Where the artist begins: Andrei Konchalovsky talks about the evolution of art over the past two centuries

In his new book, Andrei Konchalovsky, a classic of Russian filmmaking, reflects on how technological progress has changed the way information is perceived, including visual information. The author, who acts not only as a venerable director, but also as a cultural critic, sees the main tragedy of modern man in the loss of the ability to contemplate, necessary for communication with art. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week — especially for Izvestia.

Andrey Konchalovsky

"Time has no price: conversations about art"

Moscow: Eksmo, 2026. 184 p.

Today's mass consumer of information, according to Konchalovsky's observations, "is in a hurry for changes, changes, runs with his eyes after a moving object and does not know how to concentrate, stop, look into himself — and what does he feel? He doesn't know how to literally immerse himself in contemplation, take his time, forget that time is money."

The first chapter is called "Image and image" — this is generally a key dichotomy for the whole book, which Konchalovsky eventually formulates as follows: "The image of a person is a statement of his existence. If we see in this image its essence, which is penetration "beyond the surface", then it becomes an image... <...> ... an image is penetration into the essence, an image is sliding along the surface." This leads to another cognitive problem, besides the inability to slow down and take the necessary time to thoughtfully contemplate the surrounding reality: very rarely can a person create an adequate image of himself and understand himself. According to Konchalovsky, modern "selfie addiction" only exacerbates the situation and reflects only "the desire to look better than in reality and conform to some modern idea of beauty."

In the second chapter — "Grandfather, great-grandfather, Surikov, mother… The Origins" Konchalovsky moves from criticism of modernity to memoiristics, which seems important to him in the continuation of the same conversation about the image and the image. Remembering his grandfather, the artist Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky, his grandson uses the literary technique of "letters to the past." A few years ago, Andrei Sergeevich wrote a letter to his grandfather, which he did not think to write to him during his lifetime, because then he was "interested in completely different things": for him, the recognized painter Pyotr Konchalovsky was first of all a grandfather and only then an artist.

Photo: IZVESTIA/Zurab Javakhadze

There are many interesting art criticism reflections in this letter (in particular, about why Peter Konchalovsky and Pablo Picasso turned out to be antipodean artists, although both considered themselves heirs of Paul Cezanne). But the most vivid pages are not connected with theorizing, but with sensual impressions of smells and paints, with the author's childhood memories of how he helped his grandfather in the workshop: "I know the smell of turpentine and grated paints that you gave me to put on the palette."… And these magical names of amazing flowers, the origin of which you patiently explained to me, are volkonite, umbria, burnt sienna, ultramarine!.." Many warm pages are devoted in this chapter to Andrei Sergeevich's mother, Natalia Petrovna Konchalovskaya, the granddaughter of the artist Vasily Surikov, who was born into a family with the richest cultural traditions.

She dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but her illness changed her fate: how Natalia Arinbasarova conquered the Soviet audience

Bright roles, a triumph in Venice and fateful meetings in the life of the actress

From the perspective of a full—fledged heir to these traditions, Konchalovsky returns to the criticism of modern visual art in the next chapter, the title of which speaks for itself: "From the Black Square to the Black Hole." Stating that Western civilization and culture have exhausted themselves at the present stage because they have replaced artistic value with market value, Konchalovsky contemptuously mentions Andy Warhol's "handicrafts" and Salvador Dali's cynical aphorism: "I am rich because the world is full of cretins."

In his rejection of modernity, the author finds many reputable supporters, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in his speech "Exhaustion of Culture?" called utilitarianism the main problem of Western art, and Oswald Spengler. The German pessimist predicted the death of art due to a break with tradition in his famous 1918 work "The Decline of Europe", where he spoke about how, along with the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart's music, "the last eye and the last ear to which the language of their forms was accessible" would disappear. And at the end of the conversation about the fraudulent nature of modern art, Konchalovsky quotes a long quote from Tatiana Tolstoy's 1999 essay "The Square", where she fiercely exposes the dark background of Kazimir Malevich's painting: "Malevich deliberately hung a black square hole in a sacred place: he called his work "an icon of our time." Instead of red, black (zero colors), instead of a face, a gap (zero lines), instead of an icon, that is, a window up into the light, into eternal life, darkness, a basement, a trapdoor to hell, eternal darkness..."

Photo: IZVESTIA/Anna Selina

Never missing the theme of time stated in the title of the book, Konchalovsky sincerely sympathizes with the modern Western man, "dried up by consumption" and unable to find time to concentrate on serious art and literature: "You need to listen to Tchaikovsky's Symphony for 10 or 20 minutes before you begin to immerse yourself in it. To read Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, you need a sacrifice — time." These considerations are directly related to the problem of image and image: the modern mass consumer of art prefers a quick surface perception of the image instead of a deep perception of the image.

In the chapter "Photography. A View of the World" Konchalovsky traces the dichotomy of image and image in the context of the juxtaposition of cinema and photography. I must say that the director is quite ruthless towards cinema: if real art is supposed to make the viewer a collaborator and excite the imagination, then cinema "usually offers an image that leaves no room for imagination. Strictly speaking, cinema is vulgar and rude in its impact, as it forcibly imposes on you the point of view of the cameraman and the director." Especially in the modern world, where there are no directors left who would think about the meaning of each frame, as Robert Bresson or Ingmar Bergman did with their unhurried rhythm and love of a static camera.: "The great directors Bergman and Bresson, who realized that every frame of a film can be an event, advanced the art of cinematography."

Photo: IZVESTIA/Pavel Volkov

In the same prefinal chapter, using the classics of photography as an example, Konchalovsky asks the most important question of the entire book: how to distinguish a strong professional, of whom there are many in any art, from a real artist? According to the director, "an artist begins where philosophy begins, where photography is not just a fixation of reality, but an expression of a certain, individual worldview." Recalling the artists who not only painted portraits, but at the same time penetrated into the essence of a person, turning an image into an image, the author of the book formulates in the final lines of the book his own mission as a representative of traditional culture, focusing not on the greedy devouring of pictorial content, but on in—depth leisurely contemplation, immersion in the essence: "The task of man is to see the invisible behind the visible. The artist's task is to rise up and show the invisible to the ordinary viewer..."