by Leek, Peter.
Gouache and watercolour on paper, 109,7 x 72,3 cm.
196. Ilia Tchachnik, Draft of the Soviet poster screen n°4.
Year 1920. Black and red Indian ink on paper, 98 x 66 cm.
Symbolism
Symbolism — which Kandinsky regarded as the core of his artistic credo — played a prominent part in the development of Russian painting during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Originally a literary movement, it had begun to make its presence felt in the visual arts during the late 1880s. Symbolist artists sought to “resolve the conflict between the material and the spiritual world”. As the French poet Jean Moréas put it in his Symbolist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro in September 1886, their great aim was “to clothe the idea in sensuous form”.
In Russia, one of the first Symbolist painters, and one of the most intriguing, was Mikhaïl Vrubel. Many of his paintings have a surreal, dreamlike quality. Some of the most remarkable — such as The Bogatyr (1898), Pan (1899) and The Swan Princess (1900) — are of mythological figures. And many of them feature either the elaborate patterns characteristic of Art Nouveau or mosaic-like patches of colour akin to those found in the paintings of Gustav Klimt. In 1890 Vrubel was commissioned to illustrate a special edition of the works of Mikhaïl Lermontov, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death.
Even as a child Vrubel had been fascinated by Lermontov’s poem The Demon, a subject that he would return to, both in painting and sculpture, practically until the end of his life. The Seated Demon and The Demon Cast Down (1902) are two of the most powerful works of Russian Symbolism. A demon, Vrubel frequently had to explain, is not the same as a devil. In Greek mythology, a daimon was a spirit that guided the actions of mankind. Tormented by mental illness, Vrubel spent most of the last nine years of his life in hospital, where he continued to work until, in 1906, he lost his sight. Like many of the Russian Symbolists (among them Borisov-Musatov and Petrov-Vodkin), Mikhaïl Nesterov was influenced by Puvis de Chavannes, who had painted the murals of the life of Saint Genevieve in the Pantheon in Paris. During the period when he painted Taking the Veil and The Youth of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Nesterov was “under the spell of a deep religious faith, periodically withdrawing to monasteries and making pilgrimages to remote shrines”. After the Revolution his art underwent a dramatic transformation, and he became well-known for portraits with a contemporary flavour and scenes from Soviet life. A religious nature also exists in some of the pictures painted by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, such as his Madonna of Compassion Who Moves Evil Hearts. Others — such as Mother or Petrograd (1918) — have a spiritual aura, although their subject or setting is ostensibly secular. In the words of John Milner, “His excitement at the work of Matisse and Cubist artists gave way to his admiration for the traditions of icon painting… The result was iconic paintings of precision and boldness with a strong narrative aspect.” Petrov-Vodkin’s most overtly Symbolist works, such as Bathing of a Red Horse (1912) and Girls on the Volga (1915), have a metaphorical quality, but are devoid of religious overtones. Although often more complex in terms of content and symbolic meaning, many of the paintings by Marc Chagall — such as I and the Village and The Wedding — also have a mystical or dreamlike aura, heightened by the feeling that the figures within them hover between the material and the spiritual world.
197. Alexander Deineka, Building New Factories, 1926.
Oil on canvas, 209 x 200 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
198. Alexander Deineka, Female Textile Workers, 1927.
Oil on canvas, 171 x 195 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
199. Kazimir Malevitch, The Peasant, 1928-1932.
Oil on fabric, 129 x 98,5 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersbourg.
At an early age, Chagall tore himself from the cocoon of his very religious Jewish family, for whom all figurative representation was strictly forbidden, in order to follow his calling. But academic teaching was not for him. Rebelling against all teaching, his first audaciousness put distance between him and that of his teacher, of a highly classical style, Mr. Pen. The doors of the famous Zvantseva school in Saint Petersburg, where new teaching was given, were then opened to him. This teaching brought the technical means of contemporary expression to students, means that were cruelly lacking in classic teaching. Chagall elaborated his own language little by little in working with his professor Leon Baskt who had already achieved international renown at that time. Chagall made his own Baskt’s theory that was “the art of juxtaposing contrasted colours while balancing their reciprocal influences”. (Y.L. Obolenskaïa, At the Zvantseva school directed by L. Baskt and Modoujinski, 1906-1910. Manuscript kept in the manuscripts section of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (in Russian)). In his Self-Portrait of 1909, Chagall’s artistic bias is already foreshadowed. Effectively, the character already has the appearance of flying, as if liberated from gravity, an impression that the different tones of blue certainly help to create. Melancholy, a characteristic of a good number of Chagall’s works, is present as well. Pain is often hidden behind the luminous colours.
But Paris truly revealed Chagall. There, he made friends with Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars and Max Jacob; he often went to the Palette and Grande Chaumière studios. He first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, in 1912. He acquired in the capital the “free-light” through which he became an accomplished painter. Paris it was that influenced his pictorial palette, bringing to it a quickness as well as a perfect clarity of its lines. He owes the geometrical shapes of his paintings to the Cubists and colour exacerbated to the extreme to the Fauves. However, his work remained extremely personal. The Wedding for example, although it expresses a dream, has an underlying evocation of religion (which is present in many works) but also of nostalgia for the homeland and the pain of exile. Vitebsk, place of his childhood, remained forever emblematic and symbolic of his native land, as shown in his paintings. Next, a confirmed Symbolist principle is given expression in a whole series of paintings, in which the system of shapes is perfectly defined. His aspirations were often openly poetic and philosophical. The artist often used metaphor. His fundamental concepts were time and space. When war was declared, he returned to his native country, where his wife Bella was waiting for him. The Revolution only served to increase the artist’s beliefs: art became for Chagall the requirement for a person’s development as well as a means to climb the social ladder. He organised in Russia structures for teaching, museums, studios… In 1919 Malevitch violently opposed Chagall’s work, that he equated to Naturalism. Chagall understood neither Malevitch’s work nor his aesthetic choice. He therefore was obliged to leave Vitebsk, cast out by the avant-garde in the name of a concept more radical than art itself. The images that feature in the paintings of Pavel Filonov (1883-1941), who was closely associated with the Russian Futurist movement, are even more surreal and invariably pregnant with symbolic meaning. Filonov’s imagery has been succinctly summarized by the Russian art historian Dmitri Sarabianov: “His fish always signify Christ, his trees are the trees of life, his boats are Noah’s Ark, his men and women are the naked Adam and Eve standing before the world and all history, past and future.” Filonov developed a method of painting, not unlike that of Paul Klee that emphasized the value of “organism” as opposed to “mechanism”. His artistic credo, known as Analytic Art, “attracted young artists like a magnet” so that by the mid-1920s he was one of the most popular leaders of the avant-garde. Nevertheless, he refused to sell his paintings, “having decided to hand (them) over to the State to be made into a Museum of Analytical Art.”
200. Kazimir Malevitch, Peasants, 1928-1932.
Oil on fabric, 53,5 x 70 cm, Russian Museum, St. Petersbourg.
Biographies
ALEXANDER NIKOLAYEVICH BENOIS
Alexander Nikolayevich Benois was born on 21 April (3 May, New Style) 1870 in Saint Petersburg. He was the youngest of nine sons of Nikolaï Benois, an Academician of Architecture. In 1890-94, after graduation from K. May’s private schoo
l, he studied at the Law Faculty of Saint Petersburg University. In 1887 he became an unregistered student of the Academy of Arts, but, unsatisfied with the quality of education there he left four months later. He began to practice drawing and painting under the guidance of his elder brother, Albert, an academician of watercolour painting. In 1890 and 1894 he travelled to Italy, Switzerland, and Spain; in 1896-98 and from 1905 to 1907 he worked in Paris, Versailles, and Normandy; he subsequently visited France every year and also spent time in Italy, Switzerland, and Spain. He contributed to exhibitions as from 1892. From 1895 to 1899 he was the curator of Princess Tenisheva’s collection. An organizer and the ideological leader of the World of Art association, the initiator behind the establishment of the art journals Mir iskusstua (World of Art) and Khudozhestvenniye sokrovishcha Rossii (The Art Treasures of Russia) he was the editor of the latter from 1901 to 1903. From 1917 on, he was actively involved in the preservation of monuments of art and history and the reorganization of museum practice, particularly at the Hermitage where he headed the Picture Gallery from 1918 to 1926. He produced pictures in watercolour, gouache, pastel and, from 1905, oils forming a series entitled The Last Walks of Louis XIV (1897-98) and the Versailles Series (1905-06). The associated paintings are The Marquise Bathing, The Chinese Pavillon, The Jealous Man and Italian Comedy: Indiscreet Punchinello. Compositions on themes from Russian history commissioned by Iosif Knoebel for his major publication Russian History in Pictures (1907-10) are Parade in the Reign of Paul I, The Entrance of Catherine the Great at the Palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Suvorov’s Camp, Peter the Great Walking in the Summer Gardens. A major place in Benois’ legacy is held by views of old Saint Petersburg and its suburbs — Peterhof, Oranienbaum, and Pavlovsk (1900-02). He produced a large number of landscapes during his travels around Europe to the Crimea, and the villages of Novgorod Province. Benois illustrated and designed the following publications: Pushkin’s Queen of Spades (1898, 1905, 1910), Bronze Horseman (1903, 1905, 1916-22), and The Captain’s Daughter (1904, 1919); N. Kutepov’s famous books devoted to the history of a royal hunt in Russia (1901, 1907, 1908); D. Merezhkovsky’s Paul I (1907); A. Pogorelsky’s Black Hen or The Underground Dwellers (1922); illustrations for A Children’s Alphabet book (1904) and others. He created drawings, head-, and tailpieces for the journals The World of Art, The Art Treasures of Russia, and Zolotoye runo (The Golden Fleece). He produced a series of drawings called Toys in 1904 (issued as postcards by the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia) and another, Death, in 1907, as well as pencil portraits of numerous artists, musicians, friends, and relatives and a series of lithographs devoted to Peterhof (1918-22). In 1900 he began to work for the theatre. He designed the productions of Wagner’s opera Götterdömmerung and Nikolaï Tcherepnin’s Le Pavillon d’Armide (1907), he was also involved in directing the latter, at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. In 1907 he created a curtain design for the Antique Theatre which opened in Saint Petersburg. From 1908 to 1911 he was the art director of Diaghilev’s troupe in Paris; for the Russian Seasons he refurbished the decors for Le Pavillon d’Armide and designed other ballets: Chopin’s Les Sylphides (1909), Adam’s Giselle (1910), and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka (1911) — he wrote the libretto for the last and was involved in its direction — as well as Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (1914), where he was again involved as a director. In 1913-15 he headed the art production section of the Moscow Arts Theatre. In conjunction with Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he designed and staged productions of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Le Mariage forcé, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, and Pushkin’s Feast in a Time of Plague, Mozart and Salieri, and The Stone Guest. From 1919 to 1923 in Petrograd, he designed and staged Merezhovsky’s Tsarevich Alexei, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Molière’s Les Precieuses ridicules and Le Medecin malgré lui as well as Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters at the Large Drama Theatre; Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (the former Mariinsky) and Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme at the State Academic Drama Theatre (the former Alexandrinsky Theatre). From 1914 to 1917 Benois headed a project to decorate the interior of the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow with paintings. He drew up the overall plan and produced designs for several panels (Asia, Europe, Labour and Science, and others) but the project was never implemented. By 1899 Benois had become an important art critic and historian. He published an immense quantity of articles in numerous journals and newspapers. He wrote the influential Russian painting section for Richard Muther’s History of Painting in the Nineteenth Century and the books The Russian School of Painting (1904), Tsarskoye Selo during the Reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (Material for the History of Art in Russia in the Eighteenth Century) (1910) and A History of Painting in All Times and Among All Peoples (1912-17, unfinished) and other longer works. After 1926, Benois lived in Paris. He continued to paint and to work in the graphic arts, but focused his efforts on the theatre. From 1927 to 1935 he was the chief artist in Ida Rubinstein’s troupe. He designed over sixty productions in Paris, London, Milan, New York, Vienna, and other cities around the world, more than twenty of them for La Scala, where his son Nikolaï was a production manager. In later life, Benois wrote Reminiscences of the Ballet (1939) and The Life of an Artist, Memoirs (1955). Alexander Benois died on 9 February 1960 in Paris.
IVAN YAKOVLEVICH BILIBIN
Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was born on 4 August (16 N.S.) 1876, in Tarkhovka near Saint Petersburg. On graduation from secondary school he studied simultaneously at the Law Faculty of Saint Petersburg University (1896-1900), the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts (1895-98), and Princess Tenisheva’s private school under the guidance of llya Repin (1898-1900). In 1898 he frequented the studio of Anton Abe in Munich, later he toured Switzerland and Italy. From 1900 to 1904 he was an unregistered student of the Academy of Arts attending Ilya Repin’s studio. In 1900 he became a member of the World of Art Society and contributor to its exhibitions. From 1902 to 1904, commissioned by the ethnographical department of the Russian Museum, he participated in field expeditions to Vologda, Arkhangelsk, Olonets, and Tver Provinces collecting works of folk art and taking photographs of wooden architecture. In 1904 he published the articles Folk Art of the Russian North and The Relics of Art in the Russian Countryside. From 1907 to 1917 he taught at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and from 1910 to 1912 at the Women’s Higher Polytechnic Courses. In February 1917 he worked in the commission for the preservation of art monuments. He began to work in the field of literary and newspress graphic art in 1899. In the 1900s — early 1910s he illustrated traditional Russian fairy tales and designed books of them (Vasilisa the Beautiful, The Frog Princess, Maria Morevna, etc.), Pushkin’s tales (The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Tale of the Golden Cockerel), and bylinas (epic poems) and created originals for postcards issued by the Publishing House of the Red Cross Society of St. Eugenia (about 30). He designed covers, title pages, and head- and tailpieces for a large number of publications (works by Fiodor Sologub, Alexeï Tolstoi, Konstantin Balmont, Alexander Kuprin, Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, etc.) In 1905 and 1906 he contributed to the satirical journals Zhupel (Bugaboo) and Adskaya Pochta (Hell’s Mail), in the 1900s-1910s, to The WorId of Art, The Golden Fleece, The Art Treasures of Russia, Narodnoye obrazovaniye (Popular Education), Solntse Rossii (The Sun of Russia), etc. He designed posters, stamps, and playing cards. From the 1910s to the 1930s and later he produced landscape drawings and watercolours, including views of the Crimea, Egypt, Syria, Palestine and France. He produced his first work for the theatre — sets and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Snow Maiden — at the National Theatre in Prague in 1904. In 1908 he designed costumes for Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov and for Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons in Paris. From 1907 to 1914 he worked for the Antique Theatre (Rutebœuf’s Le Miracle de Théophile, 1907; Lope de Vega’s Fuente ov
ehuna, 1911) and the People’s Flouse Theatre in Saint Petersburg (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Ruslan and Liudmila, 1914) and the Zimin Opera in Moscow (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel, 1909; A. Verstovsky’s Tomb of Askold, 1914). In 1913 he produced sketches for the decoration of halls in the State Bank building in Nizhni-Novgorod and in 1915 designs for the ceiling paintings of the Kazan Railroad Station in Moscow. From 1920 to 1926 he lived in Egypt (Cairo, Alexandria) and in Paris; in 1924 he traveled to Palestine and Syria. In Egypt he produced decorative panels and sketches for iconostases and frescoes. In 1925 he designed productions of Tcherepnin’s Russian Fairy Tale and Romance of a Mummy for Anna Pavlova’s company. In Paris he continued to work for the theatre (Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Borodin’s Prince Igor, etc.), illustrated traditional fairy tales of various nations, and those of the brothers Grimm and Alexander Pushkin. While visiting Czechoslovakia, he produced sketches of frescoes and iconostases for a Russian church in Prague and designed opera productions in the theatres of Brno and Prague. In 1934, at the request of the Soviet embassy in Paris, he created the panel Mikula Selianinovich. In 1936 he returned to Leningrad. From 1936 to 1942 he was a professor at the Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the All-Russian Academy of Arts. He produced illustrations for Alexeï Tolstoi’s novel Peter the Great (1937), Lermontov’s Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov (1938-39), and bylinas (1940-41); designed the production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre and took part in decorative work for the planned Palace of Soviets in Moscow. He died during the siege of Leningrad on 7 February 1942.