Artist William Brui Photo: Vadim Alexeev

In the period from January 25 to February 27, 2011, the MMSI Petrovka, 25 will be a retrospective « William Brui (France-Russia). " ARTinvestment.ru congratulated the artist and in anticipation of the exhibition published an article by Vadim Alexeev "aristocrat of the spirit. Free artist William Brui in Moscow ».

aristocrat of the spirit
Free artist William Brui in Moscow

Brui William was born in Leningrad (1946), threw an art school and got a job as apprentice in the engraving studio, where he met with the principal city of the formalists, students Filonov and . Under their influence, in 1963, engaged in an abstraction, but in the 69 th made the book of lithographs EX ADVERSO performing the strongest impression on western criticism and bought MOMA and Guggenheim museums. A year later Brui went to Paris and then in New York, where he began a series of harmonic abstractions «Unified fields». Huge paintings kept pace with the times - the work of this series is in MOMA, Guggenheim and Pompidou. 70-s were a golden time: Brui exhibited in one of the best galleries in New York «Andre Emmerich», he worked in the loft Mark Rothko in Manhattan and lived on two continents. Life is full of phantasmagoria Brui and well described in the novels Limonov and poplar. In the 85-m William Brui returned to Paris in the studio with a view of the Beaubourg, which has become at 20 years one of the secular center of the city - the legendary party drove Dina Verni and Natalya Medvedev, Fanny Ardant and Alexander Vassiliev. Last year, his show, presented Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and on January 24 a full retrospective of William Brui opens in Moscow, the Museum of Contemporary Art on Petrovka.

William Brui Unified Fields. 1975

«If settled in Moscow, then I will bring fashion to the whiskers!" - said William, when we come to the monument to Pushkin. Of course, enters. Hat, poncho, whiskers. Rain, we walk on the Boulevard Ring, passer-by, people from the restaurant "Pushkin" seem paltry provincials. Parisians do not need to submit it: an essential part of the urban landscape, the artist attracts beautiful, colorful abstract works - purses-bags, and noisy Shabbat in his studio at Babur reduce those and others of the poets and the mad.

Brui spent his childhood in the Hermitage, baldel of Matisse and Picasso, and immediately fell in love with "Lady in a black hat" with a picture of Kees Van Dongen. At age 14, gave a workshop in their parents' bedroom, and once did ten paintings in the art drippinga, where the artist is turned off and sends her "I", splashing paint on canvas. Went contemporary painting abstract expressionism - Brui became perhaps the first since the 20's avant-garde artist in western Russia.

William Brui Untitled. 1978 Oil on canvas. 129,5 x96, 5 Sotheby's. 12.03.2008 Estimate: 5-7 thousand pounds The result: 11,800 lbs

«Then I have a bullet flew out of art school and, starting with a 61-year, full day spent in the city, hanging out with Evgeny Rein and others in the cafe Nord. "Saigon" has not yet been opened, all gathered in the "Nord", I came with a folder of pictures and showed them to the public. I was on a sweater knitted from ropes - after the terrorists caught me on the Neva and cut it into pieces. We have not been nor drunkards, nor bandits and were artists and poets, people who walk the streets freely. The brigade was located at the entrance of Joseph Brodsky - we lived on the same street. The whole history of Brodsky linked to personally dislike the leader of the squad Lerner - proud Joseph refused to wash the floor in the entryway, and that he avenged. In the 63 th year, we spent a whole winter with him in Komarovo, at the dacha of Berg. Joseph read the poems I had written in the train. We drank tea and discussed many things during the long winter evenings ».

In Komarovo Brui got into the closed environment of the old St. Petersburg intelligentsia, preserved, despite the Soviet regime. While the children drank the intellectuals in the city, the young William listened to the chalet calls daddy. In St. Petersburg, 60 retained and aristocratic life - his mother, give a dinner, a friend of a noblewoman, a half-century in hiding in the basement of his servants, taught the subtleties of the secular behavior, which greatly proved useful in life. In the 71-year William went to Paris and the hotel bar at the Ritz "became acquainted with aristocrat and lover of Mayakovsky Tatiana Yakovleva, and Alex Liberman, art director for the magazine Vogue, which set the tone worldwide. They saw a young artist from St. Petersburg this class, and presented in Paris. Entering the narrow circle of international artistic elite, became the highlight of Brui secular parties. When Libermans left, patronage Bruem took Lady Iya Abdy, a beautiful spy, and 30's, Baroness Liliane de Rothschild, and the headmistress house of Christian Dior Suzanne Lyuming. Rising to his feet, Brui moved to New York - after the war, the capital of the world was there, and Alex Liberman gave him the studio of Mark Rothko.

William Brui Alex Lieberman Gallery Andre Emmerich New York, 1975

«Terms of Tatiana and Alex were all of New York, he was full of charms Tatyana Yakovleva - New York without Tatyana Yakovleva - not New York, I'm not exaggerating. Alex and Tatiana were tastemakers, and people flocked to them to sniff out what they think and talk about art. Tatiana - one of several people who formed the style and class in New York. She cursed, hated, feared. For lunch, where there were about twenty eminent people, she often screamed at the table: "In Russia, art is not, and can not be a backward country!". At the same everywhere I drove with him, and sitting at the table, people had to figure out that I am the one who needed them. All in mid-sentence - should scrutinize and get a grasp.

There were Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Horowitz, Motherwell and Jasper Johns, I'm not talking about Andy Warhol, who was everywhere in the barrel bung and pestered my butch wife Silva, despite what looked like a professor of cabbage. I often went to the club "54", but I PEYRELEAU violent heterosexual Jews, and people were very izgazheny her youth and misbehavior massives. Great fashion of Andy Warhol began in the late 80's, shortly before his death. If I could order his own portrait for ten thousand dollars. You came to the factory, and he made three copies - one kept the two gave you. But Tatiana adored give it to him because he diluted the company - she sat at the same time Jackie Kennedy, Andrei Voznesensky and Andy Warhol ».

Brui in America began to make a very contemporary black paintings ten meters by five or six to three. His setkoobraznye abstraction affect its light and inner strength. Written in monochrome or diffuse in soft color of the canvas, these exciting, disturbing memory of the look luminous from within. Brui uses expressive, strong, sharp lines within a limited, but the light pouring out the form. In December 1975 the year he exhibited with Julian Schnabel - Emmerich Gallery and Castelli were in the same house on Broadway. Both were talented, but the newspaper chose Schnabel as Brui was Russian. Philosopher Anton Kozlov wrote that "the importance of Unified Fields is that Brui was the only Russian artist, do not continue to abstraction, from the place where her left Malevich and company, but absorbed in themselves, perhaps unintentionally, the entire evolution of Western art in the 1940s-1950s s ».

Gy. Zabelshansky, G. Sapgir, A. Brusilovsky , A. Borodulin, V. Brui. Paris. 1988

Like the Russian avant-garde before him, Brui in his best works absolutely western and so, in many ways unique in the history of postwar modernism Russian artist. From the outset Brui positioned itself as a neo-romantic painter of abstract expressionism. In his approach to the use of color and multi-dimensional planes in projective space can be traced obvious similarity with the minimalists and artists Hard Edge, such as Ellsworth Kelly. In the 1960s and 1970s Brui focuses on an extremely simplified form, using the major forms and monochrome palette of primary colors. In this Brui was a worthy representative of geometric abstraction, for him, as for Agnes Martin, François Morellet and Saul Levitt grid of intersecting lines was the primary geometric compositions.

boom was gathering around the arts. On Park Avenue were dozens of two-storey apartments, where hung Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Dali, where the delegation was taken from the museums. There lived the real philanthropists, giving money to an art, not for the inscription on the plate. That was one of Brui Gregory Gregory, Russian Nepman contained in the war of Salvador Dali. Once Brui came to the hostess Madame bank Morgan. Lift it was trimmed with brocade of the Venetian palace, pens - 18 th century, and in the hallway hung a Leonardo da Vinci. Her neighbor was a "House of the hanged man" by Cezanne, and his paintings occupy a separate room.

«In New York, cocktails begin simultaneously in several houses, then lunch, and I had in one place go to a cocktail party to another for lunch, a third for dessert, the fifth of coffee. Unlike Paris, the New York company were all very prim, very black tied, smart, elegant, nerazboltannye - because a little bit provincial - drinking, eating, besilis, and then played cards. Used drugs all, guests often come STONED, but it was a private life, no tabloid did not exist. Show-business - is one thing, the aristocracy - the other, and they never intersect nor in New York or London. Diaghilev's going to have the aristocrats, the man in the street could get except to the gallery. Iya Abdy hanging out with Churchill and Onassis, when they were twenty years old, and they get up a lot of things - but got up in his own circle. Have been prudish people that no one confused, lived in his coterie, and reshape the world. They are everywhere and always has been two hundred people. Their word is law and there be no doubt, verification, it was a small group of people, as with the king, pharaoh or the Medici. In the late 80's all over, and began a new democratic era. Children of aristocrats no longer lead the lifestyle that led their parents ».

William Brui against the background of his work Photo: Vadim Alexeev

According to art critic Michael Trofimenkova, "William Brui projected to Russian Cosmism other spiritual experiences: from the dark revelations of the Alexandrian Gnostic and psychedelic trance to search for a lost tribe of Israel and the psychological theories of the twenties. He lives in the acute and hilarious sense of emergency disaster that befall the world, drove himself into a trap, and proofreads the signs of the catastrophe everywhere. "Temrle" Brui - created by them for decades, a series of paintings in which he enumerates all the extant versions of the plan of the temple in Jerusalem - not just operate successfully invented the reception, and archeology, alchemy and meditation combined. Perhaps if the Church and be reborn, it will happen not in stone, and in paints. In paints, William Brui ».

Vadim Alexeev

Material published in author's edition