Career Paths

Dozens of Russian surrealist paintings of colorful landscapes and portraits line the small room behind Kenneth Pushkin’s gallery on Santa Fe’s world famous Canyon Road. The paintings survived decades of Soviet Russia’s fierce regulation and persecution.

Pushkin said many of the works have to sit in the back room because he has so many and he can’t put them all in the gallery.

Pushkin, 59, moved to New Mexico from Baltimore in 1970 and attended UNM as an Art major. Due to financial troubles brought on by the death of his mother, Pushkin left school to find work and travel. Pushkin took a trip to Russia in 1992, just three years after the USSR’s collapse. The trip, he said, inspired him to collect Soviet-era art, which was finally open to the public.

“When I went to Russia I was introduced to the opportunity to acquire this Soviet-era art, which was just sort of a new idea and just coming out; people were just looking at it for the first time,” he said.

After collecting and selling the art from a warehouse, Pushkin decided to open his own gallery, which features the life’s work of post-World War Russian artists such as Boris Chetkov and Vasily Golubev, both of whom painted art not authorized by the USSR. They were later persecuted.

He said his passion for art has kept him in the business for 17 years, in spite of the financial burden of trying to make a living selling art during hard economic times.

He said he focuses mainly on Russian modern and Soviet-era art because he reveres the artists for what they had to go through for their art.

“I have the greatest respect and admiration for artists who did their art even though it was against the grain of Soviet society.” He said. “They risked everything just because they were so compelled to fulfill their artistic vision. These were really deep artists, to their souls.”

He said he runs the gallery by himself.

“The only way I can really manage myself is keep this old-fashioned spiral notebook, and I literally check off my things every day,” he said. “I prefer the tactile planner instead of a handheld device, which wouldn’t be the same as this (notebook).”
Pushkin has written two books on the subject of Russian art. He is in the process of writing a third book in collaboration with Dr.

Alexander Borovsky, the head of contemporary art at the State Russian Museum in Russia, entitled “A hundred Chetkov Masterpieces”.

“I had the pleasure of knowing him (Boris Chetkov) well and collecting his works,” he said. “I bought a thousand of his paintings. What the book does is place the artist in a historical context, building value on the artist. It should be finished in about six weeks or two months.”