Zurab K. Tsereteli, a Georgian-Russian artist whose towering monuments and heroic statues pleased the authorities in the Kremlin but drew scorn from Moscow to New Jersey, died on Tuesday at his home outside Moscow. He was 91.
His death was announced by Sergei Shagulashvili, his assistant. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent a condolence note to Mr. Tsereteli’s family, calling him “an outstanding representative of multinational Russian culture.”
An admirer of Mr. Putin, Mr. Tsereteli unveiled a towering bronze statue of him in 2004, dressed in a belted judo tunic. (The work was so poorly received, however, that it remained with Mr. Tsereteli at his gallery.)
Mr. Tsereteli’s exuberant work largely defined post-Soviet Russian aesthetics. Flamboyant and vivacious, he was able to charm his way across geopolitical boundaries in earning the position of unofficial court artist in the Kremlin in the 1990s while also working with the government of his native Georgia as it tried to distance itself from Moscow.
In Georgia, where many locals condemned him for staying in Russia, he built the Freedom Monument in Tbilisi, the capital, which replaced a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the main square after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
In Russia, Mr. Tsereteli led teams that created some of the country’s biggest post-Soviet monuments, signaling a departure from the austere, geometric style of the Communist era in favor of colorful capitalist kitsch — to the chagrin of much of Moscow’s intelligentsia.
In the 1990s, he helped present the face of a new Moscow by designing the country’s first Western-style underground shopping mall, in Manege Square, next to the Kremlin. Some said the mall, its roof adorned with gaudy fairy-tale figurines, had ruined the square forever.
He was later commissioned to create, as an official gift from Russia to the United States, a monument dedicated to the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The monument, a 10-story-tall bronze-plated slab split by a fissure with an immense nickel-surfaced teardrop inside, was to be erected in Jersey City, N.J. But in 2004, municipal officials there rejected it. A local arts society described the work as “an insensitive, self-aggrandizing piece of pompousness.” It was finally installed in Bayonne, N.J., in 2006.
Mr. Tsereteli’s colossal bronze statue of Christopher Columbus in Puerto Rico also drew criticism, both for its aesthetics and for its historical context. Situated off the beaten path along the northern coast and rising 350 feet — the tallest statue in the Western Hemisphere — the monument features a towering Columbus standing on the deck of a smaller sailing ship, one hand on the ship’s wheel and the other raised to the sky, with three ship’s sails behind him.
Some called it an eyesore when it was completed in 2016. And many Puerto Ricans objected to its presence, citing the violence against native populations during Columbus’s time in the Caribbean.
Mr. Tsereteli had originally wanted to give the monument to the United States in 1992, to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. But every U.S. city he approached, including New York, Boston, Miami and Columbus, Ohio, turned it down.
Mr. Tsereteli’s oversize statues have been erected elsewhere around the world, including at the United Nations in New York and in London, Rome and Tokyo. In the process he forged personal connections abroad. He was acquainted with President Trump, with whom he shared a love of pomp and grandiosity. Speaking to The New Yorker magazine in 1997, Mr. Trump called Mr. Tsereteli “major and legit.”
Mr. Tsereteli’s fame reached its climax in 1997, when he installed a gaudy 321-foot-tall statue glorifying Peter the Great in the middle of Moscow, a city Peter was known to dislike. Similar to the Columbus monument, the piece puts an imperial-looking Peter in a disproportionately small sailing ship with its mast and sails rising behind him.
The public revolted. People signed petitions, accusing Mr. Tsereteli of tastelessness. The city was plastered with stickers crying, “Down with the Czar!” A fringe left-wing group said it had plans to blow up the monument.
But after Mr. Tsereteli’s death, even the arbiters of good taste, who made it fashionable to revile his work, began to sing his praises. Some lauded him as a shrewd administrator who defended and helped many artists in trouble, financially or otherwise. Others said that while his enormous statues were overbearing, his paintings and drawings showed a more elegant and tender side of his talent.
“He was a truly gifted artist,” Grigory Revzin, a Russian critic, wrote in an obituary in Kommersant, a Russian business daily. “He had a phenomenal sense of color, and he was primarily a painter.”
Marat Guelman, a Russian gallerist and longtime opponent of Mr. Tsereteli, said that while his sculptures were “odious and tasteless,” he was still an important figure in Russian art whose legacy would last.
“Today we understand this was not the worst thing that could happen to us,” Mr. Gelman, a former spin doctor for the Kremlin who became a vocal critic of it and left Russia, wrote in a post on Facebook.
In 1999, Mr. Tsereteli founded the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, a vibrant institution — currently led by his grandson Vasily Tsereteli — that houses a collection of major Russian works. The museum has mounted shows spotlighting up-and-coming Russian artists as well as retrospective exhibitions honoring leading artists whose works were banned during the Soviet period.
Mr. Tsereteli also founded a modern art museum in Tbilisi. On Thursday and Friday, hundreds of people went there to pay him their last respects. He was buried in the capital on Saturday, in the Didube Pantheon, alongside his wife, Inessa Andronikashvili, and many Georgian cultural figures.
In Moscow, a farewell ceremony was held on Wednesday in Christ Our Saviour, the country’s main Orthodox cathedral. Mr. Tsereteli had helped decorate it in the 1990s.
Zurab Konstantinovich Tsereteli was born on Jan. 4, 1934, in Tbilisi, when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Tbilisi Academy of Arts in 1958 and in 1960 began working as a staff artist at the Georgian Academy of Sciences, taking part in many research expeditions.
In 1964, he went to Paris, where he met Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso and discovered that an artist can make not just paintings but also sculptures and porcelain and ceramic works. On his return to the Soviet Union, he began decorating resorts on the Black Sea with colorful mosaic-clad fountains, bus stops and playgrounds that helped give the area its splashy flavor.
For much of his career Mr. Tsereteli thrived on official commissions from the Soviet and Russian political elite. In the 1970s and ’80s, he did design work for Soviet embassies and the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s summer house on the Black Sea. He was appointed chief artist of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
In the 1990s, growing close to Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of Moscow, Mr. Tsereteli worked on multiple projects in the city, including the giant Victory Park, one of the first nation-building projects of modern Russia. He was elected president of the Russian Academy of Art in 1997.
He is survived by his daughter, Yelena; three grandchildren; and many great-grandchildren.
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