Russian Painting

by Peter. Leek

  One of the liveliest tableaux of Russian life dates from the 1890s. To help Surikov recover from depression after his wife’s death, his brother urged him to paint a picture of the “storming” of a snow fortress — a Cossack tradition, which was still popular in the area around his home town of Krasnoyarsk. Each year, on the last day before the beginning of Lent, a snow fortress would be built, often with considerable skill and imagination. Then a battle would ensue between attackers on horseback, who had to “capture” the fortress, and defenders armed with branches and rattles.

  129. Nikolaï Kasatkin, Poor People

  Collecting Coal in an Abandoned Pit, 1894.

  Oil on canvas, 80.3 x 107 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  130. Boris Yakovlev, Transport Returns to Normal, 1923.

  Oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  131. Vassily Surikov, The Taking of the Snow Fortress, 1891.

  Oil on canvas, 156 x 282 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  132. Konstantin Somov, Pierrot and Lady, 1910.

  Gouache on paper, 46 x 55 cm, Museum of

  Oriental and Occidental Art, Odessa.

  133. Boris Kustodiev, Kiss and Congratulation for Easter, 1916.

  Tempera on paper mounted on cardboard, 50 x 42 cm,

  Kustodiev Picture Gallery, Astrakhan.

  Such examples of Russian life are also shown by other well-known artists. With their violinists, street sweepers, soldiers, newspaper vendors, cattle dealers, rabbis and lovers, Chagall’s pictures — including many painted when he lived in Paris — provide affectionate glimpses of village and small-town life in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

  In the post-Revolutionary period, however, industrialization provided a new stimulus for Soviet artists. In 1923 Boris Yakovlev painted a small picture entitled Transport Returns to Normal. In the words of the art historian John Milner, “only the approaching engine’s red star communicates the message” in this “hymn to railway transport… closely recalling Monet’s Gare St Lazare paintings”. If Yakovlev’s painting is a hymn to the railways, many of Deineka’s works are hynms to industry or to the dynamism of the Soviet people. Nevertheless, a note of ambiguity or paradox is often present.

  In Female Textile Workers there is a lightness and efficiency about the workers’ movements — but they are also trancelike and robotic, and a decidedly pre-industrial cowherd and pair of cows are visible through the window of the ultra-modern factory. Similarly, in Building New Factories the spark of communication between the two women and the athletic twist of their bodies contrast with the geometrical skeleton of lifeless steel girders.

  The development of collective farms stimulated some equally memorable images. Deineka’s trim 1930s farmworker pedalling through the immaculate countryside on her drop-handled bicycle provided a reassuring symbol of progress (tempered, perhaps, with a barely expressed hint of irony). In the 1930s and after the Second World War, Arkady Plastov painted farming scenes full of life and confidence, celebrating the beauty of the Russian countryside and the heroic efforts of the workers engaged in the drive for agricultural regeneration. Meant to impress, these huge canvases were intended for public buildings and they have been aptly described as “calls to action, icons of Socialism”.

  Some aspects of rural life, however, have altered little. In 1934 Sergeï Maliutin (1859-1937) — a multi-talented artist who designed several buildings in Moscow incorporating folk-art elements and who headed the woodwork studios at Talashkino in the 1890s — painted The Brigade’s Lunch. But, as so often the case with Russian painting, there is a thread of continuity in this painting that links the present and the past. The peasant meal of soup and green onions, the lunchers themselves and the riverside setting might have provided subject matter for one of the Itinerants (perhaps Miasoyedov, Arkhipov or Sergeï Ivanov) — or even for Mikhaïl Shibanov, the painter who provoked something of a furore when he exhibited his Peasant Meal at the Academy in the eighteenth century.

  134. Zinaida Serebriakova, Ballet Dressing Room:

  Snow Flakes (The Nutcracker), 1923. Oil on canvas,

  105 x 85 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  135. Alexeï Sarasov, The Rooks have returned, 1871.

  Oil on canvas, 62 x 48 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Landscape

  From the Eighteenth Century to the 1860s

  It was only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and during the first part of the nineteenth century that landscape painting in Russia emerged as a separate genre. Artists such as Fyodor Alexeyev (1753-1824), Fyodor Matveyev (1758-1 826), Maxim Vorobiev (1787-1855) and Sylvester Shchedrin (1791-1830) produced masterpieces of landscape painting, although their work was heavily influenced by the Latin tradition — by painters such as Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Canaletto — it is in the work of Venetsianov and his followers (for example, in his Summer: Harvest Time and Spring: Ploughing) that landscape with a truly Russian character makes its first appearance.

  Two of Venetsianov’s most promising pupils were Nikifor Krylov (1802-31) and Grigory Soroka (1823-64). Despite the brief span of their working lives, both of these artists were to have a considerable influence on the painters who came after them. The countryside in Kryiov’s best-known picture, Winter Landscape (1827), is unmistakably Russian, as are the people that enliven it. In order to paint the scene realistically, he had a simple wooden studio erected, looking out over the snow-covered plain to the woodlands visible in the distance. Krylov’s artistic career had barely begun when, at the age of twenty-nine, he succumbed to cholera. Only a small number of his works have survived.

  Soroka died in even more tragic circumstances. He was one of the serfs belonging to a landowner named Miliukov whose estate, Ostrovki, was close to Venetsianov’s. Conscious of Soroka’s talent, Venetsianov tried to persuade Miliukov to set the young painter free, but without success. (True to his humanitarian ideals, Venetsianov pleaded for the freedom of other talented serf artists and in some cases purchased their liberty himself.) Later, in 1864, Soroka was arrested for his part in local agitation for land reforms and sentenced to be flogged. Before the punishment could be carried out, he committed suicide. One of his most representative paintings is Fishermen: View of Lake Moldino (late 1840s), which is remarkable for the way it captures the silence and stillness of the lake.

  For a period of thirty or forty years most of the leading Russian landscape painters were taught by Maxim Vorobiev, who became a teacher at the Academy in 1815 and continued to teach there — except for long trips abroad, including an extended stay in Italy — almost up to the time of his death. Vorobiev and Sylvester Shchedrin were chiefly responsible for introducing the spirit of Romanticism into Russian landscape painting, while remaining faithful to the principles of classical art. Especially during the last decade of his life, Shchedrin favoured dramatic settings. Vorobiev went through a phase where he was attracted by landscapes shrouded in mist or lashed by storms, and both he and Shchedrin delighted in Romantic sunsets and moonlit scenes.

  136. Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, 1850.

  Oil on canvas, 221 x 332 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

  137. Fyodor Vassilyev, Wet Meadow, 1872.

  Oil on canvas, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  138. Fyodor Vassilyev, The Thaw, 1871.

  53.5 x 107 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Among Vorobiev’s most talented pupils were Mikhaïl Lebedev (1811-37) — whose landscapes are less overtly Romantic than either Vorobiev’s or Shchedrin’s — and Ivan Aivazovsky, one of the most popular scenic painters of his time and certainly the most prolific. Indeed, those who reach such fame in their lifetime are rare. Barely finished with his studies, his name was already circulating throughout Russia. His learning years were situated, in effect, at a critical time. If academic rules were still in force, Romanticism was growing and each and everyone had Briullov’s fabulous The Last Day of Pompeii on their minds. This painting had a great effect
on Aïvazovki’s inspiration. He was further taught by Vorobiov, whose teaching was influenced by the Romantic spirit. Aïvazovki remained faithful to this movement all his life, even though he oriented his work toward the realist genre. In October 1837, he finished his studies at the Academy and received a gold medal, synonymous with a trip to foreign countries at the cost of the Academy. But Aïvasovki’s gifts were such that the Council made an unusual decision: he was to spend two summers in the Crimean painting views of southern towns, present them to the Academy, and leave for Italy after that. The echo of the success of his Italian exhibitions was even heard in Russia. The Khoudojestvennaïa Gazeta wrote, “In Rome, Aïvasovski’s paintings presented at the art exhibition won first prize. Neapolitan Night, Chaos… made such an impression in the capital of fine arts that aristocratic salons, public gatherings and painters’ studios resound with the glory of the new Russian landscape artist. Newspapers dedicate laudatory lines to him and everyone says and writes that before Aïvasovski no one had shown light, water and air with such realism and life. Pope Gregory XVI bought Chaos and hung it in the Vatican where only paintings by world-famous painters have the honour of hanging.” While in Paris, he received the gold medal of the Council of the Academy of Paris and was made Knight of the Legion of Honour in 1857!

  Influenced to some extent by Turner, he created magnificent seascapes, such as Moonlit Night in the Crimea, View of the Sea and Mountains at Sunset and The Creation of the World. One of Aivazovsky’s most famous works, The Ninth Wave (1850), owes its title to the superstition among Russian sailors that in any sequence of waves, the ninth is the most violent. Like many of his paintings, it bears the imprint of Romanticism: the sea and sky convey the power and grandeur of nature, while in the foreground, the survivors of a shipwreck embody human hopes and fears. Although the sea is the dominant theme in the majority of the 6,000 paintings that Aivazovsky produced, he also painted views of the coast and countryside, both in Russia (especially in the Ukraine and Crimea) and during travels abroad.

  The enthusiasm for all things French that had been so prevalent in Russia during the eighteenth century diminished following the Napoleonic Wars — which is one reason that Russian painters, in common with European artists and writers generally, began to transfer their allegiance to Italy. This trend was reinforced by the Academy’s veneration of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance, and also by the first stirrings of the Romantic movement. Fyodor Matveyev painted little else besides Italian architecture and landscape. Both Sylvester Shchedrin (who spent the last twelve years of his life in Italy) and Mikhaïl Lebedev delighted in idyllic fishing scenes and tableaux of Italian peasant life. Aivazovsky painted views of Venice and Naples (many of them bathed in moonlight), and Fyodor Alexeyev actually became known as “the Russian Canaletto”.

  139. Ivan Shishkin, Countess Mordinova’s Forest, Peterhof, 1891.

  Oil on canvas, 81 x 108 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Sylvester Shchedrin entered the Academy of the Arts in Saint Petersburg in the landscape department. He received the gold medal to crown his graduation. The Academy offered him a trip abroad. He left for Italy, but only in 1818, because of the Neapolitan invasion. The most famous work of this period is undoubtedly New Rome, the Castle of the Holy Angel. Indeed, this painting was a great success and Shchedrin had to fill several orders and made several replicas of the painting from different angles. He lived in Rome and then in Naples. Orders were abundant and Italy was a constant source of inspiration. He worked outdoors, drawing nature, bays, hills, villages, fishermen… Among his works, we can point out View of Serrento (1826) and Terrace on a Seashore (1828). He liked drawing hillsides of vineyards overlooking the sea. His numerous terraces were very well received as, for him, they represented the harmony between people’s lives and nature. After the 1820’s, he began drawing night landscapes filled with anxiety. As he had fallen ill, this certainly explains the change. Most of his works belong to private collectors throughout the world.

  During the first half of the nineteenth century a steady stream of Russian painters travelled to Italy or took up residence there — among them the Chernetsov brothers (who also travelled to Egypt, Turkey and Palestine) and such influential painters as Briullov, Kiprensky and Alexander Ivanov, whose Appian Way at Sunset and Water and Stones near Pallazzuolo have an almost Pre-Raphaelite quality. In 1846, Nestor Kukolnik — a fashionable poet and aesthete whose portrait was painted by Briullov — declared that Russian painting had virtually become a “continuation of the Italian school”.

  140. Ivan Shishkin, Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889.

  Oil on canvas, 139 x 213 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  The architecture of their own country also caught the imagination of Russian painters. Both Fyodor Alexeyev and Vorobiev (who had been one of Alexeyev’s pupils) produced numerous paintings of the buildings, streets and squares of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. So did Semion Shchedrin (1745-1804), Sylvester’s uncle. Professor of landscape painting at the Academy from 1776 until his death, he painted charming, sensitive views of the parks and gardens of the Imperial residences near Saint Petersburg — such as Stone Bridge at Gatchina, one of a series of decorative panels that he produced between 1799 and 1801.

  Alexeyev’s images of the city created by Peter the Great are much more than topographical records. They are executed with a harmony and appreciation of beauty that became a mark of Russian landscape painting throughout the nineteenth century. The skilful handling of complicated effects of chiaroscuro, both in terms of brushwork and perspective, coupled with the wealth of observation of city life and the detail of the buildings, give his work enduring artistic and historical value.

  Andreï Martynov (1768-1826) and Stepan Galaktionov (1778-1854) were nicknamed “the poets of Saint Petersburg”. Martynov, who was a pupil of Semion Shchedrin, painted atmospheric views of the avenues of elegant houses, the gardens of Monplaisir, the quays along the Neva lined by palaces and the Smolny Convent, seen from a distance, dissolving into the evening sky. Like Vorobiev and Aivazovsky, he managed to travel widely, and painted in Siberia, Mongolia and China. Galaktionov (another of Semion Shchedrin’s pupils) was a lithographer and engraver as well as a painter, which is reflected in the careful, detailed character of his work.

  141. Ivan Shishkin, Oak Grove, 1887.

  Oil on canvas, 125 x 193 cm, Museum of Russian Art, Kiev.

  142. Arkhip Kuinji, After the Rain, 1879.

  Oil on canvas, 102 x 159 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  143. Vassily Polenov, Overgrown Pond, 1879.

  Oil on canvas, 77 x 121.8 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  144. Vassily Polenov, Bethlehem, 1882.

  Oil on canvas, 12.5 x 36 cm, Radishchev Art Museum, Saratov.

  From the 1860s to the 1890s

  With the Itinerants, the status of landscape painting was greatly enhanced. Even artists like Perov, who were primarily concerned with people rather than landscape, regarded the countryside as something more than a convenient background for portraits and genre paintings. Perov’s The Last Tavern at the City Gates, painted in 1868, is enormously evocative, with its wintry light and the snow-covered road stretching into the distance. Three years later, Fyodor Vassilyev’s The Thaw and Alexeï Savrasov’s The Rooks Have Returned were among the highlights of the Itinerants’ first exhibition. These three paintings in effect mark the watershed between academic Romanticism and a more realistic representation of nature.

  A mild-mannered and extraordinarily patient teacher, Savrasov exerted a far-reaching influence on Russian landscape painting. From 1857 to 1882 he was in charge of the landscape studio at the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where Levitan, Korovin and Nesterov were among his pupils. The Rooks Have Returned brilliantly evokes the reawakening of the Russian countryside after the winter.

  Ivan Shishkin was dubbed the “Tsar of the Forest” by his contemporaries. And rightly so. From his earliest years, he was fascinated by the
conifers around his house. After his studies, and with the benediction of his father, who always encouraged him in this path, he left for Moscow in 1952 to study painting. An exhibition of Aïvasovsky’s seascapes made a profound impression on him. At the time, realism was highly regarded and academic rules were less strict, which allowed Shishkin to freely develop his deepest inclinations. He was taught by Mokritsky, who was under the influence of Briullov and Venetsianov himself. He encouraged Shishkin in the direction that was his; namely, landscape and nature. Very soon, he asked himself why inspiration was sought in Italian nature, as by Shchedrin and Lebedev, and not in Russian nature. He then left the Academy of Moscow and went to the one in Saint Petersburg in 1856. The most influential painters there at the time were Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, for whom painting was meant to be not only a mirror of the surrounding world but a means to transform it. Another important aspect of teaching was the emulation of western painters, especially the Swiss landscape artist Alexandre Calame, who was very popular at the time. Calame influenced many Russian painters, among whom Shishkin, who, however, retained a personal touch. At first he often used pencil. A silver medal rewarded his drawings in 1857. In 1860, he was given the gold. He was recognized for the finesse and extreme precision of his strokes. At this time, he was also trying his hand at eau-forte and lithography. His drawings alone represent a large part of his work. The title of academician was given to him in 1865 thanks to his painting View near Dusseldorf. His return to Russia (he had spent three years abroad) was a real joy and a source of inspiration for him. He also made friends with many painters, including Repin. Speaking of his friend, Repin declared, “The loudest voice was Shishkin’s, he impressed everyone with his youth and his strength, which made him resemble a young forest in his vigorous health, his wolfish appetite and his beautiful Russian. Numerous and remarkable drawings were born during these evenings. Sometimes, spectators standing behind him uttered terrified ‘Ohs!’ and ‘Ahs!’ upon seeing him, with his thick, rough, cart-driver’s hands, erase what he had just so brilliantly drawn whereas, on the contrary, the drawing became as if by miracle more and more refined.” In 1870, he was among the founders of the Society for Itinerant Exhibitions, with its realist tendency.