The Soviet Artist Who Painted Titans 30 Years Before Attack on Titan

[00:00:00]This is a closeup from a painting by Vaseli [music] Schul Shenko and it might be the most unsettling giant in any painting. What makes this face so hard to look at? Why does the child not react to it? And why does it look like it walked out of Attack on Titan decades early? Today we're going to look at a pattern in Vasili Shushenko's work, his habit of painting giants into ordinary Russian life and the contrast in how the people in the paintings never seem to notice them. It's a pattern that points at the giants being a metaphor for the social problems Russia faced across Yolchenko's lifetime. For over 40 years, he has painted a dark, absurd version of everyday Russian life, sitting somewhere between realism and a bad dream. Russian critics file him under grotesque realism. He paints the people and places official Russia prefers not to show.

[00:00:47]village drunks, [music] public restrooms, scenes already in decay before the people arrive. The figures often distorted by drink and laughter, and he doesn't hold back on the harsh truth. Scholchenko has stated in an interview that his working principle is simple, not to pity and not to judge.

[00:01:04]And in another interview, he explained where his characters actually comes from. Childhood summers spent at a dhaka [music] outside of Casimov, a small town southeast of Moscow where he watched the local villagers year after year. He never lived among the people he paints, he says, and never tried to climb into their souls. He simply observed them and started painting them much later. And he has real institutional standing. His paintings hang in the Tritakov Gallery in Moscow, the country's [music] main museum of Russian art. The institutions also settle which painter he gets measured against. The comparison critics keeps reaching for is Bugal. Scholenko paints posts Soviet Russia the way Bugal painted 16th century [music] Flanders from inside at eye level without flattering. Keep that eye level in mind.

[00:01:49]It's about to matter. Back to the painting from the opening. This is where the eye level comes in because Joelchenko has put the viewer inside somebody's home standing in the middle of their room. The room takes one glance to read. A child asleep in an iron bed.

[00:02:04]Dinner things still out. Close thrown over a chair. Then the window which is open and through it the courtyard.

[00:02:10]yellow and green apartment blocks, a red roof between them. Crossing the yard mid-frame is a naked giant, thin, balding, arm [music] swinging. On his way somewhere, and then the face filling the right half of the window is the head of a second giant, [music] and he reads as enormous next to the walking one.

[00:02:28]Though part of that is simple perspective, because this one is closer to us, the viewer, [music] it is hard to pinpoint exactly what it is the giant is looking at. Joenko has placed the eye close enough to the glass that the question of what he's looking at becomes the whole painting. If this composition feels familiar, there's a reason. A giant face appearing over a man-made boundary is the image Attack on Titan built its first episode [music] around.

[00:02:52]And Scholenko's giants naked, worn, oddly proportioned, looks strikingly like Isyama's Titans painted years earlier. Whether Isyama ever saw these paintings, nobody has confirmed. So treat the resemblance as a question rather than a lineage. But the difference between the two is the point of this video. In Attack on Titan, the face over the wall is the end of the world, and everything that follows is people reacting to it. In this painting, the face is at the window and the child doesn't seem to notice or care, which begs the question of why.

[00:03:26]Compositionally, the canvas is split in two, the room and the courtyard. With the window [music] as the dividing line, everything inside the line signals normality and routine. Everything outside of it is at the wrong scale and totally unexplainable. The two halves don't interact. The giants stay out while the routine carries on and the only figure disturbed by the arrangement is us the viewer. Or set in other words, the one who doesn't live here. [music] A possible answer to the painting's weird contraption is the child itself. If the giants are a metaphor for social problems in Russia, like alcoholism or poverty, then this is a child growing up next to those problems and a child exposed to social problems from a young age learns to live with it. Or in other words, you don't lose sleep over what has always been outside your window.

[00:04:15]Scholenko has spoken about this reflex himself. In an interview, he described how differently his two audiences take his paintings. American viewers, he said, respond with pity how much these people must endure, how hard the conditions they survive in are, while Russian viewers find the scenes unpleasant and would rather act as if they didn't exist. In other [music] words, the people inside the painting treat the giants exactly the way Scholenko says his Russian audience treats [music] his paintings. They refuse to look at the problem and life carries on around it. The child sleeps because from inside this room, nothing unusual is happening. The [music] second painting in this video leaves the city and scales the same idea up to a whole landscape. The composition is a single diagonal and the body of the giant [music] is this exact diagonal. A man lies on his back with his head in the upper left of the frame and his boots in the lower right down where a river bends past him [music] and the viewer is above him looking down at an angle no person in the painting could occupy. The giant is dressed [music] and this is worth pausing on in a work coat and trousers and tall boots. the clothes of a man from any Russian village of the last 100 years. His head is lifted just clear of the ground and he seems to be looking down the length of his own body out towards his boots and the [music] land beyond them. And around the body, the land continues. There is a house on the river bank with dark windows and fields and a bridge further off. And up on the rise in the upper [music] right, a cluster of pale buildings with two towers among them, a church and what reads [music] as a bell tower. the brightest thing in the frame. Nothing reacts to the giant. No crowd, no one gathered to look and the village is laid out around him. The way it would be laid out around a hill. What the painting refuses to answer is the harder question. Why a conscious man is lying full length in a field and making no move to [music] get up. The slack open hand and the sprawled body read as collapse rather than rest. And the clothes offer the plainest explanation.

[00:06:18]This is the outfit worn by the men in Schol Shenko's ordinary paintings.

[00:06:22]Shenko's normal scale work is full of men lying where they fell. And in those paintings, the reason is drinking. The catalog notes that accompany his auction sales say it outright, figures distorted by alcoholism. And Shel Shenko himself, when a Chicago gallery owner asked whether his paintings could feature a little less vodka and fewer cigarettes, answered that his characters could not be imagined sober. put this figure at ordinary size and he becomes [music] a painting Shenko has already made many times. So, the giant may be that same man at the true size of the problem, something the village cannot move and has learned to build around instead. The composition backs this up because the sheds keep their distance and the river simply bends past his boots. [music] The way you route everything around what you've stopped trying to fix. The third painting goes back to the city into a courtyard like the one outside the child's window of [music] the kind Petersburg is famous for the enclosed well of apartment blocks. Four and five stories of identical windows on every side. It's the Petersburg of Dusteski.

[00:07:24]The closed yards and stairwells Rascalikov moves through in Crime [music] and Punishment. And that's not a decoration because when an interviewer once asked Shenko which writer stood closest to him, his answer was Dustki.

[00:07:37]He added that even Demons, the bleakest of the novels, leaves him with a sense of something great and [music] far from hopeless. Hold on to that phrase, far from hopeless, because it matters for how this painting ends up reading.

[00:07:50]Seated on the ground of this courtyard, filling it are two naked giants holding each other. One has dark hair and clings with the face buried completely. The other holds on with both arms, head bowed over the first one's shoulder, eyes down or closed. [music] And his hands presses flat against the other's back. The way you hold someone who might otherwise come apart. Their bodies reach the third and fourth floor. And the bodies are the point because Chenko paints them the way he paints [music] everything. Aged, sagging, rip showing, scaled up until they no longer fit inside the architecture. Now the windows, dozens of them [music] on every wall. And as far as I can tell, all of them are empty. The scale of the embrace guarantees that everyone in the block can see it. So the emptiness reads as a decision. The block is choosing not to look. That's the same reflex Shenko described in his Russian audience, the ones who would rather act as if these scenes [music] didn't exist, and it matches how his country handled these problems officially. For most of Shenko's lifetime, the Soviet state treated its social problems as non-existent. Homelessness was officially a myth kept invisible by prosecuting the homeless as parasites and alcohol statistics were kept scars.

[00:09:02]The empty windows [music] repeat that policy at household scale. And the reading holes whichever social problem the giants stand for. Alcoholism, poverty, homelessness and [music] even domestic abuse. And the classic Soviet building block around the giants sharpened the reading because Soviet housing was built to a quota. The state defined how many square meters a person needed to live. the so-called sanitary norm around 9 square meters per person and these apartment blocks are that calculation poured in concrete painting two people at this scale inside the architecture reads as a protest against [music] the quota human beings drawn deliberately too big for the boxes the state built them for and the protest [music] connects directly to the tenderness because look at what the two of them are doing out there and embrace this private would usually happen indoors but not in apartments measured out at 9 square m per person with every window facing the same yard. That's the warmer reading and the intimacy the nakedness [music] displays supports it.

[00:09:59]The embrace contains no threat. The two giants are simply holding on to each other and across the free paintings.

[00:10:05]This is the only moment where love or any kind of human connection is displayed and it passes between the giants [music] themselves because nobody at the windows offers any. If the giants are the social problems themselves scaled up to match the size of their effect on the society, then the painting [music] points at something true about how people survive them. When the state denies the social problems, love and connection are often the only resource a person has left. And that resource does real work, it reaches the same pain that alcohol is used to numb. And where the men in Schol Shenko's other paintings [music] drink the weight away, these two hold it together instead. This embrace is the counter image to every drunk in his catalog. The nakedness works here the way it usually works in art history.

[00:10:50]Vulnerability and intimacy rather than eroticism. Being held like this requires being fully seen with nothing left to hide behind. As we near the end of this video, it's worth stepping back from the three paintings to see what they do as a set. Across all three, the setup is identical. A [music] giant appears in an ordinary Russian scene and nobody in the painting reacts. The painters who came before Shenko staged the giant as [music] an event. Goya's colossals rises over a fleeing crowd and the entire canvas is the panic. Shenko cuts the panic out and that removal is the whole point. His giants are the social problems his country [music] lived with and refused to name. The drinking, the poverty, the homelessness painted at the scale of their real effect. So large they should be impossible to miss. And in every painting, everyone misses [music] them on purpose. Thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next