Architecture in the Bookplate GB

Beginning approximately in the 1960s, with the development of book production, interest in the bookplate awakened everywhere. Bibliophiles and artists increasingly began to realize their profound involvement in the diversity of culture. In essence, during the Thaw, the younger generation rediscovered “its own culture,” art and literature. There arose a need to classify, preserve and mark private libraries. The bookplate was revived.

The discovery of many layers of culture led to growing interest in depictions of architecture on bookplates. There emerged a need to revive various aspects and phenomena of the historical past. Numerous and diverse attempts began to restore the architectural heritage through new thinking and through new images. The 1970s–1990s were extremely important for the entire course of general cultural processes, and for the bookplate in particular. In the variegated flow of subjects in bookplate art, certain tendencies and distinctive recurring themes can be identified. One of them is “architecture.” On the basis of new graphic and technical possibilities, the search takes on a somewhat different semantic path and becomes the most important criterion for the entire development of the theme of “architecture” in the bookplate.

Architecture is that universal visual foundation whose existence depends neither on political and regional differences, nor on belonging to a particular progressiveness or conservatism, nor on various cultural phenomena or stylistic movements.

The key formula in the visual arts is the theme of “architecture,” with its many semantic levels, possibilities of interpretation and metaphoric quality. The allegories most significant to us can be deciphered as follows:

architecture - the universal human experience accumulated by generations;

architecture - a historical symbol of the people’s memory;

architecture - a complex of conceptions about the world;

architecture - a house-fortress

Finally, one may consider the understanding of “architecture” as the embodiment of a person’s inner culture, as the presence of harmony in the soul and agreement with oneself. The series could be continued, but the most important thing has already been indicated.

Let us attempt to examine the “image” of architecture as an awareness of existence, using contemporary bookplates as our material.

The phenomenon of “architecture” in the visual arts is extraordinarily broad. Its traces can be followed throughout world artistic culture.

In practice, this theme converges with history, with attempts to connect the links between times, with nostalgia for traditions and with searches for national identity.

Defining itself within the variegated palette of the visual arts, architecture acquires only new guises at different times, dressing itself in a variety of traditional or ultramodern “garments.” The multiplicity and contrasting nature of the forms in which architecture is expressed are especially evident on different stylistic grounds, allowing us to speak of a considerable number of variants or paths of visual exploration.

In connection with the rapid movement of social and technological progress, changes in conceptions, traditions and notions are felt and experienced with extraordinary acuity. The loss of all these phenomena is identical to the loss of foundations, roots and an awareness of one’s own existence. The search for something new becomes the principal content of spiritual and creative activity. The past becomes naive and simplified in its aspirations. It would seem that the strong ties connecting “one’s own history with one’s own heritage” are collapsing. Hence, on the one hand, a feeling of nostalgia and idealization of the past, and on the other - the need to find paths that could help restore the lost inner unity.

These changes may be perceived as the destruction of architecture and may be understood as a real loss, as the loss of the historical past with the entire weight of its values. But architecture is also a link connecting a person with previous generations and a real possibility of bringing them together.

Architecture owes its abundance and diversity of manifestations in the visual arts to the individuality of every artist. Creators are often uncertain about their own conceptions of the meaning and content of architecture. In their work, they attempt to search for and discover philosophical outlines for understanding architecture through the means of the visual arts. The desire to recreate and construct architecture in their engravings, to make it a memory within their creative work, leads the artist to create a new surrealism.

There is an obvious departure from reality. One reality is replaced by another: the reality of what has been seen, the reality of memory, the reality of a dream. The image acquires an entirely different form and status. Entering surrealism becomes a necessary condition for searching for and discovering a new path of representation. The world of architecture created by the artist is emphatically alienated from reality, enclosed behind an invisible barrier. State, space and time in this visual world bear the artist’s imprint. His architecture exists outside a specific place and time; it belongs solely to the subject of the work and depends on the artist.

The existence of architecture differs according to location and form, but in each case the artist’s tasks are different. In one case - the creation of one’s own theme of a “dream”; in another - the construction of a mythological world; in a third - the recreation of historical reality, but one operating according to different laws. The creation of such architecture testifies to a semi-real event, an invented stage setting that includes some action involving mythical characters. Sometimes it may be a metaphysical landscape.

It is noteworthy that the pseudo-historical moment, place or costume seen by the artist through his own creative prism loses its everyday quality and becomes a kind of convention of a certain mirror world.

Each artist has his own, personal conception of an “own world” and an “own time.” It depends on the author’s intellect, metaphors and artistic predilection.

Having deprived himself of temporal connections and material definiteness, the artist freely manipulates the present and the future and moves freely between characters and subjects. The departure from reality and the creation of an effect of the unreal are achieved by the artist through the deformation of spaces, the introduction of mythological characters into space, the destruction of objects and the choice of the model for the work’s subject. The presence in engravings of semi-real spatial and temporal collisions immerses us in a world of fantasies. The inclusion of the old in the new, of the past in the present - this is a game with time. Characters and architecture stylized and costumed according to a historical era, placed by the artist in an environment of his own invention, exist side by side fictitiously and thereby extend an invisible thread from the past into the present.

Architecture is understood by people in our society as a historical monument. As the house of one’s ancestors, whose walls are endowed with historical memory, individuality and uniqueness. Admiring architecture in the visual arts, old buildings, antique objects, streets, houses and interiors, we immerse ourselves in a spiritual world.

Contemporary art, while preserving the features of the author’s artistic hand, makes it possible to turn a work into a message from the artist to the viewer, awaken memory through legends and traditions, and remind us of the continuity of generations.

Bookplates depicting architecture unexpectedly bring time to a halt.

Looking closely at them, we immerse ourselves in different eras and years, in scenes of urban life, in romance and dreaminess.

G. Bosenko’s architectural bookplates are distinguished, above all, by a certain degree of “finish.” They are executed at a high technical and stylistic level. Chronologically, they reflect the evolution of his worldview and his approach to small graphic art.

The early architectural opuses in his bookplates have a narrative character and a formal, planar construction. These are small easel engravings with added text, in which the typeface is insufficiently individual (for example, the bookplate of T. Alexandrova, 1971, and I. Golsha, 1972).

In recent years, there has been significant progress in the creation of bookplates. Tendencies toward the functional and constructive organization of the miniature through oppositions and multiple planes have emerged and developed. The engravings have become more dynamic in composition, silhouettes and type placement. They acquire their own specific tone and printing color. This is their external aspect, but the main thing is the content, the semantic charge, without which a bookplate cannot exist. All of the bookplates of recent years are saturated with action; in all of them one senses an attitude toward architecture based on the artist’s understanding. This is a world of different images: a world of children and adults, a world of theater and the stage, a world of landscapes and ancient castles (for example, the bookplate of Nikolki, 1986, and Piilmann, 1986). From G. Bosenko’s small graphic art, a coherent and figurative system of fantastic architecture emerges before us, architecture that he loves wholeheartedly and attempts to convey to the viewer through the agreement of the bookplate owner. For him there is no “small” genre; he is always thoughtful in constructing graphic spaces and creating a mood. His creative aspirations are directed toward the search for diverse methods: combining classical drawing with a fantastic environment, changing the tonality of the engraving, shifting scale relationships, and maintaining a serious attitude toward the owner of the bookplate and the “hero” of the image. It is also important that in his bookplates the artist persistently leads the viewer toward the need for a philosophical comprehension of the action and a deep immersion in the world depicted. Possessing a sufficiently developed concept and understanding of compositional and plastic tasks, together with the use of formal and technical methods and means, becomes a stimulus that drives the creator to search for and discover new horizons for himself. Above all, this concerns the understanding of the classical, traditional and contemporary bookplate. The clarity of the artist’s position is largely explained by his unchanging attitude toward the theme (the sequence of events), toward its stylistic interpretation (observance of certain rules and the relationship of the image to the plane, scale and texture), and toward the staged illustration (a performance synthesizing various aspects of worldview). (For example, the bookplate of Zawistovscich, 1991, and A. van Waterhoot, 1992.)

The author’s position is a path of improvisation, a path of revelation and artistry. This substantial and important stage has now come to an end. The artist’s small graphic art has acquired recognizability.

It is difficult to say whether G. Bosenko will encounter a new form of representation and enter an “another” creative world, but there seems to be no doubt that he has succeeded in entering today’s graphic art.