Vasily Koroteev. Self-portrait, Late 1950s - Early 1960s

And truly, in each one of V. A. Koroteev’s works the form of the world: earth, snow, sky, clouds and the boughs of trees, is born, agonizingly comes into life. It is as if there is no set course or program involved in them, as if no sort of form and no sort of existence, nothing overall, is promised or guaranteed.

The thinker pronounces that which makes up the essence and content of art in the twentieth century as V. A. Koroteev understood it: a transcending of appearance, transcending art as a system of creating through appearance and the opening of a new era of art as a means of genuine, unconditional manifestation of a person and the world. This opening cannot occur at one time, once and for all. It is constantly taking place for the entire world and for each person at each moment of her life. Art is the form in which a mankind created and continues to create the world; art is a state in which a person takes on responsibility for humanity and for the human race. It takes shape from a painful rift not only with its yesterday but with the customary, apparent reality; it stems from experience and a physical overcoming of the impossibility of change, when the artist abandons the plane of plurality, generality and universality and approaches oneness, when he will remain one on one with all voices that speak in the name of mankind and will find it necessary to answer them; in this way he takes responsibility for all the changes that take place in the world and for the direction of his movement and development. In the face of necessity he begins to speak of how conditions and the meanings of reality and humanity quickly change.

This applies not only to artists but to all participants in the dialogue; not in art, the meanings of which remain unchanged for fifty, one hundred, or five hundred years; it is not that we know of the historical meanings of culture, but rather that we are discovering them today. The question is, what is an art created many decades and even centuries ago doing with a new time and new reality?

And at that very same time, it is as if the artist knows that nothing has taken place; moreover, has anything ever taken place that is not taking place now, that does not still continue today? And what’s more, can there be something that we have not done ourselves?