Art and ethnic identity: On the Example of the Culture of the Altai People

Abstract

The connection of art, ethnography and politics is explored using the example of the distinguished Altai painter and statesman Grigorii Ivanovich Choros-Gurkin (1870-1937). Choros-Gurkin's formation as a painter and indigenous Siberian activist is analyzed, including discussion of his mentors, Russian landscape painter Ivan I. Shishkin, ethnographer Andrei V. Anokhin, and academician- Siberian regionalist Grigorii N. Potanin. The author argues that Choros-Gurkin's post-Soviet revival and popularity as an exemplar of the spirituality of the Altai people is based on his deep understanding of the connections among “Land-Water, and Khan-Altai” [diety of the Altai Mountain peoples]. This was the motto of the Altai Mountain Duma he led in the 1920s.

Notes

English translation © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text “Iskusstvo i etnicheskaia identichnost’ (na primere kul'tury altaitsev).” Published with the author's permission.Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/maae

^1. Worthy of particular mention are A.V. Anokhin (1924) and Anokhin (1929).

^2. Preserved in the A.V. Anokhin National Museum of the Altai Republic is a Choros-Gurkin manuscript, a catalog of the Autumn Exhibition of 1899 at the Academy of the Arts with pencil drawings of fifty studies and a list of thirty-four drawings with numbers and prices. Some are annotated with the surnames and addresses of the buyers, among whom is “Professor A.A. Kiselëv” and “sister of Professor A.A. Kiselëv” (Erkinova, 2011: 7).

^3. Issued for G.I. Choros-Gurkin's solo exhibition in Tomsk in 1915 was a catalog (http://elib.tomsk.ru/purl/1-7932), including Gurkin's essay “Altai I Katun.” The catalogue featured 453 titles: 92 paintings, 286 studies on 11 boards, 44 drawings in pencil, pen, watercolor on three boards, one board with 11 drawings of objects of the shamanic cult, 51 drawings with the ornament of the Altai people on three boards, 23 drawings with petroglyphs, with [anthropomorphic] “stone women” stelae on barrows and hand-drawn depictions of Altai people on one board, 16 drawings of illustrations of epics and tales on one board, 17 drawings from traveler's album on one board. Twenty-one boards in all were used. The custodian of the exhibition was Viacheslav Iakovlevich Shishkov (1873–1945), a friend of Choros-Gurkin's, essayist and author of the novels Ugrium-reka and Emel'ian Pugachëv. In addition he was a brilliant engineer, technician of communication routes, such as the Chuiskii Trakt [highway] project.

^4.http://elib.tomsk.ru. Postanovleniia pervoi sessii Tomskogo gubernskogo narodnogo sobraniia (s 20 aprelia po 18 maia 1917 g.). Tomsk, 1917.

^5. Historical information here and in the paragraph below is from Elektronnyi resurs: Istoricheskaia entsiklopediia Sibiri. http://sibhistory.edu54.ru.