?
The Lianozovo School
The Lianozovo school–group was one of the first creative groups of the underground, arising in the second half of the 1940s and lasting until the beginning of the 1970s, a time when personal relationships and related outlooks on art were enough for practitioners of unofficial art to constitute membership in a common circle without, however, attempting at the same time to demonstrate uniformity. If we are speaking of the “school,” then it developed around the figure of the poet and artist Evgeny Leonidovich Kropivnitsky, who lived in a barracks at the Dolgoprudnaia railway station near Moscow and literally brought up his students, the poets Igor’ Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir and the artist Oskar Rabin. With regard to the Lianozovo “group”: it was located in the nearby barracks settlement of Lianozovo, where the artists Oskar Rabin and his wife Valentina Kropivnitskaia, the daughter of Evgeny Kropivnitsky, and also Kropivnitsky’s son, Lev, settled at the start of the 1950s. The Rabin apartment, like the Kropivnitsky room before it, became a place that attracted both unofficial poets (Vsevolod Nekrasov, Ian Satunovsky, and others) and artists (Nikolai Vechtomov, Vladimir Nemukhin, Lidiia Masterkova), a place for the holding of underground openings and for the formation of an “artistic circle” (Il’ia Kabakov) that not only facilitated professional communication but also the meeting of artists and of their audiences and admirers.
