Lot 529: Vadim Sidur , A Collection of 5 Bronze Sculptures, 1981

each signed in Cyrillic and dated 81 (below the base) bronze

measurements average height: 13 1/2 in. alternate measurements 34.3 cm

PROPERTY FROM THE KARL EIMERMACHER COLLECTION, GERMANY

Vadim Sidur was one of the leading representatives of Soviet nonconformist art. Working in sculpture, assemblage, graphic arts, literature, and film, Sidur was an extremely prolific artist with a very diverse oeuvre. Throughout his career, Sidur focused on "eternal themes"--love, male and female principles, war, and suffering--often drawing on his own experiences for his subjects and motifs.

As a graduate of the Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts in Moscow (the former Stroganov School), where he was trained as a monumental sculptor and from which he graduated in 1953, and a member of the Moscow Artists' Union, Sidur contributed decorative sculptures to various public buildings. However, Sidur's other, more experimental works--such as the ones included in this sale--could not be exhibited or published in the Soviet Union, because by the early 1960s the artist had made an irrevocable break with the dogmatic canons of Soviet Socialist Realist sculpture and graphic arts.

While the dominant approach to sculpture in the Soviet Union was academic, Sidur discovered that the human figure could be interpreted in an individual and modern manner, and started creating sculptures infused with simplicity, directness, expressive power, and an iconic quality. These traits were informed by archaic monumental sculpture, particularly that produced in ancient Greece, Egypt, and Assyria-Babylonia, examples of which Sidur saw while frequenting the hall of ancient sculpture in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Sidur was also influenced by "Scythian women"--the huge idols carved out of grey granite thousands of years ago that were found in the Ukrainian steppes. It was this type of sculpture rather than that of modern Western masters such as Henry Moore and Jacques Lipschitz that had a profound and long-lasting impact on Sidur's work.

The expressiveness of children's drawing was another major influence on Sidur's creative development, as were two major events in his life that the artist relates to the most important phases of his work: being critically wounded in combat in World War II and enduring a heart attack approximately fifteen years later. While serving as a soldier in the Red Army during the war, Sidur suffered a head wound in 1944. He underwent surgery at the Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics, and was demobilized as a disabled soldier. For a short time Sidur was a student at the Medical Institute in Dushanbe (Tajikistan). Having realized that he would "never be able to get used to the sufferings of the sick," Sidur decided not to study medicine, instead enrolling in the Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts. However, his encounters with the infirm at the Medical Institute later influenced his art. The disturbing images of the injured and deformed people Sidur saw at the hospital are reflected in his sculptures of the 1960s as well as in his graphic series Mutations. Sidur later observed: "Bones, muscles, bodies, vats with sawed-off human heads--all of this after many years turned into my sculpture."

Sidur suffered his heart attack in 1961. Physically unable to create sculpture for almost year, the artist produced many works in graphic media around that time. During the 1960s, he produced erotic drawings that demonstrate a further elaboration of the erotic language that Sidur employed in some of his earlier sculptural works. Erotic imagery was one of the most prohibited themes in Soviet official art. Breaking this taboo, Sidur's sexually charged works were particularly radical given the tenor of post-Stalinist art.

While much of Sidur's work deals with suffering and other grim or disturbing aspects of human existence, his oeuvre also had a strong lyrical side, as can be seen in this sculptural series. Sidur abstracts the human figure to a few sweeping curved lines and flat planes. Although all the sculptures from this group retain recognizable natural forms, Sidur focuses only on their essential characteristics.