Kapterev Valery Vsevolodovich

Painter. Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Kapterev took his first professional steps on the eve of the revolution in a private art studio; then, starting in 1918, his biography included the painting department of Vkhutemas, studying with Alexander Shevchenko. Roitenberg describes how, as a second-year student, Kapterev made his first trip to Central Asia, which attracted mystery and romanticism. The young painter simply asked to be an assistant to the land reclamation workers who were going on an expedition, and subsequently did the same many times. I drew everywhere. By this time, he managed to participate in the creation of the “Painters’ Workshop” and move from it to the already mentioned “Being” society. The impressions of the East and Crimea turned out to be extremely productive for Kapterev: even in the last decades of his life, antique, archaic motifs appeared more than once in his compositions - “The Life of a Man”, “Archaic St. George the Victorious”, “Shells, Mussels and Algae”, “Reading Ancient Authors (Olive Branch)”. In addition to a small number of Kapterev’s pre-war works, as well as “Autumn” and “Alpine Meadows”, written in the forties, today we know mainly those of his canvases and cardboards that date back to Khrushchev’s “thaw” and subsequent decades. By that time, the first and, as it turned out, the only personal exhibition during his lifetime had already taken place - in Alma-Ata, in 1943. But a new one was not expected. Temporary exclusion from the creative union “for formalism” had little effect on Kapterev’s work. And it was, rather, a preventive measure: Kapterev, a romantic who was fond of the prose of Alexander Green, music and poetry (his wife, poetess Lyudmila Oknazova, made her modest contribution to the formation of “thaw” literature), was not a member of any overly politicized artistic groups. At the same time, Kapterev did not stay away from the discussions between physicists and lyricists that were topical at that time, as well as from experiments in the field of synthesis of science and art - he simply refracted these topics in his work very individually. The titles of his paintings from the turn of the 1950s and 1960s can serve as an illustration of the artist’s interest in modernity and eternity at the same time: “Mathematical Formula of Space”, “Unity of Opposites”, “Reading the Theory of Relativity”...