Controversial From Moscow to Hudson

"No city has developed as fast as our capital of Russia," Tsereteli exulted. Then the sculptor did a little tap dance. "Hurrah," he said.

His statue of Peter the Great, installed in 1997, became the first major Tsereteli controversy. One group threatened to blow up the gigantic rendering of Peter on board a sailing ship, while others demanded to know why the czar, who built a new capital in St. Petersburg rather than remaining in Moscow, was being memorialized here.

Tsereteli's sheer productivity means his projects can be seen throughout the city -- in different styles. At one of his museums, he has installed a massive apple, with Adam and Eve entwined inside it. In the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that Luzhkov had rebuilt in the 1990s, hundreds of Tsereteli statues adorn the interior, postmodern copies of the original religious works destroyed by the dictator Joseph Stalin. One current project is a series of sculptures honoring contemporary Russian figures. One of them, called "Sound Mind in a Sound Body," looks suspiciously like President Vladimir Putin and will soon be installed in Tsereteli's museum; Luzhkov is represented by two sculptures, one showing the mayor as a tennis racket-wielding sportsman, the other as a street sweeper cleaning up the city.

David Sarkisian, director of the State Schusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow, has been one of Tsereteli's most persistent critics over the years, perhaps best known for calling him the "king of kitsch." Actually, Sarkisian said in an interview, "I didn't call him the 'king of kitsch,' I called him a genius of kitsch. He is using understandable models in a very kitschy way."

Sarkisian said he considered Tsereteli the man who has "personally done the biggest damage to the city" with his sculptures, but he added, "He is an artist in his way, always close to the power and always very successful. In certain countries, such artists prosper -- people who are serving the taste of the ruling power."

Revzin, culture critic for the newspaper Kommersant, said Tsereteli was an example of the "Disneyland" artist, "if Disneyland was directed at producing PR for power." Like several other commentators contacted for this article who refused to speak in any detail about Tsereteli on grounds that they were furious at the amount of attention he commanded, Revzin said. "It's an amazing phenomenon that the only internationally well-known artist we have is Tsereteli."

But the genial artist, wearing a broad smile and a three-piece, custom-made suit with oversize gold cufflinks, is by now so used to such insults he parries them with a well-practiced speech.

"Art takes time," he said. "It happens that people make mistakes, which is why the Eiffel Tower was criticized. Art will always find its place." He also said he had never let unkind words of the reviewers stop him: "How can I believe someone who can't draw, doesn't know anything about art and writes foolish things in order to show themselves off? Such a person doesn't have any effect on me. If it did, I wouldn't produce so many things."

He claimed that even bitter foes of his Peter the Great statue had come around to it. "They saw this czar and they were scared, now they are praising it. . . . People are apologizing, saying, 'It's a sin that I criticized such a great work,' " Tsereteli said.

Kabanova, who writes for Rossiskaya Gazeta, found herself in the unusual position of agreeing with him.

"Every year it's harder and harder to speak about Tsereteli. He's become not a sculptor but rather some kind of natural phenomenon, as if it were raining for a month and you criticize the weather, but if the rain continues for an entire year, you consider it just to be the climate," she said. "You can call it Stockholm syndrome, and we are in the state of a hostage who starts to like his captor."