Alexander Shchipitsyn "Shepherd" 1935

In 1926, L. Zhegin, a lecturer at the Higher Art and Industry Printing Studios (attached to the Sytin Printing House in Moscow), organized his former students — Koroteyev, Kostyukhin, Gubin, Grib and Sashenkov — into an artists’ group called Path of Painting. These artists were joined by several former members of Makovets — Pestel, Alexandrova, Babichev and Nikolayevtsev. This group’s exhibitions in 1927, 1928 and 1930 showed that a new generation of twenty-year-old painters and graphic artists had come on the scene, and that their artistic ambitions in no way coincided with the plans of sociologized art.

A few years later, in 1929, the first exhibition of the Thirteen group was held. This association of graphic artists included Milashevsky, Kuzmin, Daran, Mavrina, Sofronova, and Rastorguyev, as well as Drevin and Udaltsova.

Even a simple enumeration of the most prominent artists’ groups and societies of this period gives historians a good foundation for entitling it “the art of 1920s—1930s artists’ associations.” These societies worked on developing various artistic methodologies in their search for new languages of artistic expression.

The multilingual aspect of this era was recognized by contemporaries as a guarantee of freedom, democracy, and cultural tolerance, which could eventually grow to become a yet unknown form of culture. 0. Mandelstam said: “Something like glossolalia is taking place at the present time. Poets in holy ecstasy are speaking a language that relates to all times and all cultures. There is nothing impossible. Just as a room in which a person is dying is open for all to visit, so the door of the old world has been flung open to the masses.” This openness of the present day to all times and the entire history of art is what A. Labas had in mind when he spoke about his work:

“There is no real time here; time here is conventional.”