Amaravella
Amaravella was a group of artists with an intuitive approach to creativity, who also described themselves as “cosmists.” They found inspiration in the space of the spiritual, the unearthly and the mystical. The group came together spontaneously. In 1922, Boris Smirnov-Rusetsky, a young artist influenced by Vasily Kandinsky, Nicholas Roerich, and Mikalojus Čiurlionis, met Pyotr Fateev, who was knowledgeable about theosophy and whose life and artistic practice were influenced by the teachings of P.D. Ouspensky, as formulated in his book The Fourth Dimension. Later, Rusetsky met artist and musician Aleksandr Sardan: their encounter took place at the Museum of Artistic Culture, by Malevich’s Black Square, which sparked their conversation. In 1924, Vera Pshesetskaya joined the group. She was an artist, poet, and actress who used the pseudonym Runa and was interested in Egyptian culture and mysticism and the secrets of the Egyptian Tarot. This may have been partly as a result of her brief marriage to P.D. Ouspensky, a mystic and occultist who was influential in Moscow circles and collaborated with George Gurdjieff. In 1926, the group were joined by Sergei Shigolev and later, for one of the group’s few international exhibitions (International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York, 1927), by Viktor Chernovolenko.
The prospect of an international exhibition, organized with Roerich’s assistance, encouraged the group to think of a name and a manifesto. Aleksandr Sardan (or possibly Roerich) suggested the name Amaravella, which in Sanskrit “stands for ‘space,’ ‘ocean,’ or ‘radiation,’ ‘expansion’, and is associated with creative energy.”1 The artists were looking for common ground that would define their projects. “We proclaimed (and later tried to formulate our beliefs in a manifesto [...]) what we called living creativity, or the bringing of knowledge to life. You can find these ideas in Andrei Bely, in Tagore, and in theosophical works.”2 Together with their name, the group formulated “the key creative points” of Amaravella:
- The work of art should speak for itself to the person who is able to hear what it says.
- This cannot be taught.
- How strong and convincing the work is depends on how deeply the artist penetrates the original source of the creative impulse and the inner meaning of that source.
- Our creativity, which is largely intuitive, is directed at the exploration of various aspects of the cosmos, be it through human appearance, landscapes or visualizations of abstract images that belong to the inner world.
- As we work toward this goal, the technical aspect of art is of secondary importance and has no independent value.
- Therefore, our works should not be approached rationally or analytically but emotionally and empathically. Then the thought behind them will be attainable.3
The group came to a tragic end. Runa was arrested in 1930 and her artistic legacy has been almost entirely lost. Sardan, who was imprisoned in the same year, more or less abandoned art after his release, but worked on popular science films, such as Crystals: The Color of the Earth. After the outbreak of war, Chernovolenko stopped making art (he resumed only after his retirement) and began working in a military factory. Shigolev became an animator but was arrested during political purges in 1942. The time and place of his death are unknown. Smirnov-Rusetsky was also arrested in 1941 and spent 14 years in the camps. Fateev spent the rest of his life in seclusion, deliberately avoiding showing his work in public.