Radical Mexican artist "Vlady" is Dead

north america / mexico | culture | news report Saturday July 30, 2005 23:11 by Ross Peterson anything_prose at videotron dot ca

Little-known outside Mexico, nearly marginal there, an important Russian-born artist whose art evolved into a thoroughly and uniquely Mexican contribution to the body of international artistic expression has died. He was the son of the recognised writer of revolutions, Victor Serge.

Vlady is Dead

Vlady was the Russian-born muralist and painter whose portraits of 20th-century anarchists and Bolsheviks both before and immediately after the Spanish Civil War. He died Thursday, July 21, 2005 in his adoptive Mexico. Everyone who knows the man and his art calls him Vlady -- Vladimir Kibalchich Rusakov (1920-2005), born in San Petersburgo, immigrated to Mexico in 1941.

Vlady is survived in Mexico by his wife, Isabel, and a nephew Carlos Diez. His life lasted him 30 years longer than that of his ever-exiled father, Victor Serge. The father, novelist and memoirist of anarchist revolt and Bolshevist revolution met his death suddenly in 1947 after a heart attack in a taxicab, while searching for his son to hand him a father's poem as Vlady and Isabel's wedding gift.

As early as age 10, Vlady had started doing sketches of the militant anarchists and communists in the Soviet Russian outposts as well as the Moscow and Petrograd conclaves -- any and every place his father stayed long enough to bring the family along on engagements -- and finally -- the family's deportation into the Soviet gulag.

Today, in French and English, the written record of Vlady's life is best followed by reading Victor Serge's Memoiirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941.Thankfully, Jean-Guy Rens has uploaded the first-draft of a biography of Vlady, in French, to the Internet at - http://www.rens.ca/ - where art images may be viewed along with praise of Vlady's work by Regis Débray and others. M. Rens says a Mexican publisher is coming out with a Spanish translation before 2006.

Anarchists who read Spanish and are interested in Vlady's work and politico-artistic patronage by the exiled POUM leaders of the Spanish Civil War should go to http://www.fundanin.org/vlady.htm. Here in Spanish you can read critical and appreciative comments on the biography of Victor Serge and about the mass of Spaniards exiled to France who then made yet another mad exodus, this time from Europe to Mexico. Watch all these Internet sites, as well as www.vlady.org, for material that will go online in English translation.

In Mexico, as Vlady became his own man after age 20, the artist pursued his education in art by seeking out a teacher as well as artistic collaborators. This was just after the energetic period when Diego Rivera and Orozco painted feverishly, when they seemed to be still competing for glory, and when Rivera already had completed his famous commissions in the States. (How could you have missed the books or the movie?) Rivera had been kicked out of the CP Mexico and Victor Serge was persona non grata for more fundamental political reasons on the part of apologists for Stalin.

Artists of a less nationalist and iconic vein, and less well subsidized by the Mexican state, gave Vlady some needed support. His a-political wife Isabel got her baptism in art and politics through Frida Kahlo, with whom a warm friendship ensued. Vlady travelled to Italy and studied XVth century Rennaissance masters (as had Rivera, by the way) through their frescoes and canvasses. He experienced Paris, but cut the "Café-Salon Life" short (unlike Rivera, but this was post-Vichy). Eventually Vlady landed a mural commission of his own near Mexico City, was exposed successfully in Santa Barbara, California and could consider himself a professional and noncommercial, independent artist. When his first mural was destroyed just before its completion, thanks to pressure from Mexican Stalinists in high places, Vlady's place on the margins of both officially nationalist and unofficially Stalinist Mexican culture was assured. He wore this mark of the outsider who refused to bend like a badge the rest of his life. (Strains of Rivera in reverse resonate here, but the story has yet to be investigated thoroughly.)

Was Vlady an anarchist? For that matter, was his father, Victor Serge?

I recommend that wherever we can, we encourage the executors of the Vlady collection and the Mexican consulates to put his work on tour around the world. All of us want Serge's writings to spread still wider so that we can have a more informed examination of the twentieth century and the history of "struggling from defeat to defeat toward the ultimate victory."

In art and sometimes in political struggle the questions of political labels takes a back seat to what has been accomplished. In Vlady's case, his posthumous recognition rests now in the hands of the estate and the cultural arm of Mexico City and Mexico's museum network there and abroad. Vlady, according to his nephew, wanted his works to be available to the grassroots worldwide. I will be watching and waiting to see this oeuvre in my nearest gallery-café and cultural fair.