Art Talk

Modern art comes of age with a sweep of Putin's brush

by Jonathan Jones - guardian.co.uk

He may have had help, but the Russian PM's painting is stylish and witty for an amateur work Vladimir Putin's Pattern, which fetched £750,000 at auction.

Photograph: Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters
There are two obvious comparisons to reach for in attempting to assess Vladimir Putin as an artist – one flattering, one scary. Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler are the modern leaders most famous for having dabbled in painting, and it's inevitable that we should wonder whether he lives up, or down, to their examples.
The most striking thing about the most expensive painting ever sold in Russia is how different it is from those precedents. Churchill was the quintessentially conservative Sunday painter of tranquil scenes. Hitler, a failed professional artist, actively hated modern art and his pictures are as traditionalist as Churchill's.
Putin, by contrast, appears to know and like Russia's native heritage of modernism. Gentle, unthreatening and slight his painting may be, but it is not naive. It is, rather, faux-naive in the way it pays homage to St Petersburg's avant garde a century ago, when artists such as Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova were adopting Russian rustic styles.
Putin's picture pastiches Larionov. There is even a conceptual touch in his writing the word for "pattern" on the picture. In short, this is stylish and witty for an amateur painting, showing surprising knowledge of art. But is it all his own work?
Putin had some kind of help from a St Petersburg artist – reports vary, saying he produced his painting in "collaboration" with Nadezhda Anfalova, or was advised by her, or that she "finished" it – so she may be the source of the painting's comparatively sophisticated ideas.
Either way, it shows that modern art has, a century on from the days when Matisse was painting his Dance that hangs in St Petersburg's Hermitage, become truly universal. It's a new world when a powerful man feels the need to pose as a modern primitive.