In 1962 Khrushchev called his work degenerate art and threatened him with the uranium mines. Twelve years later, the sculptor carved Khrushchev's own gravestone.
On December 1, 1962, at an exhibition in Moscow's Manege, Nikita Khrushchev stopped in front of sculptor Ernst Neizvestny's work and began shouting that it was "dog's filth" and that a donkey could paint better with its tail. By Neizvestny's own account, the Soviet leader, in the heat of the argument, questioned his manhood. Neizvestny replied that he could prove otherwise right then, and offered to have a woman brought in.
Alexander Shelepin, who was present, told Neizvestny that this was no way to speak to the head of state and reminded him of the uranium mines. Neizvestny, a wounded veteran who had been seriously injured in Austria in 1945 and decorated with the Order of the Red Star, answered that he was not afraid of threats and that Khrushchev did not know whom he was addressing. The argument continued in a side room, where Neizvestny insisted that the chairman simply did not understand art. Soon afterward, he was expelled from the Union of Artists.
In 1974, four years after Khrushchev's death, his son approached Neizvestny himself to design his gravestone for Novodevichy Cemetery, although another sculptor had first been asked. The finished monument, where light and dark stone collide, was made in exactly the style that had so angered Khrushchev at that exhibition.
In 1976 Neizvestny emigrated to Switzerland, and a year later moved to the United States, where he lectured at New York University, Harvard, Yale and Columbia. The Don Foundation collection holds three of his works: the bronzes "Hermaphrodite" and "Centaur," and the 1960 drypoint etching "Crucifixion," built on the same clash of black and white, the same sharp, conflicted sense of form, as the scene at the Manege.
