[X-Folk] Pictures at an Exhibition 1/5

[Menshevik]

DISCLAIMER: This is an unauthorized work of fiction using characters that
are (c) & TM by Marvel Comics Group. No profit is being made on this story,
so I'll invoke The Marvel Readers' Bill of Rights (for the full text see
_Stan's Soapbox_ in some of the May 1998 comics, e.g. _Generation X_ #38):
"8. The right to practice scripting and drawing our Marvel characters for
your own pleasure and amusement."
The story and the original characters in it (for a list, see the end notes)
are (c) Tilman Stieve (Mens...@aol.com). You can download this and copy
it for your entertainment, but don't sell it for profit, or Marvel will set
their lawyers on you. Please do not archive this on your website without
informing me first.
"Pictures at an Exhibition" belongs to the continuing series, the Tales of
the Twilight Menshevik; it interconnects with a few other stories, but
should be understandable on its own. It is set in an alternative future,
about thirteen years after the death of most of the X-Men on 2 September,
2013.

You can find the other Tales archived on "Fonts of Wisdom"
(http://home.att.net/~lubakmetyk/), "Down-Home Charm"
(http://www.public.asu.edu/~alykat/X-Men/Rogue/rogue.htm), "MissyRedX: The
Average Website" (http://members.xoom.com/MissyRedX/index.htm), and
"Stacy's Fan-Fiction Page"
(http://stacyr.ne.mediaone.net/fanfic/).


_Pictures at an Exhibition, or: The Draughtsman's Account_

By Tilman Stieve ake the Menshevik (Mens...@aol.com)

000
Welcome to "Breakstone LAKE Baikal", an exhibition of drawings and
paintings by Piotr Rasputin at the X-Men Museum in Xavier Mansion,
sponsored by Worthington Industries, the Charles Francis Xavier Foundation
and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. To use this recorded
guided tour, just scan or punch in the numbered codes next to the exhibits
and at the entrances to the galleries, and press the PLAY button. Feel free
to use the seating provided to listen to the more lengthy explanations.
Should you prefer to hear the tour in a language other than English, punch
001 for the language setting menu. This tour is available in Russian,
Spanish, French, German, Shi'ar, Japanese and Chinese. The starting point
in the first gallery is code-numbered 100.
For an account of the history of Xavier Mansion, please press 010.
For a brief history of the X-Men and the related teams, please press 020.
For an outline of the aims of the Xavier Foundation, please press 030.
A multimedia introduction to the exhibition is on show every full and half
hour in the former kitchen.

100
Piotr Nikolaevich Rasputin, a second-wave X-Man, went on to achieve world
wide fame after the end of his superhero career as Colossus. He continues
to be associated with the team's former members and the existing teams
descended from the X-Men, thus his oeuvre contains many portraits of mutant
heroes and heroines both living and dead. Given the X-Men Museum's focus,
the exhibition concentrates on these, even though that makes it not
entirely representative of the artist's work as a whole. Piotr Rasputin is
after all is best known to art historians as an abstract painter, but that
aspect will be more exhaustively covered in next year's retrospective at
the Museum of Modern Art.
This first gallery begins with some of Piotr Rasputin's earliest works,
from the time before his mutation became manifest and he was recruited by
Professor Charles Xavier.
For a potted biography of the artist, please punch 101.

110
Daddy fixing the combine harvester (1986).
The artist's father, Nikolai Rasputin, sketched at a forced pause during
the wheat harvest at the Ust-Ordynski collective farm, nearly four years
before Piotr joined the X-Men. This is from the artist's oldest surviving
sketchpad and already shows a bit of promise for the future. Nikolai
Rasputin's face is mostly obscured by the hat he wore to shield him from
the intense sun of late Siberian summer, but notice the exquisite detail in
the muscles of the lower arm and the hand gripping the spanner.

115
Misha in Space (1988)
The artist's elder brother Mikhail was a cosmonaut in the Soviet space
program and not surprisingly became a source of fierce local and family
pride. Also not unnaturally he was idolized by his younger brother, who
chose him as his subject for his first attempt at a full-sized water-color
painting at Chapayev High School. Piotr Rasputin received top marks for
this portrait, which however is testimony not only to the young artist's
raw talent, but also to the way he then conformed to his teacher's artistic
guidelines. Fyodor Grigorenko, whose father's paintings had been awarded a
Stalin Prize, was a conservative by the standards of his time, upholding
the principles of Soviet Realism. Grigorenko's teachings were to exert a
great influence on Piotr Rasputin's work for years to come and this
probably was one of the reasons why he continued to draw and paint
realistically for so long. After his exposure to different styles in the US
and British scene he did develop his realism in ways not foreseen by his
first mentor, but one recalls one critic's remark at one of his first
exhibits: "Rasputin gives his male portraits jaws strong enough to crack
Brazil nuts -- maybe he should consider a career in adventure comics."
Please press 116 to listen to Piotr Rasputin remembering his time as Fyodor
Grigorenko's pupil.

116
Piotr Rasputin: "Fyodor Ivanich was a popular teacher, but a bit eccentric
-- we students called him Dyadya Fedya, Uncle Fedya -- behind his back. He
loved the pictures of his father very much and was very sad because every
year there were fewer of them in museums and public buildings. Even the
state-sanctioned art establishment had passed Ivan Grigorenko by years
before... But Fyodor Ivanich was a great teacher. He taught me many
techniques, some just the basics, others more completely, and he always had
the right advice or help when I needed it, when I was running into
problems. And he always encouraged me to push myself. For example, when I
was barely sixteen, he asked me to paint a big akvarel', er, watercolor of
my brother Misha, who was a big local hero as a cosmonaut. And you know you
can't make many mistakes with watercolors... or you have to start all over
from the beginning. But after several attempts it worked out surprisingly
well. I was very proud and happy I did it to Fyodor Ivanovich's
satisfaction. I am looking at the portrait with new eyes now, but still
have to say it is not bad for a sixteen-year-old.
Fyodor Ivanich was from Rostov on the Don, originally, and two years after
I joined the X-Men he retired. I met him again, once, years later. He was
not having an easy life -- because of inflation his pension was worth very
little, so he painted landscapes to sell to make money, but not many
tourists come to Irkutsk, so he was thinking of moving back west of the
Ural."

117
Mikhail Nikolaevich Rasputin (1988)
This second portrait of the artist's elder brother was drawn later in the
same year as the watercolor painting. In the meantime tragedy had struck
the Rasputin family: Mikhail was missing, believed dead after his last
space flight. This portrait was intended for the family living-room.
Partly because of the sadness of the occasion Piotr Rasputin chose charcoal
as his medium. In this somewhat idealized portrait, Mikhail Rasputin is
shown against a dark, cross-hatched background, wearing his cosmonaut's
military uniform and decorations, including that of a Hero of the Soviet
Union which was awarded posthumously.

119
Twilight Over Lake Baikal, Summer (1989)
Lake Baikal is a subject to which Piotr Rasputin would keep returning in
later years, but this pastel drawing is one of the few of his pictures of
the world's largest body of fresh water that was painted from nature. For
most of the Baikal pictures he created afterwards he would have to rely on
photographs and his memory.

130
Xavier Mansion (1990)
Joining the X-Men in his costumed identity Colossus meant that Piotr
Rasputin became separated from his family for a long time. He had to keep
in touch by mail, and normally would enclose a few sketches in his letters.
These sketches were usually done in pencil, occasionally also using a pen
or ball-point. The picture before you is one of the bigger ones he did at
the time and had to be folded several times to fit into the envelope. Since
the artist regarded his sketches as mere illustrations, he also did not
hesitate to write his explanatory remarks onto the drawings. The legend in
blue ink at the top translates as "Xavier Mansion from the back". The arrow
to the window in the second floor says: "My room". Note the unusual
signature: 'Koloss', the Russian translation of the code-name Charles
Xavier gave him.
For a guide to the Library and a description of Alicia Masters' bust of
Charles Xavier, please press 131.

133
Fall in Westchester (1990)
A rarity for the artist's stage of development at the time, this neo-
Impressionist watercolor (which may actually have started out as a study
for a larger and more detailed picture) shows Piotr Rasputin's wonder at
the spectacular bright colors of the trees and bushes in the Xavier estate
during his first fall in America. It was so different from the autumn at
home in Siberia. The shapes of the trees here become secondary to the
multitude of shades of yellow, red, orange and brown, with the dark green
of the conifers and evergreens providing the counterpoint.

134
Kurt Wagner (1990/1991)
Piotr Rasputin described his teammates and friends to his family, including
this page of sketches of Nightcrawler. The pensive facial study top left
may have been made during a team briefing, while the dynamic full-body
picture in the center, where Nightcrawler parries an attack with his epee,
must have been made when the artist watched his friend during a Danger Room
exercise. The third sketch shows Kurt Wagner with his later wife, Amanda
Sefton. Piotr Rasputin got to know her quite well, as he and his then
girlfriend Betsy Wilford frequently double dated with her and Kurt.

139
Fahé, Nereel and Shakani (1999)
Many of the sketches and paintings Piotr Rasputin drew during his early
days with the X-Men were lost to posterity for a variety of reasons --
because he felt dissatisfied with them and threw them away, or because they
were destroyed during the artist's travels with the team or when the places
where he lived were damaged or looted. Most of the surviving works from
that period were those the artist gave away to friends who lived outside
the Mansion or mailed to his family in Siberia. Sadly that means that a
number of important facets of Piotr Rasputin's life in the early 1990s
cannot be illustrated by contemporary works of his -- in some cases this is
accidental, in others it is because he considered the subject matters too
intimate to give pictures of them to teammates or relatives. Consequently,
although it is known that Rasputin drew a great many sketches of the
ballerina Anya Makarova, not a single one of them is known to have
survived, and there appears to be only one drawing left of Betsy Wilford,
who went out with Piotr Rasputin during late 1990 and early 1991: a
discarded unfinished sketch that happened to be preserved because the
artist used the other side of the sheet for another picture.
All the sketches of the women Piotr Rasputin met during the X-Men's sojourn
with the Fall People of the Savage Land in 1991 were lost. At the time he
considered the series of nudes and semi-nudes to 'risqué' to send home to
his parents and sister. "I was afraid it might give them ideas ... and
correct ones at that," he recalled when interviewed by the makers of this
exhibition. However, we can present one of the artist's later works to fill
the gap, a painting done in 1999, mostly from memory.
Here we are shown three friends Piotr made during his first stay in the
Savage Land. The woman on your right is Shakani, who sadly was killed by a
large predator in 1991, and the one on the left is Fahé, who became one of
the victims of Terminus' attack on the Savage Land two years later. Between
them stands Nereel, later the head of the United Tribes and consort of the
artist. She asked him for a picture to commemorate the occasion and her two
late friends, and Piotr Rasputin painted them as he vividly remembered
them: as three young, desirable and mostly naked young women full of the
joy of life. Note that at the lower right edge the artist placed himself,
or to be precise, you can see part of his left hand holding his sketchpad,
with the end of his pencil also visible.