ALEKSANDR A. IVANOV (1806-58), the religious painter, once declared in the 1840s: “We have no predecessors.”¹ This sentiment was shared by many Russian artists, writers, and critics in the nineteenth century, not least by the democratic thinkers Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen. But Ivanov and his colleagues also sensed that, because of its youthful vigor, Russian art was on the threshold of an unprecedented prosperity. Their presentiment of an artistic renaissance in Russia was linked to a broader and recurrent demand for universal social and political change in Russia, one voiced by many artists, especially by the realists of the 186os-8os. An adequate appreciation of nineteenth-century Russian art can be achieved only on the basis of the realization that, by and large, the Russian artist was (and is) concerned with the tendentious and transformative purpose of art and not simply with formal or esthetic qualities.

A central question to be asked in any discussion of nineteenth-century Russian art is why, after centuries of remarkable accomplishment in the ecclesiastical arts, Russia suddenly began to shift her energies to the znatneishie iskusstva (the very splendid arts), and how, within only a hundred years or so, she managed to attain a high professional level in easel painting, civic architecture, and the graphic arts. Of course, it is generally agreed that the era of Russia’s civility was inaugurated by Peter the Great through his program of Westernization in the early eighteenth century. Peter sponsored many architectural projects, he laid the foundations of Russia’s industrial development, he connected Russia with the political mainstream of Europe, and—the inspiration for many artists and writers—he founded his “window on Europe,” the city of St. Petersburg, in 1703. Peter was interested more in technology than in the fine arts, and he was concerned above all with shipbuilding and the timber trade—with economic planning. Still, to some degree Peter can also be considered as the first imperial patron of the arts in Russia: he purchased Old Masters such as Brueghel, Rembrandt, and Rubens during his travels through Europe and commissioned many Dutch, German, French, and Italian artists and architects—the first of many cultural immigrants from the West to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other centers—to help with his reconstruction of Russia.

At this stage in the history of Russian art, there begins an uneasy recognition and processing of Western artistic ideals, often compounded by a spontaneous return to national traditions such as iconpainting. This duality of perception, symbolized by the ongoing rivalry of “Western” St. Petersburg and “Eastern” Moscow, was maintained well into the nineteenth century and can be identified with the coexistence of, for example, Karl P. Briullov (1799-1852) on the one hand, and Aleksei G. Venetsianov (1780-47) on the other. Indeed, Russia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended upon cultural extremes of the most curious kind—”captive Turkish women and Russian landlords, French phrases learnt by village muzhiki, barefoot Akulinas in Greek costumes and Doric temples constructed in the sleepy forests of Kostroma.”² But however provincial, however tentative her artistic endeavors in the eighteenth century, Russia prepared herself for a great artistic efflorescence as her artists and architects—consciously or unconsciously—tried to catch up and, in some cases, to overtake the Western schools. The portraits by Vladimir L. Borovikovsky (17571825), Dmitrii G. Levitsky (1735-1822), and Fedor S. Rokotov (1736-1808) of the late eighteenth century easily withstand comparison with those by their French, Italian, and English predecessors and contemporaries. Perhaps the greatest exponent of the Western artistic ideal in Russian painting was Borovikovsky, as is demonstrated by his portraits such as Mariia I. Lopukhina of 1797 (fig. 6.1). The virtuoso technique, the idealization of subject, the ceremonial format—all these features betray a traditional Western approach derived from a classically inspired esthetic. Borovikovsky was an excellent portrait painter, but there is little here to suggest that he was Russian or particularly different from the English masters: when we look at the Lopukhina portrait, we are, essentially, looking at the school of Gainsborough and Reynolds.

As might be expected, Russia’s recognition of the European academic styles of the late eighteenth century left an appreciable mark on her subsequent artistic development well into the nineteenth century. Russia’s loyalty to the classical idea explains, in part, certain artistic phenomena identifiable with the early nineteenth century: the emphasis on compositional design and draftsmanship, the preference for the portrait and historical genres and the corresponding neglect of landscape and the intérieur, the eager appreciation of Raphael and Poussin but the less immediate concern with Caravaggio and Correggio, and the very ambigious attitude toward the Flemish and Dutch schools.

The staunchest defender and, eventually, depraver of the classical idea in Russia was the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts established in St. Petersburg in 1757 under the Empress Elizabeth and opened as a teaching establishment in 1763 under Catherine the Great. Most of the more familiar artists and architects active in Russian art in the first half of the nineteenth century were affiliated in some way or another with the Academy of Fine Arts. Even painters, sculptors, and architects who criticized the academy, such as Venetsianov, still acknowledged its unassailable position and looked to it for inspiration and guidance. Generally speaking, the St. Petersburg Academy occupied a place of power more exclusive, more autocratic than that of its French and English counterparts, at least until the 1820s. Subsequently, the St. Petersburg Academy lost some of its impulse and, like most official institutions, rejected the advance of any new movement that deviated from its norms. The initial success of the academy as a pedagogical institution and as a dictator of artistic fashion in Russia was ensured by the awareness and intelligence of its protectress, Catherine the Great. The influence of Catherine’s personality on the development of Russia’s art and letters has yet to be recognized in full: she commissioned Grimm in Paris, Reifenstein and Mengs in Rome, and many others “to keep an eye open for all sales”;³ she entered into an extensive correspondence with the literary and artistic luminaries of Europe; she acquired the libraries of Diderot and Voltaire; and she supported the pensionnaire system that enabled academy graduates to study abroad.⁴ Moreover, thanks to Catherine’s individual tastes, Russian aristocrats experienced a rapid and wholehearted conversion to French culture, and, before 1789, they spent as much time in Paris as they did in St. Petersburg—if not more. By the end of the eighteenth century the Sheremetevs, the Shuvalovs, the Stroganovs, and the Yusupovs had replaced the English lord as the Croesus and patron of the muses in Paris.

From the 1770s onward, the general cultural orientation in Russia was a French one, an esthetic bias that was maintained publicly and privately until at least the accession of Nicholas I in 1825. Many actions and events in Russia confirmed this: for example, in 1797 Paul I appointed the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier President of the St. Petersburg Academy (until 1800); many of its faculty at that time were French artists, often of secondary talent; the splendid architectural ensembles of St. Petersburg were often designed by French architects; and some of the celebrated paintings and sculptures of this time relied on French prototypes. To understand the successes and failures of early nineteenth-century Russian art, we must recognize the extent to which French culture affected the psychology of the Russian artist—which is not to say that he served his apprenticeship unswervingly or never outwitted his mentor. Actually, the results of this inculcation were not always beneficial, and, from the very beginning, the academy’s European system fell afoul of Russian imperfections and misunderstandings. Students came to class drunk. Delivery of supplies was so erratic that one professor was forced to travel to the Black Sea to find pencils; a German teacher of anatomy waited in vain for a skeleton for three years and finally gave up and returned home. Some of the imported instructors were frauds, including the Paris pâtissier who was hired to teach architecture.⁵ Such episodes may be in part apocryphal or at least exaggerated, but they do reflect the unease with which Western ideas were accepted by the Russians.

The curriculum of the St. Petersburg Academy embraced all humanistic subjects—the classics, languages and literatures, history, geography, and, of course, the fine arts. Although the composition and direction of the academy changed from time to time, especially under the presidency of Aleksei N. Olenin (1763-1843); president 181743), a rigid system of tuition was always maintained. During his term of study (normally fifteen years), a student attended lessons given by French, German, and Italian professors or by Russian professors who had returned from study abroad. Most of the important Russian artists of the early nineteenth century were trained at the academy: Briullov and Fedor A. Bruni (1799-1875) enrolled in 1809, Aleksandr Ivanov in 1817, Orest A. Kiprensky (1782-1836) in 1788, and Silvestr F. Shchedrin (1791-1830) in 1800; Vasilii A. Tropinin (1776-1857) became an auditor in 1798. As in other academies, art instruction depended essentially on life drawing and from plaster casts of antiquities and from professors’ drawings. Life drawing constituted the foundation of the academic system, something that accounts for the very high level of draftsmanship among nineteenth-century Russian artists. True, artists outside the academy such as Soroka sometimes possessed a finer sensitivity to the expressive qualities of paint and texture, but the graduates of the academy, especially Briullov, Bruni, and Kiprensky, had a remarkable grasp of the intricacies of perspective and anatomical proportion, even in their adolescent years. Often the drawings are superior to the paintings, rivaling the graphic expertise of Ingres. Such is the case with Aleksei E. Egorov (1776-1851) and Bruni. Indeed, some of the more rhetorical paintings of the early and mid-nineteenth century in Russia such as Briullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1830-33) and Aleksandr Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ to the People (1837-57) are colored designs rather than paintings (a condition no less characteristic of contemporary French art).

This cultivation of line and linear composition on the part of the academy teachers and students encouraged — or was encouraged by—the traditional choice of models—Leonardo, Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and, first and foremost, Raphael: “Raphael among painters,” declared Kiprensky, “is the Alpha and Omega.”⁶ Caravaggio, Correggio, and Titian were considered to be inferior and Rubens simply unskilled. As late as the 1830s, Russian pensionnaires rarely took the trouble to visit Venice to see the Titians, and when Ivanov went there in 1834 with the express aim of acquainting himself with Titian, he was criticized harshly by his colleagues. They argued that such artists, and many modern artists too, such as the German romantics, were unable to draw properly and were tampering with the rules of academic design.

In the early 1840s the painter and pupil of Briullov, Fedor A. Moller (1812-75) wrote to Ivanov that the “French limit themselves to defining the general effect . . . so, justifiably, their paintings can be called large studies.”⁷ In 1846 the critic Nestor V. Kukol’nik (1809-68) asserted that the “Russian school [of painting] is, in general, the continuation of the Italian school.”⁸ Moller and Kukol’nik could have arrived at these conclusions only after major changes in Russia’s cultural life, i.e., changes that undermined the earlier hegemony of French taste. During the 1820S-40S Russia’s artistic allegiance to Italy became very strong—demonstrated simply by the fact that the prominent artists of the time, Briullov, Bruni, Ivanov, Kiprensky, were, or had been, living in Rome for long periods. What caused this dramatic shift from Paris to Rome? How was it that the poet Prince Petr Viazemsky could declare that in Italy “one can even do without happiness. . . . People live in the heavens there”?⁹

Naturally, the Russians shared the current European fashion for things Italian, although there are other, specific reasons for this new direction in Russian taste. Above all, the reaction against the domination of French culture may be interpreted as a symptom of mounting dissent within the existing order and conventions of Russian society, just as the Decembrist revolt of 1825 marked the climax of a period of unrest. Dissatisfaction with the status quo — social, political, cultural—was apparent in Russian intellectual circles even in the 1790s. The sudden increase in Masonic lodges in St. Petersburg at that time was, to some degree, indicative of opposition to the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment and of a search for a more mystical, more individualistic world view. Many artists, architects, and writers of the time, such as Konstantin Batiushkov, Borovikovsky, Nikolai Karamzin, Levitsky, Andrei N. Voronikhin (1760-1814), and, later, Aleksandr O. Orlovsky (Orlowski) (1777-1832), were members of lodges with names like Elizabeth or the United Friends and the Dying Sphinx, and the symbols of the lodges often accompanied the portraits of contemporaries. The Masons did not contemplate violent revolution, and they were appalled at the ravages of 1789 in France. Rather, they considered philanthropy as the social panacea and, ultimately, believed that popular, national unity could be accomplished in Russia. Indeed, hopes for social and artistic changes ran high with the advent of the new century and with the accession of Alexander I in 1801.¹⁰

Of particular relevance to this context is the Free Society of Lovers of Literature, the Sciences, and the Arts founded in St. Petersburg in 1801. The Free Society, which included some Masons among its members, set out to play the role of public enlightener, sponsoring lectures such as “An Attempt to Define the Elevated in the Fine Arts” and “The Literary Fable of Antiquity and Its Use by Artists.” The Free Society also advocated unorthodox, even radical political views: for instance, Ivan Pnin, editor of S. Peterburgskii zhurnal and one of the more active intellectuals in the Free Society, spoke of the need to abolish serfdom in one of his philosophical essays.¹¹ Several prominent artists were affiliated with the Free Society, including Andrei I. Ivanov (1777-1848), the caricaturist Ivan I. Terebenev (1780-1815), and the sculptors Samuil I. Gal berg (1787-1839) and Ivan P. Martos (1754-1835). The Free Society propagated its cause through various magazines of the time, such as Mikhail Kachenovsky’s Vestnik Evropy (St. Petersburg, 1821-23) and Vasilii Grigorovich’s Zhurnal iziashchnykh iskusstv (St. Petersburg, 1923-25), and, perhaps even more effectively, through the numerous salons that flourished in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Writers, artists, and philosophers gathered regularly at the homes of Nikolai A. Lvov (1753-1803), Olenin, Vladimir F. Odoevsky, etc., and frequented the “Sundays” of Fedor P. Tolstoi (1783-1873), and, later, the “Wednesdays” of Kukol’nik, declaiming poetry, debating political issues, sketching, and making music.¹²

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian intellectual society rapidly divided into many factions, and new artistic philosophies evolved, questioning the rectitude of the classical idea, proposing alternative systems, and contributing to the formation of a more romantic tendency. Typical of this new movement was Aleksei R. Tomilov (1779-1848), an artillery engineer and Mason who also took a keen interest in the fine arts. The “last purely Russian Maecenas,” as Baron Nikolai N. Vrangel later called him,¹³ Tomilov supported unconventional views, which he expounded in various tracts such as Mysli o zhivopisi (ca. 1810). Questioning the canons of classical art as interpreted by Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann (whose Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums was a key component of any Russian library), Tomilov gave much thought to the new artistic phenomena. He asserted that the artist must go beyond mere imitation of nature, that “feeling” and the “imagination” must be of primary importance in art, and that the artist had the right, therefore, to communicate his own intuitive response.¹⁴ Furthermore, Tomilov indicated that the work of art was the embodiment of the subjective, individualistic impulse—a perception that was close to that of the German romantics and also that of a number of Russian intellectuals of the 1810s and 1820s, e.g., Wilhelm Kuchelbecker. Kuchelbecker maintained that the artist should be concerned not with the prose of life but with the harmonious combination of “inspiration” and “charm.”¹⁵ For Kuchelbecker the first protagonist of this idea was Raphael, the first antagonist— Rubens.¹⁶

In spite of the philosophical innovations of the 1810S, the traditions of academic art were so well entrenched in Russia that a clear exposition of the romantic tendency in art was not published there until 1825 — Aleksandr I. Galich’s Opyt nauki iziashchnego. Novalis and Schlegel were known and respected in Russia, but their ideas had little immediate effect on the visual arts there. The more conservative “art critics,” who tended to be either poets or artists manques, such as Grigorovich, Karamzin, and Kukol’nik, neglected contemporary developments in Russian art and, in the 1810S-30S, continued to uphold the criteria of certain of the Old Masters, above all, Raphael. Many years passed before Kukol’nik could bring himself to admit that Raphael might not meet modern criteria of art.¹⁷ But by then the romantic era was in decline, and the idols whom he and the classicists had disregarded had long been established as paragons of good taste.

Still, the philosophical enquiry of the 1810s and 1820s initiated by Tomilov and his colleagues did not go completely unheeded by artists, and innovations in pictorial style and content became evident. The world of antiquity remained a primary theme, but now its ruins were treated as backdrops for epic events, as in Briullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii, or for lyrical contemplation, as in Kiprensky’s Portrait of the Poet Vasilii Zhukovsky (1816), and its heroes were reembodied as Russians, as in Terebenev’s caricatures “The Russian Scaevola” (cf. fig. 12.2) and “The Russian Hercules” (both of 1812). The romantic notion of “incompleteness,” of transience and mutability, now influenced the way some Russian artists conceived and designed their paintings: for example, in his portrait of Zhukovsky, Kiprensky deliberately left the hand unfinished so as to evoke a sense of spontaneity and immediacy. The psychological portrait and the self-portrait also became centers of attention, while the official or parade portrait, popular in the late eighteenth century, fell out of favor. Also typical of this process of change was the fact that artists like Ivanov and Kiprensky began to formulate their own artistic systems, imbuing their ideas with an absolute and fanatical power.

Of course, romantic ideas affected all the Russian arts of the 1820s-30s, but it would be an exaggeration to conclude that there was a distinctive romantic movement in Russian painting and sculpture. One reason for this is simply a geographical one: those artists who merit the description romantic — Briullov, Kiprensky, and to some extent Venetsianov—lived much of their lives away from St. Petersburg and the “official” direction of Russian art. Briullov and Kiprensky preferred the exotic milieu of Rome, and Venetsianov felt more at ease in the Russian countryside. Ultimately, their actions prompted the establishment of a new tradition, an alternative to that of the academy, one that gained momentum as the nineteenth century progressed. However, before the Russian colony in Rome and the Venetsianov school can be examined, mention must be made of a single political episode that exerted a profound influence on all walks of Russian life—the War of 1812.¹⁸

When the Grande Armée crossed the Russian frontier on 23 June 1812, the manners of the Russian bear proved to be not so very French as his previous behavior might have indicated. The influence of French culture had persisted during the first years of the nineteenth century, inspired to some extent by Alexander I’s personal taste, but this influence was not indelible. For a brief moment the Napoleonic invasion gave an emotional cohesion to a nation that, in the 1800s, was showing clear signs of dissent and division. As would happen at the beginning of World War I in 1914, the external enemy now replaced the internal one. “Let there be one sentiment in all hearts,” wrote an observer in 1812, “let there be one cry on everyone’s lips — Revenge!”¹⁹

Artists responded to the events by producing caricatures against Napoleon or panegyrics to the Russian army.²⁰ Napoleon was pictured as the Antichrist, Alexander as Apollo, and the classical motifs were used to good purpose in order to invest the Russian cause with the appropriate symbols of heroism and righteousness. For example, Kiprensky undertook a number of patriotic works, including drawings of Alexander 1 and Minerva and Kutuzov Advancing into the Temple of Glory. Something like 200 caricatures of Napoleon and his army were printed during the period 1812-14 in Russia, introducing Russia’s first professional political caricaturists, including Terebenev and Venetsianov. Despite all these parodies and satires, it was Napoleon, rather than the French people as a whole, who was the target of abuse. Moreover, on his two triumphal entries into Paris in 1814 and 1815, Alexander I made it quite clear that he had only one enemy and that the French people were not to be harassed or punished. Contemporary reports and prints indicate that the Russian troops did, indeed, fare well with the French citizens, especially with the parisiennes: once again Russians assimilated French culture, although not always of the highest order.

Even after 1812 French artists continued to reside in St. Petersburg. In 1815 Henri François Riesener, a pupil of Jacques-Louis David, came; in 1816 Richard de Montferrand came with his plans for St. Isaac’s Cathedral; in 1835 the battle painter Adolphe Yvon became a professor at the academy, contributing much to the stylistic development of Ivan K. Aivazovsky (1817-1900), Russia’s leading maritime painter. As the French critic Louis Réau has stated rather patronizingly, even the captured French cannons, displayed in the Kremlin, bore inscriptions in French.²¹ As for the Russian studio artists, they tended to concentrate on triumphal, commemorative subjects: Olenin designed fifteen medallions, Fedor Tolstoi embarked on an ambitious scheme of twenty-one sculptural allegories of military events; the architect and painter Aleksandr L. Vitberg (1787-1855) began construction of a commemorative Cathedral of Christ the Savior located on the Sparrow Hills from which Napoleon had looked down on Moscow. The imposing Cathedral of the Savior designed by Konstantin A. Ton (1794-1881), constructed during 1837-81, was meant as a monument to Russia’s conquest of Napoleon. But perhaps the most impressive artistic outcome of the war was the creation of the so-called Gallery of 1812 in the Winter Palace—an assemblage of 332 portraits of Russian military heroes supervised by the English artist George Dawe.

The Russian decorative arts of this period also took on a new confidence and assertiveness, even though they still owed a good deal to the French. The Russian style Empire was heavier and more ornate than its French counterpart, although particular motifs were common to both interpretations. It should be remembered, however, that the application of Graeco-Roman and Egyptian images such as the sphinx, the lyre, and the faun was also prompted by Russia’s close association with, and admiration for, Greek and Middle Eastern art since at least the time of Catherine the Great. This traditional orientalism, especially evident in Russian culture of the 1820S-40S, accommodates many works of art and literature, from malachite caskets resting on sphinxes to mahogany chairs with gilded serpents, from Pushkin’s poem The Fountain of Bakhchisarai to the pair of sphinxes on the embankment of the Academy of Arts.²² These solid artifacts of the Alexandrine era express Russia’s new self-awareness and optimism: Russia the conqueror was now on an equal footing with the nations of Europe.

In contrast to the eras of Catherine the Great and Alexander I, the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) ^{was a} time of political reaction, extreme Slavophilism, and curtailment of civil rights. The Decembrist revolt of 1825 and its cruel consequences harbingered the many unpleasant episodes that were to occur under Nicholas I. But this was also a time of cultural and intellectual prosperity—the late 1820s-30s saw the creation of literary masterpieces by Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin, the foundation of a genuine school of Russian music led by Glinka, and the execution of some of the most celebrated of Russia’s paintings, such as Briullov’s The Last Day of Pompeii, Ivanov’s preliminary studies for The Appearance of Christ to the People, Kiprensky’s Portrait of Pushkin (1827), and Venetsianov’s Spring. Plowing (1830s). After decades of obedience to Western directives, the Russian artist now seemed to have acquired a new conviction of purpose. Foreign artists still came to Russia, but Nicholas’s favorite artist was German, not French—Franz Kruger, principal representative of the Biedermeyer style. Russian artists still traveled abroad, but they now preferred Rome, and if, in the old days, the academy pensionnaires had gone to Paris as submissive students, venerating their French mentors, they now arrived in Rome as professional artists, respectful of the Old Masters but skeptical of contemporary Italian artists. Rarely, if ever, did Briullov, Ivanov, or Kiprensky express interest in their Italian supervisors and colleagues.

Russian artists in Rome found themselves to be part of a large international community: both Briullov and Kiprensky were acquainted with Ingres, who was in Italy in 1806-24 and 1835-41; Ivanov was at one time close to Overbeck. Moreover, the colony was augmented by writers, philosophers, and musicians. Gogol, for example, lived mainly in Rome between 1836 and 1848 and was especially close to Ivanov. Besides meeting within their own emigre section in the northern part of Rome not far from the Piazza del Popolo, the Russians congregated regularly at favorite cafés, especially the Caffè Greco, and, beginning in 1839, at the brilliant salon of Princess Zinaida A. Volkonskaia, “le Corinne du Nord.”

Apart from private patronage, especially of Russian aristocrats living in Rome, there were two ways in which a Russian artist could become a pensionnaire in Italy—through the St. Petersburg Academy program or through the Society for the Encouragement of Artists (later Arts), a private and then imperial organization established in 1820 to assist art students financially. In the 1820s both the academy and the society urged their protégés to uphold the classical tradition by concentrating on Leonardo, Mengs, Raphael, Vasari, and Winckelmann and to regard innovations with suspicion. One representative of the society advised Ivanov to keep to the Old Masters, since “Romanticism is destroying both art and literature,” and was highly indignant at the fashionable tendency to treat the watercolor and the sketch as legitimate, independent media.²³

Pensionnaires came to Rome normally for three years and were assigned to the care of prominent artists living in Rome, e.g., Vincenzo Camuccini (a follower of David and head of the Accademia di San Luca after Canova) and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (whose portrait Kiprensky painted in 1833). Some pensionnaires quickly succumbed to the pleasures of Bacchus and Venus, and the most disturbing rumors circulated concerning the unconventional behavior of certain Russians. In 1840, therefore, Nicholas I decided to bring order to the Russian colony and established a special commission to take charge of the artists there. In 1845 Nicholas I himself arrived to take stock of the situation.

Even though Olenin, President of the Academy of Arts, was not keen on long residences abroad (“We do not intend to people foreign territories with our artists,” he once declared²⁴), many artists went to Italy during the 1810S-40S, including Petr V. Basin (1793-1877); Bruni; the Chernetsov brothers, Grigorii G. (1802-65) and Nikanor G. (1805-79); Grigorii G. Gagarin (1810-93); Samuil I. Gal’berg (1787-1839); Fedor M. Matveev (1758-1826); Moller; Silvestr Shchedrin; Ton; Aleksei V. Tyranov (1808-59); and Maksim Vorob’ev (1787-1855). But by far the most original artists of the colony in Rome were Kiprensky (arrived 1816), Briullov (1823), and Ivanov (1830).

When Kiprensky arrived in Italy, he was thirty-four years old and already a mature artist. A pupil of Grigorii I. Ugriumov (1764-1823) and Gabriel François Doyen at the St. Petersburg Academy, Kiprensky had moved rapidly from the classical canon to a freer, more “romantic” vision. In St. Petersburg he had known Tomilov, and frequented Olenin’s salon, and had cultivated a deep interest in the work of Rembrandt and Rubens. Kiprensky was a born artist. His first portraits—e.g., one of his father, Shvalbe (1804), the self-portrait with paint brushes (1808), and one of the dashing Evgenii Davydov (1809)—were of a caliber equal, if not superior, to that of the work of his Italian periods (1816-22, 1828-36). Perhaps his contemporaries can be forgiven for mistaking the Shvalbe for a Rembrandt! Much of Kiprensky’s painting of the 1830s represented a distinct decline, as the “king of painting”²⁵ tried desperately to restore an image fast tarnishing.

Kiprensky’s sojourn in Italy seems to have affected his initial style very little. His idiosyncratic viewpoint from below the horizon (cf. his portrait of Karl I. Al’brekht of 1827), his esthetic treatment of the color black, his attempts to harmonize bare canvas and superimposed paint, and his attention to texture were components of his artistic system from the beginning, well before he resided in Rome. Moreover, most of Kiprensky’s celebrated portraits were painted outside Italy, either before he left St. Petersburg or back in Russia during 1823-28. These included the remarkable Pushkin portrait of 1827, commissioned by the poet Anton A. Del’vig in St. Petersburg in the spring of that year. Most observers, including Pushkin himself, agreed that the painting bore a close resemblance, even though Nikolai A. Polevoi, the critic and contemporary of Pushkin advised that “Pushkin’s physiognomy is so well defined, so expressive that any good painter can catch it; at the same time it’s variable and unstable so that it’s difficult to imagine that a single portrait of Pushkin could provide an authentic conception of it”.²⁶ In the evolution of Russian painting, Kiprensky’s portraits made an original and vital contribution. In the European chronology, however, Kiprensky’s portraits arrive rather too late to merit universal, unqualified appreciation. Kiprensky concentrated on the psychological portrayal of his sitter, he removed the obvious pose, and he attended to the question of the sitter’s age (he painted children as if they were children, not as adults). But by the early 1800s, these qualities were not novel, for the French artists Girodet, Gros, and Ingres had already introduced them, and perhaps we can understand François Gerard’s comment on one of Kiprensky’s contributions to the Paris Salon of 1822: “Cette peinture n’est pas de notre siede.”²⁷

Whether or not Gerard’s opinion was valid, Kiprensky helped to bring Russian art into the international arena. As Ivanov said when Kiprensky died: “Shame on those who abandoned this artist. He was the first to make known the Russian name in Europe.”²⁸ Indeed, Kiprensky was the first Russian artist to have a self-portrait commissioned for the Uffizi Gallery. Kiprensky’s real reputation must rest on his superb drawings, especially his graphic portraits, e.g., those of Tomilov (1813) and of Princess Sofia S. Shcherbatova (1819; fig. 6.2). In such works Kiprensky seemed almost to realize his dream to “destroy the line that divides nature and art.”²⁹ That Kiprensky used the drawing as a powerful, independent discipline is evident, for example, from his album of 138 sketches dating from ca. 1807, one of the most intriguing monuments of nineteenth-century Russian art. Although they lack the clarity and order of Géricaulťs and Vernet’s drawings of approximately the same period, these varied sketches of antiquities, animals, and heads reveal a great mastery and energy of design.

Kiprensky served as an immediate bridge between the classical and romantic tendencies in Russian art. He was a product of the St. Petersburg Academy and never really rejected its fundamental canons of taste. Indeed, Kiprensky’s technical precision was astounding, and he himself even envisioned an artistic system whereby the artist would be able to produce “total illusion.”³⁰ At the same time, Kiprensky was familiar with the ideas of Novalis, Schelling, and Schlegel, and he admired the French and German romantic painters. In his own portraits Kiprensky paid particular attention to individual psychology as well as to the pathetic fallacy—as in his portrait of Zhukovsky. Of course, these dynamic portraits reflect Kiprensky’s own ebullient temperament, which must have adapted itself to the strict academic system only with great reluctance. Certain biographical facts—that he murdered his mistress by burning her in turpentine and then married her thirteen-year-old daughter, that he made fakes of Titian and Tintoretto, proffering them to the St. Petersburg Academy, and that he painted many selfportraits, none of which resembled him—demonstrate the quixotic and passionate character of this first-rate artist.

Throughout his life, Kiprensky complained that financial considerations forced him to paint portraits and that he was denied the opportunity to undertake historical themes. No doubt he envied the fate of Russia’s most successful “Western” artist, Karl Briullov, a painter who also lived in Italy for much of his life. In contrast to Kiprensky, Briullov was a very different artist, outgoing where Kiprensky was introverted, exuberant where Kiprensky was somber, and not surprisingly, welcomed in society where Kiprensky was not. Briullov (the name is from the French Brudeleau) arrived in Rome in 1823 and immediately attained popularity both as an oil painter and as a watercolorist. During his two residences in Italy (1823-24, 1850-52), Briullov produced about 100 portraits, his most successful genre, although his celebrated Last Day of Pompeii (fig. 6.3), commissioned by Count Anatolii N. Demidov, is a fine example of historical painting, comparable to Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios or Géricaulťs Raft of the “Medusa,” even though its composition is from Poussin (cf. The Plague at Ashdod). Gogol described the picture as “one of the brilliant phenomena of the nineteenth century. It is the radiant resurrection of painting. . . .”³¹ Whether or not it was as superlative as Gogol thought, The Last Day of Pompeii was certainly a product of its time: excavations at Pompeii had been in progress since the mid-eighteenth century, inspiring numerous paintings; Giovanni Pacini produced his opera of the same name in Rome in 1825; and Bulwer-Lytton published his novel The Last Days of Pompeii in 1834 (Russian translation published in 1836). It has been suggested that Briullov took the idea for his painting from Raphael’s (or, rather, Romano’s) fresco Fire in the Borgo at the Vatican, although the sensuous, tactile rendition of the figures betrays Briullov’s closer allegiance to the Mannerists, especially Parmigianino. Like the novel of Bulwer-Lytton, Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii enjoyed an immediate— and fleeting—success, honored in Rome, Florence, Paris, and then St. Petersburg, and it inspired numerous copies and paraphrases.

Some nineteenth-century Russian commentators tried to interpret the tension between the Pompeiians’ powerful physiques and their imminent destruction as a symbol of Russia’s destiny, i.e., of what they felt must be the imminent termination of the autocratic rule of Nicholas I. After all, they argued, his reign began under the bloody augury of the Decembrist revolt in 1825, and the democratic thinker Herzen identified The Last Day of Pompeii precisely with this environment of terror.³² Perhaps the painting did hold a prophetic meaning, and the cataclysm about to annihilate the noble Pompeiians might be taken as a prediction of the subsequent destruction of Imperial Russia. In the same context, it is not too farfetched to draw a parallel between Briullov’s depiction of the Pompeiian tragedy and Gogol’s description of Russia’s landowning class, sick at heart and dying, that he used in his novel Dead Souls, also a work of the 1830s.

Briullov’s Last Day of Pompeii and his grand portraits of the 1830S-40S have a drama and panache that contrast sharply with the dry stereotypes of the lesser academicians and briullovtsy such as Gagarin and Moller. Still, as in the case of his French counterparts like Gerard and Gros, Briullov’s painting is not always painting. His pictures rely on maximum literary content: we read him before we see him. Of course, Briullov did produce some beautiful artifacts that depend on understatement and restraint, for example, his male portraits, such as the one of the writer Aleksei A. Perovsky (1787-1836) of 1836. His portraits of women were generally more opulent and, as in the case of The Last Day of Pompeii, tended to reveal the artist’s technical bravura rather than the character of the sitter, as in the case of the portrait of Mariia I. Alekseeva (née Trofimova) of 1837. At the same time, some of these portraits cannot fail to impress by their brilliance: the Portrait of Princess Elizaveta P. Slaty kova of 1841 is perhaps the most imposing portrait of Briullov’s later period, combining the physical profusion of the oriental environment (the leopard skin, the tropical plants, the peacock feather) and the sensitive, equivocal mood of the sitter.

A third major representative of the Western esthetic in Russian art is Aleksandr Ivanov, an eccentric, fanatical painter who regarded art as a medium of deep moral and religious experience. Ivanov had little in common with his Russian colleagues in Rome, and he tended to lead a withdrawn, monastic way of life. The son of Andrei Ivanov, a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy, Aleksandr Ivanov arrived in Rome with a solid academic training and with a deep admiration for Raphael, Leonardo and Poussin. Ivanov left Russia in 1830 and returned home only in 1858, but, despite this long absence, despite his great love of Italy and his antipathy toward the St. Petersburg establishment, Ivanov remained profoundly “Russian” — particularly in his messianic, apocalyptic philosophy of art. Together with Belinsky, Herzen, and other democratic thinkers of Russia’s “remarkable decade” (1838-48), Ivanov wished to reform mankind, and he regarded art as a sure weapon in the struggle for social transformation.

Briullov was a brilliant member of the international artistic elite, but, as Turgenev once said, he was a “phrase-monger with no ideal in his soul, a drum, a cold and raucous rhetorician.”³³ Ivanov, on the other hand, was guided by a fervent belief in Russia, a religious fanaticism that Gogol and perhaps Dostoevsky also shared. Ivanov put forward his ideas in a curious essay entitled “Mysli, prikhodiashchie pri chtenii biblii,” which he wrote in 1847. Here Ivanov argued that the Slavic peoples would be the bearers of a Golden Age, when “mankind will live in complete peace, when wars will cease and eternal peace will be established. . . . All branches of the human intellect . . . will attain their full development, particularly historical painters.”³⁴

So as to hasten the dawn of this Golden Age, Ivanov worked on a huge canvas (540 X 750 cms.) entitled The Appearance of Christ to the People (fig. 6.4) between 1837 and 1857. The prototypes of this painting were entirely Western, ranging from the Raphael/Romano Transfiguration at the Vatican to various works by Poussin and the Nazarenes, and its composition owed very little to the indigenous traditions of Russian art. Although many works of Ivanov’s academic period pertained to biblical subjects, several circumstances dictated his choice of the theme of the appearance of the Messiah. Above all, Ivanov was profoundly impressed by the Raphael frescoes at the Vatican; in Padua he discovered Giotto, in Florence, Giotto and Masaccio, and in Venice, Titian. Exposure to the large format, to the particular resolution of space and distance in the mural, contributed much to Ivanov’s own conception of The Appearance—perhaps the tragic weakness of his masterpiece lies in the fact that it is an easel painting and not a fresco.

Shortly after arriving in Rome, Ivanov made the acquaintance of Overbeck, leader of the Nazarenes. During the 1830s and 1840s Ivanov often met with Overbeck, regarding him as an artistic and philosophical mentor and, no doubt, concurring with him that “Russia . . . has put on a dress-coat too soon.”³⁵ Like Overbeck, Cornelius, von Carolsfeld, and other Nazarenes, Ivanov turned back to the early Renaissance, particularly to Fra Angelico, hoping to find inspiration for a spiritual revival. Ivanov sensed that his magnum opus was intimately connected with this mission. Ivanov himself regarded Moscow as the Third Rome and the Russian people as humble and pure in heart—worthy of the Second Coming. We note that Gogol, a great Russian patriot, is included in the procession, as is Ivanov himself. Furthermore, the very tendentious nature of The Appearance relates to the general Russian preference for narrative, didactic art—as Belinsky remarked in 1840: “Art must serve mankind, not mankind art.”³⁶ Still, as the years passed, as the preliminary designs increased from 228 in 1839 to 400 in the early 1850s, Ivanov lost interest in his grand picture. In 1855 Ivanov confessed sadly to Herzen that “my work—my large painting—is, in my eyes, sinking ever lower”;³⁷ and Herzen admitted that Ivanov himself was an anachronism.³⁸ When The Appearance was finished in 1857 and exhibited the following year at the St. Petersburg Academy, it had only a moderate success and was eclipsed, ironically, by an even larger canvas—Yvon’s Battle of Kulikovo.

Far from creating a revolution in Russian society, as Ivanov had hoped, The Appearance did not even affect the course of Russian art. Turgenev was justified in regarding this picture as the product of a period of decline, a period when painting was “poetry, philosophy, history, and religion” (but not painting).³⁹ For us today, the primary interest of The Appearance lies in its external associations—in the acerbic correspondence between Ivanov and the impatient Society for the Encouragement of Artists, in the comments made on the picture by visitors to Ivanov’s studio in Rome (“An excellent start!” said Nicholas I in 1845),⁴⁰ in the careful researches that Ivanov conducted in his striving for ethnographical and historical accuracy, and in the many fine landscapes and figure studies for the painting. These circumstances do not disguise the fact that The Appearance is a mediocre work, and a major reason for its failure is that by the 1840s Ivanov himself had evolved toward new methods and subjects. For example, he began to give increasing attention to painting directly from nature, using the urchins of Rome and Naples as his models. Also, Ivanov experimented with the rhythmical principle that he found in the frescoes of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, producing a series of unorthodox watercolors known as The Biblical Studies, which he based on episodes from David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. Historians have noted the formal parallels between The Biblical Studies, William Blake’s illustrations to Dante, and the metaphysical paintings of the German romantics, although there is no evidence to suggest that Ivanov had studied these works. The softness, the “mellifluousness” of Ivanov’s biblical watercolors distinguish them immediately from the drier, narrative style of his earlier painting and, as a matter of fact, bring them close to the symbolist art of Viktor E. Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905) and Mikhail A. Vrubel (1856-1910) at the turn of the century. It was precisely in their time that Ivanov was rediscovered and recognized as a precursor of the modern movement.⁴¹

Both The Appearance of Christ to the People and The Last Day of Pompeii stand in opposition to a genre that, during the 1830s and 1840s, was attracting increasing attention in Russia: the intérieur. The move from outside to inside produced a series of remarkable paintings, among which should be mentioned Fedor Tolstoi’s Interior (1830), A Suite of Rooms (1830S-40S) by Kapiton A. Zelentsov (1790-1845), Soroka’s Study at the House of Ostrovki (1844) and Encore, Encore! (1851-52) by Pavel A. Fedotov (1815-52). Critics have not given sufficient attention to the establishment of the intérieur as a legitimate genre in Russian painting of this period and have tended to concentrate on the concurrent evolution of the Russian landscape school. While artists such as Venetsianov and Soroka made a valuable contribution to this discipline and, in general, provided a national Russian alternative to the anonymous academic style, their endeavors were paralleled by a renewed interest in the everyday, domestic life of the Russian family, especially of the middle and lower classes. It is tempting to regard this “internalization” as the reflection of the more withdrawn, more intimate mood of Russian society after the exuberance of the Napoleonic period. On the one hand, the simple intérieurs of Tolstoi, Soroka, and Zelentsov evoke a sense of nostalgia for a more serene era long departed; on the other hand, a painting such as Fedotov’s Encore, Encore! (fig. 6.5) seems to depict a private but anguished landscape—a closer examination of the individual self.

Artists such as Fedotov, Tropinin, and Venetsianov and his pupils (Evgraf F. Krendovsky [1810-53], Fedor M. Slaviansky [1816-76], Soroka et al.) constituted a domestic art movement in Russia, as opposed to the more international school of Briullov, Ivanov, and Kiprensky. They combined labored interpretations of academic conventions with a spontaneous feeling for color, texture, space. If Briullov, Ivanov, and Kiprensky marked the culmination of the Western idealist tradition in Russia, Fedotov, Tropinin, Venetsianov, and their colleagues were the beginning of a new esthetic, which was often vulgar, unconventional, and even iconoclastic.

Sometimes the ingenuousness of the native Russian talent was still disguised and spoiled by the academy, an imposition that resulted in artistic compromise, and Tropinin was typical of this process. A serf who was “midway between cook-cum-confectioner and personal lackey,”⁴² Tropinin was sent by his master to train at the St. Petersburg Academy in 1798, and he soon began to paint à la Greuze and à la Doyen. Tropinin’s portraits are often primitive paraphrases of the French originals. On the other hand, the Russian subjects that Tropinin preferred, such as the casual portrait of Pushkin (1827), the ample Natal’ia Zubova (1834), and several versions of a self-portrait against a view of the Kremlin (fig. 6.6), are charming descriptions of everyday Russian dress and manners. Whatever his faults, Tropinin encouraged a forceful reaction against the autocracy of the academy by introducing mundane subjects such as a washerwoman, a peasant boy, or a lace-maker, which, a few years previously, would have been considered unworthy of artistic concern. We can understand why one fashionable Moscow socialite cancelled her portrait from Tropinin after learning that his name was not “Tropini” but “Tropinin.”⁴³

Although Tropinin digressed from the academic norms, it was Venetsianov and his pupils who transferred art, so to speak, from its cosmopolitan to its provincial status. Venetsianov came from a Moscow merchant family. In 1807 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he attended the studio of Borovikovsky and performed various duties in the civil service. Venetsianov was a critic and theorist, but his claim to fame rests on his genre paintings—paintings in which he tried to paint not “à la Rembrandt, à la Rubens, etc., but simply, as it were, à la Nature.”⁴⁴ Of course, it is evident that Venetsianov’s work was influenced both by Dutch genre painters and by French and Belgian masters such as François Marius Granet, Hubert Robert, and David Teniers. For example, Venetsianov himself recalled how he was deeply affected by the internal lighting of Granet’s painting Le choeur de l’église du monastère des Capucins de la Place Barberini in the Hermitage: “We saw . . . a depiction of objects—not just similar, but exact, alive, not painted from nature, but depicting nature itself.”⁴⁵ An immediate result of this experience was Venetsianov’s Threshing Floor of ca. 1821, an interior rendered in deep perspective, symmetrically organized, and, like the Granet, illuminated by a light that seems to come from within.

Venetsianov painted the Threshing Floor and his lyrical country scenes of the 1820s and 1830s such as Spring. Plowing (fig. 6.7) on his estate in Tver Province, where he retired in 1819. It was there and at his St. Petersburg home that Venetsianov established and patronized his art school for the less privileged members of society. Several of his outstanding students, such as Slaviansky and Soroka, had been born into serfdom and without Venetsianov’s help would have found it difficult to train as professional artists. The school lasted until Venetsianov’s death in 1842, but its time of flowering was the late 1820S-early 1830s, when up to seventy students were registered. Venetsianov opposed the academic system by eroding the traditional perimeters of the genres, by his very choice of students (some of whom, however, attended the academy simultaneously), by his concentration of Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Ruysdael instead of the Italian primitives, by his emphasis on the need to paint from nature, and by his own intimate portraits and peasant scenes. Even so, Venetsianov never broke his ties with the academy and always respected its authority. He sent his own and his students’ works to the academy’s public exhibitions and, toward the end of his life, tried hard to secure a professorship there.

Venetsianov and his colleagues endeavored to move art from past to present, from high class to low, from city to country. The primary exponent of this “antithetical” development was Soroka, one of Venetsianov’s favorite students.⁴⁶ In his domestic portraits, homey interiors, and local scenes such as View of the Moldino Lake (1840s-50s) the air is still, observation replaces analysis, flatness and horizontality replace the three-dimensional illusionism of the academic style, proportions and perspectives are awry, inaction replaces action. How different is Soroka’s simple Fishermen (1840s) from The Last Day of Pompeii—and how close it is, curiously, to George Bingham’s Boatmen on the Missouri (1846). This resemblance is not completely accidental, for the local artists of mid-nineteenth-century Russia and America were attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to break with the impersonal influence of the European academy. Both sides, in seeking a national identity for their art, chose mundane subjects such as fishermen, farmers, tradesmen, ordinary people going about their work. The naive, awkward style that accompanied these themes was perhaps more the result of deliberate reaction against academic strictures than of artistic illiteracy.

Thanks to Venetsianov, a school of Russian landscape painting was established, and the achievements of the famous landscapists of the 1860S-80S such as Ivan I. Shishkin (1831-98; fig. 6.8) can be traced to him. To a considerable extent, this new artistic orientation affected the teaching system at the so-called Moscow Art Class, which was founded in 1832 as the Moscow Nature Class and, in 1843, became the Moscow Institute of Painting and Sculpture, the alma mater of many talented artists. It is not fortuitous that many members of the Russian avant-garde in the 1900s and 191os were students at the Moscow Institute.

Venetsianov, his students, artists of the Arzamas School, and to some extent Fedotov and Tropinin, predetermined the subsequent development of Russian art toward the realism of the 186os-8os. Increasing disenchantment with the academy’s continued reliance on classical prototypes foreign to the demands of modern life, and the increasing awareness of alternative artistic criteria defined by Fedotov and Venetsianov reached a climax in 1863 with the secession of thirteen art students, led by Ivan N. Kramskoi (1837-87), from the St. Petersburg Academy. The ostensible reason for this mutiny was the academy’s selection of a mythological theme for the Historical Section of the Annual Gold Medal Competition, the Feast of the Gods in Valhalla. Students argued that such a subject was divorced from contemporary social and political demands, and, as a sign of protest, they resigned from the academy after their request for a change of theme had been rejected. However, it should be remembered here that a topic quite relevant to the “accursed questions” of the 1860s—The Liberation of the Serfs—was stipulated concurrently for the Genre Section of the competition. Consequently, we should interpret the secession not as the result of discontent with a particular topic, but as the outcome of many conditions and the culmination of a long period of tension: the practical causes for the action of the thirteen students can be traced not only to the more radical mood of the younger generation of academy students but also to the dissemination of the sociopolitical and esthetic programs of Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, and Pisarev.⁴⁷

The revolt at the academy engendered two principal results. First, it introduced a new artistic orientation, realism, to Russian art, and second, it undermined the exclusive authority of the academy, which subsequently entered a decline until its partial reformation in the 1890s. Of course, even before 1863, a few painters and sculptors such as Fedotov and Vasilii G. Perov (1833-82) were conscious of the fundamental ills of Russian society and had described subjects such as the corruption of the clergy (Perov’s Easter Procession in the Country of 1861 [cf. Valkenier, fig. 8.2]), the inferior social position of woman (Fedotov’s The Major’s Betrothal of 1850-52), or the position of political exiles (The Prisoners’ Halt of 1861 by Valerii I. Yakobi [18341902]). In many cases, these artists were aware of the social thinkers and progressive writers of their time—a connection that, inter alia, led to the creation of many striking portraits such as Perov’s Dostoevsky of 1872 and Kramskoi’s Tolstoi of 1873. Occasionally, these portraits were outward commentaries rather than psychological revelations, prompting the artist and critic Alexandre N. Benois (1870-1960) to speak of their “materialism,”⁴⁸ but by and large they were moving interpretations of prominent intellectuals of the time and constitute one of the memorable accomplishments of the realist epoch.

Many other artists soon joined the original group of thirteen revolutionaries, but a registered, titled group was not established until 1870 with the so-called Society of Traveling Exhibitions (the Wanderers or Travelers). The Wanderers organized annual exhibitions from 1871 through 1918 and again briefly in the early 1920s. Although they quickly declined into Victorian sentimentality, some of them tried sincerely to use art as a medium of social criticism. The most successful practitioner of this doctrine was Il’ia E. Repin (1844-1930), whose moving episodes from everyday life, such as The Volga Boathaulers (1870; fig. 6.9) and They Did Not Expect Him (1884), were painted to a very high standard. Repin’s portrayals of people, whether individuals, such as the Portrait of the Composer Musorgsky (1881), or crowds, such as the Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1880-83), are among the most “real” of his paintings.⁴⁹

To some extent, Repin shared the general fate of Russian realism in the visual arts, for, although he began as a radical artist in the 1860s, he lost the impetus and novelty of his vision by the 1890s. He refused to acknowledge the discoveries of later groups such as the World of Art and the Blue Rose, and he even joined the teaching staff of the St. Petersburg Academy—the very institution that he had opposed. Still, during the 1870s and 1880s Repin and his colleagues were a vital force in Russian art thanks not only to their own artistic activity but also to the practical and ideological support from their leading apologist, Vladimir V. Stasov (1824-1906).

Through his many books, articles, and reviews, Stasov propagated the esthetic ideas of the Wanderers, championing diverse artists such as Nikolai N. Ge (1831-94; fig. 6.10), Shishkin, and Vasilii I. Surikov (1848-1916) as well as Russia’s greatest battle painter, Vasilii V. Vereshchagin (1842-1904; fig. 6.11), who, although not a member of the Wanderers, was a staunch supporter of the realist program. Like Repin, however, Stasov could not accept the artistic innovations of the early 1900S and even criticized those younger members of the Wanderers who digressed from the established line, such as Konstantin A. Korovin (1861-1939; fig. 6.12) and Isaak I. Levitan (1860-1900) with their interpretations of impressionism. The Wanderers were also indebted to the art collector and patron Pavel M. Tretiakov (1832-98), who acquired paintings and sculptures by most of the realists. It was on the basis of his private collection, donated to the City of Moscow in 1892, that the Tretiakov Gallery was formed.

The Wanderers should be remembered not only as the advocate of an artistic perception alternative to that of the Academy of Arts but also as a testing ground for new, potential talents. The regular exhibitions attracted many young artists, such as K. Korovin, Levitan, Mikhail V. Nesterov (1862-1942), Valentin A. Serov (1865-1911), and the Vasnetsov brothers, Viktor M. (1848-1926) and Apollinarii M. (1856-1933), and gave them valuable professional experience. Perhaps the most inventive and most “Russian” of these latter-day Wanderers was Levitan, whose silent evocations of the Russian landscape (fig. 6.13) bring to mind the contemplative, lyrical poetry of the symbolists, especially Aleksandr A. Blok. Serov should also be mentioned here, because his many portraits, especially those in pencil and charcoal, constitute an entire gallery of writers, patrons, and fellow artists of the Silver Age (fig. 6.14).

Whatever the defects of the Russian realists, they were the avant-garde of their time and, by opposing the conventional, academic canons, they exerted a decisive effect on the development of Russian art. Even when we place them in a more universal context and see their accomplishment rivaled by the works of Daumier, Gavarni, and Menzel, we should not forget the radical influence of their contribution to the culture of their own country. Still, this is not to say that a “nonrealist” trend did not also exist in the later nineteenth century in Russia. One of its proponents was Arkhip I. Kuindzhi (1842-1910), who, although a member of the Wanderers between 1874 and 1879, hardly concerned himself with the realist credo and favored a much more lyrical, subjective interpretation. Kuindzhi’s rejection of the narrative themes used by the realists and his exclusive attention to the evocation of mood, his audacious spectral contrasts and luminous effects (exemplified by his famous Birch Grove of 1879; fig. 6.15) point forward also to the symbolist generation and even to the avant-garde with its advocacy of “painting as an end in itself.”

Other artistic developments at this time also helped lay the foundation for the spectacular renaissance of the Russian arts during the Silver Age. Particular mention should be made of the popular decorative arts and crafts, which by the 1860s had entered a state of decline as a result of the harmful effects of Russia’s rapid industrialization. The process of urbanization was leading to a mass exodus of peasants from the countryside to the towns, with the resultant abandonment of the domestic arts: icons, handmade fabrics, and woodcarvings began to be replaced by factory-produced wares and, consequently, an entire cultural heritage was suddenly faced with extinction. Some of the Wanderers, particularly Vasilii D. Polenov (1844-1927), Repin, Surikov, and V. Vasnetsov, used peasant artifacts and rituals in their pictures of historical and national subjects, and this focused public attention on Russia’s indigenous culture, even though the problem of how to rescue and rejuvenate this culture still remained. Fortunately, there were a few enlightened individuals who were aware of the plight of the national arts and who also wished to establish a closer link between the fine arts and the popular crafts. Paradoxically, these individuals were themselves in some measure responsible for the degradation of peasant art inasmuch as they owned or financed elaborate industrial and transportation complexes: of particular importance in this endeavor were Savva I. Mamontov (1841-1918) and Princess Mariia K. Tenisheva (1867-1928).⁵⁰

In 1870 Mamontov acquired a country retreat called Abramtsevo, not far from Moscow, and decided to open an artists’ colony there. Mamontov and his wife, Elizaveta Grigor’evna (1847-1908), were very interested in the Russian arts and crafts, and they were well aware of the arts and crafts movement in Europe. By 1880 Mamontov had established an artists’ collective that was united by a common concern with Russian art, literature, and music. The colony encompassed many artists, including Polenov, his sister Elena D. Polenova (1850-98), Repin, and V. Vasnetsov. Apart from studio paintings and sculptures, the Abramtsevo artists produced designs for furniture, icons, utensils, embroidery, etc. based on traditional motifs, thereby contributing to the establishment of the neo-nationalist or neo-Russian style — supported in turn by K. Korovin, Nesterov, Vrubel, Mariia V. Yakunchikova (1870-1902), and many others. The same style was practiced by artists working at Princess Tenisheva’s estate called Talashkino, near Smolensk. Although Talashkino did not start to function as an art colony until the late 1890s, important artists worked there, including Aleksandr Ya. Golovin (1863-1930), Sergei V. Maliutin (1859-1937), Nikolai K. Rerikh (1847-1947), and Vrubel. The neo-nationalist style formulated at Abramtsevo and Talashkino exerted an immediate influence on all the decorative arts in Russia, especially book illustration and stage design. For example, K. Korovin and Vrubel designed a number of productions in the new style for Mamontov’s Private Opera (founded in 1885), establishing the departure point for the revival of the Russian decorative arts that reached its apogee with the designs for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between 1909 and 1929.

The most original, most powerful of the artists associated with Abramtsevo and Talashkino was Vrubel.⁵¹ Vrubel was a painter, a sculptor, and designer, but his most talented works were his monumental canvases (fig. 6.16) or panneaux treating of historical and mythological themes. Vrubel’s inventive imagination manifested itself in pictures such as The Bogatyr’ (1899) and Demon Downcast (1902) and in his panels for Aleksei V. Morozov’s house in Moscow (1896-98), which included renderings of the theme of Faust and Mephistopheles. Even in the small graphic works such as his illustrations to the jubilee edition of Lermontov’s writings in 1890-91, Vrubel’s individuality enforced its presence, and although he was indebted to Art Nouveau and the neonationalist style, Vrubel cultivated an idiosyncratic approach, especially in his fragmentary treatment of the surface—something that prompted critics later on to describe Vrubel as the first Russian cubist.⁵² Indeed, because of his innovations, Vrubel served as an important link between the realism of the 1870s and the first stage of the avant-garde in the early 1900s—in broader terms, between figurative and nonfigurative art.

Although Vrubel cannot be accommodated within any one particular group or category, he was closely associated with the symbolist ideology and with the World of Art society—phenomena of Russia’s fin-de-siècle culture. Championed by the critic and impresario Sergei P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), the World of Art artists such as Benois and Konstantin A. Somov (1869-1939) argued that art should fulfill an esthetic, not an ethical, role, that Russian art should become part of the international scene, and that beauty was to be found in the expression of the artist’s subjective impulse, not in objective truth. Many ideas that were later developed by the artists of the avant-garde were formulated by the symbolists—for example, the notion of abstract art was one consequence of the symbolists’ evocation of mood at the expense of concrete description; their concern with the Gesamtkunstwerk looked forward to the constructivists’ interest in total design; and their many statements about “musicality” and “internal harmony” obviously contributed to Kandinsky’s concept of the “inner sound.”⁵³ In fact, the accomplishments of the avant-garde are unthinkable without the preparatory support of the symbolist movement in the late 1890s and early 1900s.

In 1846 Kukol’nik wrote: “In our fatherland painting has no past.”⁵⁴ Fifty years later such a statement was no longer valid, for within that short period Russia had made extraordinary progress in art; she had, indeed, caught up with the West and was about to overtake it. The genius of Vrubel and of the artists of the subsequent generation, such as Kazimir S. Malevich (1878-1935), Kandinsky, and Vladimir E. Tatlin (1885-1953), seems, at first glance, to have little in common with the art of predecessors such as Briullov, Fedotov, Ivanov, Kiprensky, Repin, and Venetsianov. But just as Ivanov regarded art as one component of a universal philosophy for transforming the world, so the artists of the avant-garde also hoped to “suprematize” and “constructivize” all aspects of reality. For all their weaknesses—eclecticism, haphazard development, grotesque exaggeration of Western ideas—the nineteenth-century Russian artists created a solid and distinctive school of art. Slowly but surely, the intense artistic personalities of Russia’s nineteenth-century masters broke through the heavy imposition of Western influence and, as the nineteenth century advanced, Russian art came increasingly to draw upon its own resources. Evidently, Benois had this in mind when, in 1894, he wrote the following comment on nineteenth-century Russian painting for Richard Muther’s Geschichte der Malerei im XIX Jahrhundert:

From parasitic works of borrowed sentiment Russian painting rises to national, barbaric strength, utterly wanting in the discipline that comes of taste; and out of this evil originality it rises again, and, in individual cases, highly refined and well-balanced performances are produced—works in which the spirit of the people is felt none the less to vibrate. That is more or less the course of development which has been run through in the nineteenth century.⁵⁵

NOTES

Russian and Soviet scholars have given much attention to the development of Russian art in the nineteenth century. Of particular interest are the following sources:

Alexandre Benois, “Russia,” in The History of Modern Painting, ed. Richard Muther (New York: Dutton, 1907), pp. 236-85. First published in German as Geschichte der Malerei im XIX Jahrhundert (Munich: Kunstverlag, 1894).

V. Friche, ed., Russkaia zhivopis’ XIX veka (Moscow: Ranion, 1929).

O. Liaskovskaia, Plener v russkoi zhivopisi XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966).

N. Moleva and E. Beliutin, Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963); Russkaia khudozhestvennaia shkola vtoroi poloviny XlX-nachala XX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967).

M. Rakova, Russkoe iskusstvo pervoi poloviny XIX v. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975).

M. Rakova, Russkaia istoricheskaia zhivopis’ (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979).

D. Sarab’ianov: Russkaia zhivopis’ XIX veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1980).

1. Shmidt, ed., Ocherki po istorii russkogo portreta pervoi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1966); also see the accompanying volume edited by N. Mashkovtsev, Ocherki po istorii russkogo portreta vtoroi poloviny XIX veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1963).

A. Sidorov, Risunok starykh russkikh masterov (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1956); Risunok russkikh masterov (Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1960).

E. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977).

Of particular relevance to Russian art in the early part of the nineteenth century is the catalog of the exhibition “The Art of Russia 1800-1850” at the University of Minnesota and other institutions, 1978-79. For the present essay I have used some of the data presented in my introduction to this catalog.

1. Quoted in M. Alpatov, Aleksandr Ivanov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956), p. 175. Original source not provided.

2. N. Vrangel’, “Inostrantsy v Rossii,” Starye gody (St. Petersburg), July-September 1911, p. 7.

3. J Schnitzler, Notice sur l’Ermitage de Saint-Petershourg (St. Petersburg: Brieff, 1828), p. 15.

4. For information on the first pensionnaires, see A. Trubnikov, “Pervye pensionery”, Starye gody, April-June 1916, pp. 67-82.

5. All these amusing details are taken from Vrangel’s excellent article “Stranichka iz khudozhestvennoi zhizni nachala XIX veka,” Starye gody May 1907, pp. 155-62.

6. “Dnevnik Kiprenskogo zagranitsei 1817g,” Starye gody, July-September 1908, p. 426. Edited by N. Vrangel’.

7. Letter from Moller to Aleksandr Ivanov (early 1840s). Quoted in Alpatov, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 24.

8. N. Kukol’nik, Kartiny russkoi zhivopisi (St. Petersburg: III Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Office, 1846), p. 14.

9. Letter from Viazemsky to A. Turgenev of 17 May 1819. In Ostaf’evskii arkhiv kniazei Viazemskikh, ed. V. Saitov (St. Petersburg, Sheremetev, 1899), vol. 1, p. 202.

10. The subject of the Masons in Russia has been disregarded or, at least, misrepresented by Soviet scholars. However, Tat’iana Alekseeva, in her splendid monograph on Borovikovsky, deals with the Masons in an informative and positive manner. See T. Alekseeva, Vladimir Lukich Borovikovskii i russkaia kul’tura na rubezhe 18go-19go vekov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), esp. chapter V.

11. I. Pnin, Opyt 0 prosveshchenii otnositel’no k Rossii (St. Petersburg: Glazunov, 1804).

12. For information on the Russian salons, see M. Aronson and S. Reiser, Literaturnye kruzhki i salony (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929).

13. Vrangel’, “Stranichka,” p. 161.

14. For information on Tomilov, see N. Vrangel’, “Stranichka.” Also see A. R. Tomilov, “Mysli po zhivopisi” and T. Alekseeva’s presentation of this in her Issledovaniia i nakhodki (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), pp. 105-25.

15. D. Blagoi et al., eds., Dekabristy i russkaia kultura (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), P. 270.

16. Ibid., p. 271.

17. Kukol’nik, op. cit., p. 75.

18. One of the most detailed sources of visual material concerning the 1812 campaign in Russia is the large catalog to “Výstavka 1812 god,” edited by V. Bozhovskii (Moscow: Levenson, 1913). The issue of Starye gody entitled “Ocherki po iskusstvu epokhi Aleksandra I” for July-September 1908 should also be consulted.

19. From an article entitled “Glas russkogo” in Syn Otechestva. Quoted in V. Turchin, Orest Kiprensky (Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1975), p. 120.

20. For more information on Russian caricature and the War of 1812, see chapter 12 of this volume.

21. Louis Reau, Histoire de l’expansion de l’art français moderne (Paris: Laurens, 1924), P. 326.

22. Vrangel provides some information on this particular association in his article “Romantizm v zhivopisi Aleksandrovskoi epokhi i Otechestvennaia voina,” Starye gody, July-September 1908, p. 381.

23. Report dated 10 May 1837. Quoted in Alpatov, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 158.

24. Quoted in F. Iordan, Zapiski rektora i professora Akademii khudozhestv Fedora Ivanovicha lordana (Moscow: n.p., 1918), p. 36.

25. Kiprensky referred to himself as the “king of painting.” See Turchin, op. cit., p. 41-

26. Quoted in Turchin, op. cit., p 56.

27. Vrangel’, “Ocherki po iskusstvu,” p. 398.

28. Quoted in Turchin, op. cit., p. 42.

29. Ibid., p. 100.

30. Ibid.

31. N. Gogol’, “Poslednii den’ Pompei” in Russkie pisateli ob izobrazitel nom iskusstve, ed. G. Arbuzov (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1976), p. 43.

32. A. Gertsen, “A. Ivanov,” ibid., p. 72.

33. Letter from Turgenev to P. Annenkov dated 1 December 1857, ibid., p. 55.

34. Quoted in Alpatov, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 112.

35. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 139.

36. Quoted in E. Atsarkina, “Khudozhestvennaia ideologiia Rossii 1840-kh godov,” in Friche, op. cit., p. 14.

37. A. Botkin, Aleksandr Ivanov: ego zhizn’ i perepiska (St. Petersburg, 1880), p. 287.

38. Gertsen, op. cit., p. 69.

39. Letter from Turgenev to P. Viardo dated 21 July 1858 in Arbuzov, op. cit., p. 56.

40. Quoted in Alpatov, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 89. Original source not provided.

41. See, for example, Nikolai Punin’s long study of Ivanov. This was published recently as “Aleksandr Ivanov” in N.N. Punin. Russkoe i sovetskoe iskusstvo, ed. I. Punina (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1976), pp. 55-112.

42. A. Rozinsky, “V.A. Tropinin,” in Iskusstvo v Yuzhnoi Rossii (Kiev), 1913, no. 1, p. 4. For information on Tropinin, see G. Kropivnitskaia, Muzei V.A. Tropinina i moskovskikh khudozhnikov ego vremeni (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik), 1975.

43. Reported by A. Amshinskaia, Tropinin (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1976), p. 121.

44. (A. Venetsianov), “Pis’mo k izdateliu literaturnykh pribavlenii ot izvestnogo nashego khudozhnika A.G. Venetsianova o kartine: Berlinskii parad, pisannoi Kriugerom.” First appearted in Literaturnye pribavleniia k Russkomu invalidu (St. Petersburg), 1831, no. 33, pp. 257-61.

45. Quoted in A. Savinov, Venetsianov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1955), p. 198. Venetsianov saw an 1820 copy of the 1816 original.

46. For information on Soroka, see K. Mikhailova, Grigorii Soroka 1823-1864 (Leningrad: Russian Museum, 1975) (catalog of an exhibition).

47. For information on the secession, see Valkenier, op. cit.

48. A. Benois, Istoriia russkoi zkivopisi v XIX veke (St. Petersburg: Evdokimov, 1902), vol. 2, p. 185.

49. The most detailed source of general information on Repin is still Igor’ Grabar’s Repin (Moscow: Izogiz, 1937), 2 vols.

50. For information on Savva Mamontov and Princess Tenisheva, see John E. Bowlt, “Two Russian Maecenases,” Apollo (London), December 1973, pp. 44-53.

51. The most reliable source of information on Vrubel is still Stepan Yaremich’s Vrubel’ (Moscow: Knebel’, n.d.).

52. See, for example, S. Makovskii, “Vrubel’ i Rerikh,” in his Siluety russkikh khudozhnikov (Prague: Nasha rech, 1922), pp. 110-32.

53. Vasilii Kandinsky often referred to the “inner sound” of painting. For a discussion of this and related ideas, see John E. Bowlt and Rose-Carol Washton Long, The Life of Vasilii Kandinsky in Russian Art (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1980).

54. Kukol’nik, op. cit., p. 5.

55. A. Benois, “Russia,” p. 238.