indulged in self-admiration. Being a mathematician and a philosopher, his thought was precise and organised. The items he depicted seem to be the actors, who play their pre-destined role. Starting from the 1970s until the 1990s, he attempted to implement into his works something that was not known to the humans of the Earth before – a knowledge received by him in an extraordinary way, through a crossing of the present and the future, of the real and the virtual.

An acquaintance with Eduard Puterbrot would hardly be valuable with only this much told, because his art and talent were not limited to painting alone. He worked to make discoveries for himself and for others. Sculpture, theatre set design, graphic art and literature, Eduard was interested in everything. He was the first to start writing (in spite of the ideological prohibition) about the Russian avant-garde of 1920s and 1930s, about Khalimbek Musayev and Eugene Lanceray. His panoramic vision and knowledge of culture is something that art connoisseurs are still trying to comprehend and appraise.

He was the first person to provide an expanded analysis of certain works from the collections of Dagestan’s museums. He paid attention to the paintings that were shoved back into the storerooms of the museums: the ones by A Ekstern, Alexander Rodchenko, Nadezhda Udaltsova, Aristarkh Lentulov and Pavel Kuznetsov. Eduard also dedicated himself to theatre set design. He was simultaneously working in seven Dagestani theatres from 1983 until 1993. He created over 80 performances, and in 1980 received the prize for best set design for Bertolt Brecht’s Man Equals Man.

Eduard was not able to conceive his creative work without Dagestan. He was very eager to develop the cultural layer, to create a collective of like-minded persons and friends, together with whom it would be possible to break into the larger global cultural space. Finding the time to engage in research work, he wrote a large collection of articles about Dagestani painters. In 2010, a Year of Puterbrot was announced by Business Success Magazine, which published excerpts from his memoirs and articles.

Many of his hopes were fulfilled. He was a sighted optimist, ready to help anyone with a spark of talent and originality.

Eduard’s art seems mysterious at times, since it carries a certain message – special information sent to us, humans, who live in the restrictions of the here and now. What remains is just to greet the viewers and wish them an experience of communion with universal intelligence, with cosmic creative force, again and again.

In 1993 my husband was murdered. My children and I have kept the entire archive of his works'.

He said: 'To be an artist means to live many times'.