Ilya Kabakov, Soviet-born artist of immersive installations, dies at 89

Ilya Kabakov, a celebrated artist whose compelling installations, paintings and drawings told sardonically witty stories about the dreams and inner lives of those who endured the hardships and degradations of the Soviet era in which he grew up, died on May 27 in a hospital near his home and studio in Mattituck, NY, on the east side of Long Island. He turned 89.

According to his stepdaughter Viola Kanevsky, he had a heart condition.

In Soviet Russia, Mr. Kabakov was a well-known children’s book illustrator by day for decades, a state-sponsored artist with his own studio and art supplies (which he shared with his underground artist friends). He created some 150 children’s books before 1988, when he left the country for good.

Yet he also led a double life as a conceptual artist. In the 1970s, he began making what he called albums, a series of whimsical drawings and paintings featuring tragic-comic characters who used their imaginations to escape the hardships and humiliations of the failed utopian experiment that was the Soviet Union. His albums had titles and screenplays reminiscent of the work of novelists such as Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of ‘The Master and Margarita’, a 1967 dark satire about life under Stalin.

One album, “Sitting in the Closet Primakov”, was about a little boy who retreats to a closet filled with toys and bits of trash, but dreams of flying off and disappearing into the sky. Another was “Agonizing Surikov,” about a man who couldn’t see a full picture of the world before him; his view – a tiny landscape, a hint of blue sky – was like that of a peephole. And in “Decorator Malignin,” a bureaucrat scribbled in the margins of documents during the endless, tedious meetings that were part of his pointless working life.

“All the characters were aspects of his own psyche, of his frustrations, his fears and his dreams,” said Amei Wallach, who wrote the monograph “Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away” (1996), in a telephone conversation. interview. And he housed his characters in what were known as communal apartments, the quintessential Soviet-era living arrangement in which families crammed into single rooms carved out of what had often been large apartments, shared bathrooms with strangers, and fought over resources and privacy. . It was a metaphor he would return to again and again.

The albums were rendered in the anonymous style that Mr. Kabakov had honed as a prolific state-licensed illustrator. It was illegal to display anything other than state-sponsored art, so he secretly distributed his banned work to his artist friends, such as Eric Bulatov and Oleg Vassiliev, members of a cadre of men and women who came to be known as the Moscow conceptualists. Unlike their Western counterparts’ work, theirs was story and character driven, especially Mr. Kababov’s.

“All the time we were expecting to be arrested because something terrible was going to happen,” Mr. Kabakov told Andrew Solomon, writing about him in 1992 in The New York Times Magazine. “But nothing terrible ever happened to us. We just drank tea in each other’s kitchen, discussed and critiqued each other’s work, and traveled together in the summer.”

His name nevertheless began to spread beyond his Moscow circle as small pieces of him were smuggled out of the country and displayed in the West. In the mid-1980s, a curator put together an exhibition of his work in Paris; another staged in Bern, Switzerland. Mr. Kabakov was also unable to attend.

On the day of the show in Bern, he told Mr. Solomon: “I invited all my friends to the forest and we tied a red ribbon between two trees. Exactly at noon, when we knew the exhibition would open at the Kunsthalle, we cut the ribbon and drank a bottle of champagne. It was a very bittersweet moment when this happened, but I could never be there.”

In 1988 he was ready to leave. He emigrated to Austria and then Paris before settling on Long Island with the help of Emilia Kanevsky, a distant cousin who became his promoter, producer and collaborator. They married in 1992, and over the decades shared the credits for all of Mr. Kabakov’s installations, in a symbiotic collaboration that recalled the bond between Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude.

“Ilya Kabakov was the secret anthropologist of Soviet society,” wrote the critic and curator Robert Storr in his introduction to Mrs. Wallach’s monograph. “A student of the myths and customs, ironic observer of his normal citizens, and sympathetic analyst of his eccentrics, he patiently collected a picture of collectivized life which the West could understand and the East could not but acknowledge.”

Ilya Josifovich Kabakov was born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), Ukraine. His mother, Bertha Ulievna Solodukhina, was a secretary at a trade school; his father, Joseph Benzionovich Kabakov, who trained as a locksmith, worked as a metalworker in a factory that made bed parts. Like many Soviet citizens in Ukraine under Stalin’s rule, they were terribly poor and malnourished.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the family fled to Samarkand, Uzbekistan. By a twist of fate, a prestigious art school had also been evacuated to that city. One day, when Ilya was 10, he was persuaded by an older boy to sneak into the grand building claimed by the art school. When they were discovered by a woman, the older boy ran away, and Ilya stood open-mouthed in front of a group of paintings; they featured a large number of nude women, and Mr. Kabakov later credited their erotic allure as changing his life. The woman invited him to apply to the school, and he was hired right away.

When the war ended, Ilya entered another prestigious school, the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow. His mother followed him there, living illegally for not having proper papers, into a series of horrible rooms, including the bathroom of a school where she had found work as a janitor. She and Ilya’s father, a brutal man who had beaten his son and started living with other women, had separated when he returned from army service.

In 1992, for the Ninth Documenta, an exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in Kassel, Germany, Mr. Kabakov pays homage to his mother’s harrowing experience with an installation called “The Toilet,” a meticulously stark replica of Soviet-style public art. toilets from the 60s and 70s.

Within the work, he created another world in the bathroom cubicles with the equipment of a dingy but cozy Soviet-era family apartment, complete with toys and furniture. He told an interviewer that the play “focused a whole bunch of problems – homelessness and defenselessness in front of the authorities, and the fact that a person of incredible decency, neatness and honesty was forced to drag out a living in the most incredible place. “

That same year, Mr. Kabakov was seemingly everywhere, finally able to stretch out with ambitious installations at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Ronald Feldman Gallery, as well as shows across Europe.

“He took the West by storm,” said Ms Wallach, whose 2013 film, “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” documents the pair’s return to Russia in 2008, when he was treated like a national treasure there. She added: “When he finally left” in the late 1980s – during the Perestroika years – “it was just the right time for the West to honor a Soviet-born artist of his stature.”

“It may seem sudden,” said David A. Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, of Mr. Kabakov’s newfound fame, as Mr. Solomon reported in 1992, “but you must understand that he was decades out of the visibly worked and that his whole life of work was then discovered at once. Finding him was like meeting Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg in the prime of their adulthood.

In addition to his stepdaughter, Mrs. Kanevsky, Mr. Kabakov is survived by his wife; a daughter, Galina, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; another stepdaughter, Isis Kanevsky; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

At home in the West, Mr. Kabakov and his wife continued to create elaborate installations, such as “The Palace of Projects,” shown in Manhattan at the Armory in 2000 after stops in Madrid and London. The ‘Palace’ was a spiral pavilion containing 65 ‘projects’ or fictional proposals – presented in text, photos and models by imaginary characters – to improve the world, including a ladder from which to see angels and a soothing habitat made of cabinets.