by Leek, Peter.
To satisfy demands for patriotic propaganda, many of the paintings produced during the Second World War were executed in an exaggerated heroic style reminiscent of poster art. Among them were such monumental canvases as The Defence of Sevastopol by Alexander Deineka. The Defence of Petrograd, which Deineka painted in 1964, is no less heroic — but the style is totally different, being, in effect, a return to or rather a development of his style of the 1920s. This later painting starkly presents two contrasting images. In the top half, victims of war wearily make their way across a bridge, while below, as if marching in counterpoint, their comrades rally to the city’s defence.
95. Mikhail Vrubel, The Six-Winged Seraph, 1905.
Watercolor, lead mine and black chalk on paper,
33.6 x 48.5 cm, Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg.
96. Nicolaï Roerich, Guest from Overseas, 1902.
Oil on cardboard, 79 x 100 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
97. Ilya Repin, Man and Woman at a Table, two seated Women,
Man putting a Glove (Study for the painting Parisian café), 1873.
Oil on canvas stuck on paper, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
98. Boris Kustodiev, A Bolshevik, 1920.
Oil on canvas, 101 x 141 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
99. Nicolaï Roerich, The Rite of Spring
(Setting for Nijinsky’s Ballet), 1914.
Tempera on canvas, 56.5 x 122 cm,
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
100. Leon Bakst, Terror Antiquus, 1908.
Decorative Panel, oil on canvas, 250 x 270 cm,
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
101. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Death of the Commissar, 1928.
Oil on canvas, 196 x 248 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
102. Karl Briullov, Young Girls Gathering
Grapes near Naples, 1827. Oil on canvas,
62 x 52.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
103. Karl Briullov, Italian Family, 1831.
Watercolor on cardboard, 18.8 x 22.4 cm,
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Interiors and Genre Painting
Interiors in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
With the establishment of the Academy, instead of being treated as a branch of “perspective painting”, the depiction of interiors came to be regarded as an artistic discipline in its own right. An outstanding example of the new genre was the watercolour “portrait” of the salon of the palace in Saint Petersburg belonging to Prince Alexander Bezborodko, Catherine the Great’s military commander. Painted in 1790 by his close friend the architect and artist Nikolaï Lvov, in a gamut of greens and lilacs, it has an intimacy in keeping with their friendship, coupled with a theatricality due in some measure to the extravagant drapery. By making ingenious use of mirrors and views from the windows, Lvov managed to include glimpses of both the city and the mountains. This touch of artistic sophistry was surely appreciated by the prince, who was a connoisseur and generous patron of the arts.
Compositions of this kind became increasingly common during the first half of the nineteenth century, stimulated no doubt by the interest in interior design that seized Europe during the post-Napoleonic period. In 1828 Vorobiev was appointed professor of perspective at the Academy. At the same time Venetsianov, as part of his own curriculum, made pupils paint carefully observed interior scenes. Many of these have survived, among them views of the Hermitage and the state rooms of the Winter Palace. Other notable paintings of interiors by Venetsianov’s pupils include Soroka’s The Study in a Country House at Ostrovski, Alexeï Tyranov’s delightful picture of the Chernetsov brothers in their studio (1828), Alexander Denisov’s Sailors at a Cobbler’s (1832), Yevgraf Krendovsky’s Preparations Before the Hunt (1836) and Lavr Plakhov’s Coachmen’s Room at the Academy (1834).
Venetsianov’s own treatment of interiors underwent a sudden transformation thanks to The Choir of the Church of the Capuchin Monastery on the Piazza Barberini by the French artist François Granet. Venetsianov saw it in the Hermitage in 1820 and was instantly struck with a desire to apply Granet’s treatment of space and light to a vernacular interior. The result was The Threshing Floor, which he painted some months later. In order to get the light and details right, he had one of the end walls of the threshing barn removed. It is interesting to compare this interior with The Kitchen by Yuri Krylov (1805-41), painted five or six years later. It is not known whether Krylov was one of Venetsianov’s pupils, but the mood, attention to detail, and the preoccupation with perspective and light must surely have been influenced by the earlier work.
104. Alexeï Venetsianov, The Threshing Floor, 1821-23.
Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 80.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
105. Leondi Solomatkin, Morning at a Tavern, 1873.
Oil on canvas, 52 x 71 cm, Art Museum of Irskutsk, Irkutsk.
Genre Painting from the Eighteenth Century to the 1860s
In the 1770s the Academy offered a class of “domestic exercises”. Scenes from ordinary everyday life however, which came to be known as genre painting, were scarcely considered as worthy topics for art and did not enjoy the same prestige as portraits or historical tableaux. Initially, as with landscape and interiors, Venetsianov’s interest in peasant life was partly responsible for genre painting being viewed as a separate artistic discipline.
Although, as with other artists, the distinction between Venetsianov’s genre pictures and his other types of painting is sometimes blurred, what sets them apart is the quiet focusing on the men, women and children who appear in these tableaux — on their activities, surroundings, identity and lifestyle. Many of his genre paintings — such as Cleaning the Sugar Beet, Peasant Children in a Field and The Morning of a Landowner’s Wife — capture a “frozen” moment of time. The same is true of the lively medley of people, animals, carts and carriages in Square in a Provincial Town by Yevgraf Krendovsky (1810-53), a wide-angled panorama notable for its ingenious manipulation of perspective.
One of the first Russian artists to specialize in this type of painting was Mikhaïl Shibanov. A serf of Prince Grigory Potemkin (the favourite of Catherine the Great), he had first-hand knowledge of peasant life. The dates of his birth and death are not known, though he died after 1789. The family that figures in his most famous painting — Peasant Meal, painted in 1774 — is shown gathered round a farmhouse table. It is doubtful whether the Academy had ever previously been asked to consider a work of art that featured ordinary people in a humble domestic setting engaged in a commonplace daily routine. By portraying the dignified solidarity of this peasant family, Shibanov showed that it was possible to produce a masterpiece without painting in the grand manner. The same qualities are apparent in Solemnizing the Wedding Contract, which he painted three years later. There is no distance between Shibanov and the people featured in these pictures. For the first time in the history of Russian art, peasants are treated not as exotic characters or curiosities, but as real people endowed with an aesthetic and moral worth.
Another artist who left a vivid record of peasant life was L. A. Ermenev. As with Shibanov, we do not know his precise dates, but he was probably born in 1746 and died some time after 1789. The son of an equerry at the court of Catherine the Great, he was orphaned at an early age. After graduating from the Academy, he went to study in Paris. There he witnessed the events of the French Revolution, which deepened his preoccupation with the condition of the lower classes. Ermenev’s paintings have poignant titles — Poor Woman and Her Daughter, Blind Singers, Peasants at Table, Poor Man and Woman, Old Man Seated with a Bowl. Dressed in tatters or patched clothes, often with rheum-filled eyes and with rags on their swollen feet, the serfs and beggars that people his pictures are a far cry from the fashionably attired courtiers who sat for Rokotov, Borovikovsky or Levitsky. Ermenev died alone, unrecognized, and his work was virtually overlooked until after his death.
106. Illarion Pryanishnikov, The Mockers, 1865.
Trtiakov Gallery, Moscow.
107. Pavel Fedotov, The Major’s Marriage Proposal, 1848.
Oil on canvas, 58.3 x 75.4 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
108. Pavel Fedotov, The Newly Decorated Civil Servant, 1846.
Oil on canvas, 48.2 x 42.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
109. Vassily Maximov, All in the Past, 1889.
Oil on canvas, 72 x 93.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
110. Vassily Maximov, The Sick Husband, 1881.
Oil on canvas, 70.8 x 88.6 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian writers and painters were also beginning to focus attention on other sectors of society that had, until then, scarcely figured in art. Landowners, civil servants, the military and the clergy all became possible subjects for artistic comment. As a reaction against the repressive and bureaucratic regime of Nicholas I, the behaviour of the ruling class was frequently depicted in a satirical light.
One of the most astute social commentators was Pavel Fedotov. Fedotov’s contemporaries would have immediately recognised the social status of the dramatis personae in his best-known picture — The Major’s Marriage Proposal, painted in 1848. Marriageable young ladies, like the one whose hand the languid major is seeking, could be seen promenading on Saint Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt and in the city’s parks. All the figures, down to the servants in the background, are portrayed with an unerring eye for detail. Fedotov’s art pillories social evils (in this case the way women were treated as marketable chattels), mostly with humour though occasionally with bitterness. In 1844, at the age of twenty-nine, Fedotov abandoned a military career in favour of painting. Eight years later he died in a mental institution, his mental state unbalanced by poverty and frustration.
Fedotov’s The Newly Decorated Civil Servant infuriated the self-important officials caricatured by him to such an extent that he was banned from selling reproductions until the medal had been removed from the civil servant’s dressing gown and the title changed to The Morning After a Party. His sense of the absurd is keenly evident in works like The Discriminating Bride (1847), A Poor Aristocrat’s Breakfast (1849) and Encore! Encore! (1851-52), which features an army officer desperately trying to relieve the tedium of a rural posting by teaching his dog to jump over a stick. Fedotov’s last paintings have a more sombre atmosphere — such as The Gamblers (1852) and The Young Widow (1851-52), an extremely moving picture inspired by his own sister’s bereavement.
111. Vassily Pukirev, The Unequal Marriage, 1862.
Oil on canvas, 173 x 136.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
112. Ilya Repin, On the Turf Bench, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 36 x 55.5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
113. Vassily Perov, Troika (Apprentice Workmen Carrying Water), 1866.
Oil on canvas, 123.5 x 167.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
114. Vassily Perov, Drowned Girl, 1867.
Oil on canvas, 68 x 106 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
115. Ilya Repin, A Ploughman, Leo Tolstoy Ploughing, 1887.
Oil on cardboard, 27.8 x 40.3 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
116. Vassily Perov, Hunters at Rest, 1871.
Oil on canvas, 119 x 183 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
117. Ilya Repin, Religious Procession in Kursk Province, 1880-1883.
Oil on canvas, 175 x 280 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
118. Vassily Maximov, Arrival of a Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding, 1875.
Oil on canvas, 116 x 188 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Genre Painting from the 1860s to the 1890s
During the first half of the nineteenth century, two currents existed side by side. Painters such as Venetsianov and Shibanov expressed aspects of everyday life in Russia in a good-natured way without the least criticism, while others, such as Fedotov and Ermenev, laid the foundations of Critical Realism, which directly or by implication commented on social and moral issues. The Itinerants and other painters active during the second half of the century built on these foundations, providing a vivid record of the reality of people’s lives.
One painter who would have appreciated Fedotov’s The Artist Who Married Without a Dowry Relying on his Talent was Vassily Pukirev, whose dramatic painting The Unequal Marriage had an autobiographical basis. The parents of the girl he loved had made her marry an elderly general, since they did not regard painting as an eligible career. Pukirev himself figures in the congregation, standing unhappily, with arms crossed, behind the reluctant bride. This painting, which was to enjoy enormous popularity, made its debut in September 1863 at the same exhibition as Nikolaï Gay’s The Last Supper. Together they heralded a much freer and more innovative approach to academic art.
Like Fedotov and Pukirev, Nikolaï Nevrev had a sharp eye for pretence. In Bargaining: A Daily Scene in the Serfdom Era (From the Recent Past) the object of derision is a landowner selling a pretty serf to cover his debts. The anachronism and obscenity of serfdom is underlined by the “civilized” surroundings in which the deal is being struck. Leonid Solomatkin was a less overt moralist, but in many of his paintings comedy has a mordant edge — as can be seen from Morning at a Tavern and the grotesque jollity of The Wedding (1872).
119. Grigory Miasoyedov, The Zemstov is Dining, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 74 x 125 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The Mockers by Illarion Pryanishnikov, in which merchants and their affluent customers laugh at a dancing beggar, was based on a scene from a play by Alexander Ostrovsky. In The Zemstvo is Dining by Grigory Miasoyedov the contrast between rich and poor is more oblique in pictorial terms, though no less obvious. The peasants are obliged to eat their frugal lunch outside, while decanters and washing-up glimpsed through the window reveal that the more affluent members of the zemstvo (rural district council) have been banqueting in the council chamber.
The prime concern of many artists of this period, both Itinerants and non-Itinerants, was to convey the reality of people’s lives. Vassily Maximov grew up in a village and spent much of his adult life in rural Russia, different aspects of which are portrayed in paintings such as Arrival of the Sorcerer at a Peasant Wedding, The Sick Husband and All in the Past. In the paintings of Konstantin Savitsky, often people en masse — rather than individuals — are the heroes, as in Repairing the Railway and Off to War!.
Vladimir Makovsky was equally adept at portraying crowds of people, as in Bank Crash and A Doss-House (1889), even though these and most of his other canvases are half the size of Savitsky’s Off to War. Both urban and village life figure in his paintings. The best ones, such as In the Doctor’s Waiting Room and On the Boulevard, or The Rendez-Vous (1883) and Declaration of Love (1889-91), quietly capture fleeting moments from people’s lives. The unevenness of Makovsky’s work led Benois to describe his art as “cold” and “heartless”, while Dostoyevsky enthusiastically praised his “love of humanity”.
Perov’s genre works range from comedy to tragedy. In The Last Farewell the bowed and huddled figures accompanying the coffin on the sledge poignantly convey the harshness of life. In The Drowned Girl the stillness of the two figures, alone in the riverside dawn, is no less expressive. In contrast to these sombre sentiments are the hilarity of pictures such as Hunters at Rest and the whimsicality (barely masking anticlerical satire) of Easter Procession in the Country, in which the joy of Easter is marred by the weather and the drunkenness of the priests.
Pryanishnikov faithfully captured the atmosphere of a rather more normal religious procession, but Repin’s Religious Procession in Kursk Province — on which he worked from 1880 to 1883 — represents a totally different level of artistic achievement. The woman holding a miraculous icon, the mounted police and stewards, the merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, clergy, beggars, cripples, children… everyone is carefully characterised, creating a multifaceted image of provincial Russia, or even of Russia as a whole. Thanks to the masterly use of perspective, the whole procession seems to be moving st
eadily forward and to be imbued with life.
120. Vladimir Makovsky, In the Doctor’s Waiting Room, 1870.
Oil on canvas, 69.4 x 85.3 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
121. Victor Vasnetov, Players, 1879.
Oil on canvas, 84 x 136 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
122. Vassily Perov, Easter Procession in the Country, 1861.
Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 89 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
123. Arkady Plastov, Haymaking, 1945.
Oil on canvas, 193 x 232 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.