A major exhibition at the Galeev Gallery in Moscow reveals a far less familiar Alexei Pakhomov. Bringing together works from private collections and eighteen Russian museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum, it looks beyond the artist best known for his images of Soviet childhood to uncover a much more complex modernist. Art critic Sergey Khachaturov traces Pakhomov’s dialogue with the Old Masters, German New Objectivity and Art Deco – and follows a graphic language that, unexpectedly, leads all the way to Tintin, comics and Pop Art.

The exhibition ‘Alexei Pakhomov. Son of Man’ is arguably even more comprehensive than the big retrospective last year at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, marking the artist’s 125th anniversary. Art dealer and cultural promoter Ildar Galeev has assembled a vast array of works from diverse sources, bringing together pieces from many private collections alongside loans from eighteen Russian museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum.

It is striking how effectively these little-known works dispel the familiar stereotype of Alexei Pakhomov (1900–1973) as primarily a painter of round-faced children from the illustrated books of the 1930s–1950s. Galeev’s selection traces with great precision the formation of Pakhomov’s style, in which the radical impulses of Cubo-Futurism and non-objective art were combined, in a highly individual way, with neoclassicism. From an early age, Pakhomov admired Old Russian icon painting, Giotto (c. 1267–1337) and Alexei Venetsianov (1780–1847). His monumental manner, with its powerful figures and at the same time highly musical sense of plastic form, creates an unexpected bridge between Cubism and the Proto-Renaissance.

Like his teachers at Vkhutemas in Petrograd – Alexander Savinov (1881–1942), Sergei Chekhonin (1878–1936) and Vasily Shukhaev (1887–1973) – Pakhomov was preoccupied with a central question: to what extent could the new language of form, with its fractured plasticity and Futurist cascades of expressive colour, be reconciled with the elevated style of the Old Masters?

The watercolour and pencil studies of reapers from 1927, now in private collections, and the 1928 canvas ‘The Reaper’ in the State Russian Museum are closely attuned to Kazimir Malevich’s (1879–1935) Suprematist peasants. Yet Pakhomov does not reduce the human figure to a sign, nor is he drawn towards a hieroglyphic language. What interests him instead is the full physical presence of the body – the expressive performance of flesh. This elevation of corporeality finds parallels in the contemporary fascination with plastic theatre and acrobatic performance in the 1920s. Following Pakhomov’s development from the 1920s into the 1940s through paintings and drawings in the State Russian Museum, it is difficult not to consider another movement that came to prominence in European, and above all German, art in the mid-1920s: Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. At the very moment when Pakhomov’s own style was taking shape, exhibitions of artists from the Weimar Republic were being shown widely in Soviet Russia. In 1924, works by Otto Dix (1891–1969), George Grosz (1893–1959), Georg Schrimpf (1889–1938), Rudolf Schlichter (1890–1955) and others were exhibited in Moscow, Leningrad and Saratov as part of the First General German Art Exhibition. The exhibition provoked considerable debate within the Soviet art world. Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexei Sidorov, Nikolai Tarabukin, Yakov Tugendhold and Alexei Fedorov-Davydov all responded to it, often polemically and from sharply differing positions. What matters here is that this exhibition, together with later surveys of contemporary German art, generated an intense field of exchange with the artistic practices of the young Soviet state.

The powerful, monumental figures, caught in oddly twisted poses, create a curious sense of emotional dislocation, in which pathos sits alongside the grotesque, and simplicity alongside excess. Similar qualities can be found in the work of the German Verists. There, too, flattened space produces a relief-like unfolding of forms. The figures are at once monumental and caricatured, possessed of a nervous, almost hysterical intensity. In Dix and Grosz, this tragically distorted treatment of the human body becomes a vehicle for exposing the social pathologies of contemporary society. In Pakhomov and among his colleagues in the Circle of Artists group (1926–1932), “thingness” and neo-naturalism are likewise combined with a Mannerist affectation of movement and with extraordinarily complex, at times almost mannered, foreshortenings.

What connects Pakhomov most strikingly to New Objectivity, however, are the children and adults shown at the Galeev Gallery: strange, forlorn figures whose palpable physical presence seems to invade the viewer’s personal space, their fixed, disquieting gaze directed straight out of the picture. This is particularly evident in ‘Party Committee Secretary’ (1931, Smolensk Museum-Reserve) and ‘Boy’ (1929, State Russian Museum).

Like the Verists of New Objectivity, Pakhomov looked deliberately both to the newest artistic movements and, at the same time, to neoclassicism. In the Renaissance, he found an ideal of form fully animated by life. The works on paper of Vladimir Lebedev (1891–1967) also gave Pakhomov an acute sensitivity to detail: a meticulous attention to surfaces, and an ability to construct images with a cinematic sense of rhythm and space.

In his series devoted to children – whether genre scenes or book illustrations – Pakhomov also continued a major tradition inherited from Romanticism and Symbolism. Its origins can be traced in portraits of children by artists such as Orest Kiprensky (1782–1836), Alexei Venetsianov and Vasily Tropinin (1776–1857). It was during the Empire period, in Pushkin’s time, that childhood began to be recognised as an autonomous world, with its own passions, reflections and psychological complexity. These were no longer miniature adults or decorative dolls, but inhabitants of a distinct realm demanding respect and sympathy, and resistant to moralising or didactic interpretation.

This sustained exploration of the world of childhood found a particularly distinctive expression in Pakhomov’s numerous series, which became, in many respects, a visual benchmark for generations of Soviet and post-Soviet viewers.

Pakhomov’s watercolour shepherdesses possess something of the stately dignity of Venetsianov’s peasants. They evoke the grand manner and the heroic figures of academic painting. The restrained, austere beauty of Pakhomov’s female students and sportswomen, painted from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, also resonates with the work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), who himself drew deeply on the traditions of Old Russian painting.

Pakhomov conducts a dialogue across many historical periods, while consistently developing a visual language of his own. Earlier artistic traditions and modern movements – from Cubism to Verism – come together to shape his distinctive conception of the “children’s world” in art. His poster-like linearity, soft and flowing modelling of form, delight in detail and collage-like construction of space, with its tiered, almost “étagère-like” arrangement, place much of his graphic work, including his book covers, within the broader visual language of Art Deco. Some of Pakhomov’s post-war graphic works might even be seen as anticipating aspects of Pop Art.

Since we have touched on Pakhomov and Pop Art, it is worth considering his relationship to the graphic language of comics. The comparison becomes all the more intriguing in light of the campaign against him in 1936, when the defamatory article ‘On Artist-Daubers’ appeared in the central Communist newspaper Pravda and Pakhomov was accused of formalism. Thereafter, he largely abandoned painting and devoted himself to graphic art, above all to the illustration of children’s books and magazines.

One parallel is especially striking: the child of Pakhomov’s idealised Soviet childhood and the young Belgian reporter Tintin, created by Hergé (1907–1983; real name Georges Prosper Remi). Pakhomov and Hergé were near contemporaries – Pakhomov was born in 1900, Hergé in 1907 – and both sent their youthful heroes out into the world at roughly the same moment, in the 1920s.

Tintin, the round-faced reporter with his unmistakable quiff, is full of energy and good health and thoroughly imbued with the assumptions of his own ideological world. He carries the supposed light of civilisation into the Belgian colonies and exposes the darkness and deception of the Soviet Union – Hergé made Tintin’s journey to Soviet Russia his first adventure. Pakhomov’s round-faced pioneers, with their shining eyes and robust bodies, are equally energetic and equally shaped by the ideological language surrounding them: they struggle for peace, communism, collectivism and equality.

Even the linear style of Pakhomov’s illustrations for the children’s magazine Chizh (The Siskin) finds an unexpected parallel in Hergé’s ligne claire. Hergé’s drawings rely on lines of consistent weight and areas of flat, even colour. This appliqué-like quality brings both artists close to the visual language of Art Deco, the period in which each developed his mature graphic vocabulary. At the same time, the heroes of Hergé and Pakhomov seem, retrospectively, to point towards the visual world of Pop Art. It is no coincidence that artists such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) were drawn to the bold contours and reproducible imagery of comics.

Yet the differences between the two artists are ultimately greater than the similarities. Tintin remains essentially unchanged, a fixed comic-strip type. Pakhomov’s figures, by contrast, grow older, mature and suffer alongside the tragic history of the Soviet Union. In his harrowing Leningrad siege series of 1941–1945, children are at times placed within an iconographic tradition that recalls Rembrandt’s (1606–1669) treatments of the Pietà, as in the lithograph ‘Avenge!’ of 1942. Once again, Pakhomov turned to the art of the past as a source of moral and emotional authority, seeking in the classical tradition a language of humanity at a moment when humanity itself seemed to be under assault.