Works of Mongolian sculptors — graduates from the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture

Abstract

This article deals with the role of Mongolian sculptors — graduates from the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the process of development of the fine art in modern Mongolia. This question seems actual because there is no any specific study dedicated to these artists in the historiography of Mongolian art. Although some mentions could be found in scientific and popular-science books, it does not contribute significantly to the complete comprehension of this topic. Meanwhile, the artworks of Mongolian Repin-graduates deserve to be studied not only because of their extremely high artistic quality. Today, they serve as a sort of milestones in the process of studying Mongolian art because they demonstrate how some new and important tasks were resolved on their base in this country for the first time. In this way, such works help us to study the historical development of Mongolian sculpture as a whole beginning from the mid-20th century until nowadays.

The most striking feature in this process was the emergence of secular subject-matters and, accordingly with this, new artistic genres such as portrait bust, sculptural monument and monumental sculpture. In order to create them, Mongolian sculptors had to possess fundamental technical skills and principles of representing sculptural forms. How it worked is clearly visible when we study the creative activity of an outstanding Mongolian sculptor A. Davaatseren who was the 1956-year graduate. He was very versatile producing allegorical pieces, historical scenes, portraits as well as some works of monumental decoration. For the first time in Mongolian art, he managed to combine realistic principles of depiction of the surrounding world with some elements of the national tradition in art.

Along with Davaatseren, some other graduates from the Repin Institute played an important part in the process of development of Mongolian sculpture during the 1960th and 70th. Among those were D. Sanzhaa, L. Dashdeleg, U. Bold, and Ts. Dorjsuren. They introduced some very important novelties in Mongolian art of that time, in particular, developing completely new for this country type of the colossal monument which combined elements of architecture and sculpture (the Zaysan memorial complex, Ulaanbaatar, inaugurated in 1979). On the other hand, these masters introduced in Mongolian art new subject-matters as in the case of the so-called austere style, for example, and used new materials. Sometimes, they preferred to conduct original stylistic experiments while deviating from the principles of the Realist art. This provides a link with the next generation of Mongolian sculptors, among those were Z. Amgalan, R. Enkhtaivan, B. Denzen, and others. They started their careers in 1980th, but their sculptural works served as a base for the future development of the modern Mongolian art. This fact put an emphasis on the specific role of the Repin graduates in this process.