Max Trutt: A Russian Journalist Reborn as an Artist in Vienna

For a decade and a half, Maxim Trudolyubov was regarded as one of Russia’s most influential editors, responsible for the opinion pages of a leading liberal newspaper. Now, after being labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian state in 2024, Trudolyubov lives between Vilnius and Vienna and has reinvented himself in exile as the visual artist Max Trutt. His very first solo exhibition opened this weekend at the gallery of an Iranian artist in Vienna’s Neubau district.

Having worked as a journalist in Moscow already in the 1990s, Trudolyubov helped build the daily newspaper Vedomosti during the early years of the Putin era. From 1999 until 2015 he led Russia’s most important opinion section there. In doing so, he played a major role in shaping the discourse of those Russian elites who envisioned a market-oriented, Western-facing, pluralist country. Vladimir Putin gradually put an end to those ambitions and the invasion of Ukraine served as the final, decisive break. Trudolyubov left Russia and went on to work as a respected Russia expert for Western think tanks, most recently in 2024 at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

Russian “foreign agent” stigma follows him even in Vienna

In exile, however, he has also begun to appear as an artist, working under the name Max Trutt, which is considerably easier for Western audiences to pronounce. Around 35 works can now be seen through mid-March at the Maya Galerie on Burggasse in Vienna, run by the Tehran-born artist Maryam Mansouri. A planned collaboration with another private gallery in Vienna, whose owners have Russian roots, had previously fallen through, to Trudolyubov’s great surprise, because of his branding as a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice.

In his new artistic role, he jokes, he is about a year old, “almost an infant,” as the 55-year-old tells APA. Although he is well aware that he will not be founding any new artistic movement, it has become increasingly clear to him in recent years that he would deeply regret not pursuing art. “I’ve spent too many years talking too much,” he says.

Images of a Brutal Modernization

Trudolyubov’s reinvention as a visual artist is also rooted in solid technical skills: in the early 1990s, during his studies at the renowned Moscow Architectural Institute, he received a very traditional training in drawing. Before the rise of computer software, he explains, even complex architectural projects were drafted entirely by hand.

This artistic schooling is clearly visible in three dark, large-format acrylic works reminiscent of free architectural fantasies. In the triptych City Upon a Hill, which also gives the exhibition its title, he reflects, in the spirit of Soviet writer Andrei Platonov, on the brutal modernization and industrialization of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Amid frenetic construction on a hill and clusters of small houses, he has painted animals moving along improvised roads. “When the city of Magnitogorsk was built, they simply drove peasants into a field and forced them to dig,” Trutt explains. “They didn’t know what they were doing it for; no one told them.”

Art as an Antidote to Detached Expertise

Trudolyubov also sees himself as partly responsible for another wave of Russian modernization – the one he accompanied as an editor of influential opinion pages and now considers problematic. “We were incredibly arrogant toward Russian society in those years,” he says, looking back critically. “With good intentions, of course, but we pushed a rather linear Westernization across many spheres of life.”

As an artist, however, he no longer wants to be a detached expert explaining how Russia ought to develop. Instead, he feels closer to the people who, as he puts it, “were taken somewhere without having planned it.”

The prominent presence of animals in his work – many of the exhibited paintings feature brightly colored donkeys, goats, or rabbits riding on turtles – is his way of reflecting on the human condition. Fables and parables, he says, are not the language of the elite; they belong to the lower, fearful strata of society.

Interview by Herwig Höller for APA

SERVICE: “Max Trutt. City Upon a Hill” at Maya Galerie Vienna, Burggasse 89, 1070 Vienna, through March 15.

Salzburger Nachrichten 

05.03.2025

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