INTRODUCTION

“OUR GOAL is to capture the still living creative spirit of the people and give it the opportunity to revive.”¹ The words of one of the artists who took part in efforts to preserve Russian folk arts in the 188os and 1890s reflect a concern for national artistic traditions that stimulated comparable efforts in Western Europe countries. An outgrowth of romantic historicism, the concept of a homogeneous “folk” community with a continuous artistic tradition was already anachronistic at a time when industrial and commercial development and the new requirements of cities and towns had already affected the traditional crafts of rural Russia. For example, the town of Sergeievo (now Zagorsk), which had grown up around the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, was the center of a successful toy-making enterprise, with over three hundred shops employing a thousand artisans; in the year 1879 alone, the town produced and shipped to Moscow well over 750,000 pounds of wood and papier-mâché toys. Other traditional crafts, formerly based in peasant villages, were also subject to pressures for quantity of production at the expense of quality and originality. At the same time, machine-made products were beginning to supplant handcrafted items, such as the painted and lacquered dishes from Khokhloma, which could not compete in the marketplace. Indeed, one of the chief concerns of the early collectors and students of folk art was to protect the traditional crafts from the dual threats of exploitation and neglect.

The first major steps toward the protection of folk art were taken at Abramtsevo, a country estate only a few miles from Sergeievo; its owner, the businessman Savva Mamontov, invited some of the leading artists of the period to live and work there.² Elizaveta Mamontova, Elena Polenova, and others founded carpentry and crafts workshops in order to provide training for local peasants, to give them both a pride in their own traditions and a practical livelihood.³ The artists also collected examples of folk art and recorded, by means of sketches and photographs, the stylistic variety of architectural decoration, painted and carved ornamentation on utilitarian objects, and regional costumes—in Polenova’s words: “that which was taken directly from the soil, . . . examples which I managed to collect in the villages, the isolated provincial towns and the monasteries.”⁴ Polenova and her pupils used these records as the basis for new ornamental patterns for cupboards and chair-backs and even for book illustrations and stage settings (fig. 13.1). Although they were later criticized for adulterating their sources by applying forms taken from architecture to embroidery or those from embroidery to furniture, this practice was not wholly foreign to the spirit of folk art. As even the limited collection at Abramtsevo would show, there were a few basic ornamental motifs, which could be found in all types of folk art. The most important contribution of the Abramtsevo workshops was the reintegration of ornamental with utilitarian forms and the reintroduction of traditional esthetic values, familiar to the peasants, into the tools and tasks of everyday life.

The role of the applied arts in the eyes of the major painters who worked at Abramtsevo was important from another point of view as well. Whereas the image of the peasant had become a significant thematic element in Russian realist painting in the mid-nineteenth century, it is generally assumed that the styles of the folk arts were appreciated only very late in the century, by such artists as Polenova and Viktor Vasnetsov, and that an identifiable “folk esthetic” began to play a role only with the development of neoprimidvist styles by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and other artists early in the twentieth century.⁵ Nonetheless, signs of a subtle interrelationship between folk and “high” art may be seen much earlier in the nineteenth century in the work of a small group of trained “serf artists” and, in a more general way, in some areas of the applied arts where the rural Russian and the urban, Western-oriented artistic traditions ran parallel to or intersected one another. One aim of this chapter is to explore some aspects of this area of intersection. The first part will describe the traditional folk arts of woodcarving and painting on wood, with excursions into other media, such as weaving and embroidery, to show the range of certain motifs and styles. The second section will concern the makers of folk art, the peasants and village craftsmen and the serf artisans employed by aristocratic property-holders, and will discuss the relationships between the makers and users of handcrafted objects. The final section will raise the question of the position of folk art in relation to the dominant culture in Russia and will suggest how, if at all, the folk arts may have influenced the styles of “high” art in the first half of the nineteenth century.

FOLK ART TRADITIONS IN WOOD

The crafts and skills needed to make the dwellings, clothing, and farming and domestic implements basic to peasant life were, of course, practiced from earliest times. The more specialized arts of ornamental carving and painting, pattern-weaving and embroidery, pottery and stove tile-making, metalwork, and bone-carving developed over the centuries in distinctive ways in the various regions of Russia. Until the eighteenth century, the isolation of rural areas insured the preservation of local decorative motifs and techniques and local preferences for certain color combinations, geometrical or foliage forms of ornament, or for particular materials. Although itinerant craftsmen and peddlers brought about some diffusion of forms and styles, there was very little change in the regional styles. Indeed, the conservative nature of the folk arts has made it possible for scholars to classify pieces according to their geographical origins. Dating involves different problems. Most of the basic motifs used by peasant craftsmen came from a common stock of symbolic and ritual images—such as the Tree of Life or heraldic mounted figures (fig. 13.2) dating from pre-Mongol and even preChristian times. New forms appeared, generally speaking, in response to specific events or changes, such as Peter the Great’s westernizing campaign, the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, and the emancipation of the serfs. Scholars in the field of Russian folk art have suggested that if one overlooked the specific, topical motifs related to events of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, what would remain in the pool of forms would be those which originated in pagan Russia.⁶ These ancient forms have been extensively studied.⁷ However, the new motifs that appeared alongside them in more recent times were, to a great extent, what gave to Russian folk art the vitality and spontaneity so highly valued by late nineteenth- and twentieth-century admirers. The distinctive qualities of the newer elements and the conjunction and interaction of the traditional with the topical in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are equally important to an understanding of folk art. The terms “folk art,” “peasant art,” “popular art,” and “handcrafts” are used interchangeably for objects made by peasants for their own use or, in the case of more specialized crafts, for barter with other peasants. They may also refer to objects made by professional artisans in towns for sale or trade, such as the satirical or didactic broadsides known as lubki.⁸ The term “serf art,” on the other hand, applies to a wholly different category of works that were made for wealthy, cosmopolitan landowners by serfs who were specially trained in such arts as scroll-carving, gilding, wood inlay, or painting, just as other serfs were trained in singing, dancing, dressmaking or pastry-cooking. A purist approach to folk art might exclude the third category or even the second. But in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the three areas came into frequent contact, which resulted in some sharing of motifs and mutual influences in styles.

The traditional folk arts include the following primary types: (1) woodworking, including architectural ornament (carved window and door frames, pediments, and roof edging), carts, sleds, furniture, and implements for domestic use (distaffs, mangles, storage chests, cradles, boxes, bowls, gingerbread molds); (2) textiles for clothing, towels, valances, and other special functions; (3) work in other media such as ceramics, iron and steelwork, toy-making, and printing of textiles and lubki, which were not so widely practiced as the primary wood and textile crafts. While this discussion will focus on only a small selection of wood objects, it will attempt to illustrate the distinctive stylistic elements of Russian folk art that are found in all its branches. These characteristics include: (1) a deep-rooted respect for the material and its organic nature; (2) a close connection between the plastic form of an object and the kinds of ornamentation on its surface; (3) the prevalance of a distinct repertoire of forms from nature (e.g., the sun, tree, horse, snow leopard, and lion) as well as fanciful forms (the male and female figures with fish tails, the sirin or woman-faced bird, all beneficient beings), which may be stylized or even reduced to geometrical forms and either used as central decorative elements or worked into border ornament; and (4) the mingling of such traditional, symbolic forms with figures, animals, and objects from everyday life.

The major stylistic changes that occurred in the eighteenth century may be summarized only in a most general way: (1) An increasing ornamentalism, partly attributable to the incorporation of baroque and rococo ornamental forms (and, early in the nineteenth century, the contrasting influence of the Empire style) becomes especially evident in architectural ornament. (2) Surface decoration becomes more profuse and independent of traditional shapes of utilitarian objects. (3) The traditional symbolic images are accompanied and gradually replaced by genre scenes, such as tea-drinking, promenading, and riding in carriages or sleighs, and quite specific details of costume, gesture, and surroundings replace the schematic and conventionalized floral or geometrical patterns of earlier work. While they do not account for the enormous variety of regional and individual styles, these observations offer a focus for identifying distinctive changes in the styles and kinds of imagery found in traditional folk art.

Architectural wood sculpture of the region along the Volga and the north provides the only existing examples of large-scale folk art. Carved and sometimes painted horizontal and vertical boards decorated the façades of long houses and accented their structural articulations—the windows, doors, pediments, corners, and sometimes gates (figs. 13.3, 13.4). Depending on regional custom and individual preferences, the builders either confined the decoration to a few key areas, thus creating a contrast between these zones and the large, flat areas of wall (this was common in the north, where houses had to be large enough to hold entire households, complete with livestock, in the winter), or they might fill nearly an entire façade with carving. Designs and images were cut in deep relief so that they could be seen from some distance. The carvers took advantage of both the grain of the wood and the shadows cast by the sun to produce emphatic contours.

Among the traditional motifs, the most frequent are the beregini or protectors, fantastic creatures derived from mythological sources, usually in the forms of male or female figures with fish tails, or a creature with a woman’s face on a bird’s body.⁹ Lions and other animals, which may originally have had protective or apotropaic functions, are frequently seen cavorting with almost playful expressions on their highly individualized faces. Besides the figures carved in relief, most houses in the north displayed three-dimensional figures of houses, deer, ducks, or mermaids, which were carved from or attached to the end of the projecting ridge beam of the roof. The horse was by far the most popular form; similar, schematized horses were made as children’s toys and as functional but decorative parts of tools for daily work. Often found on distaffs, looms, and other women’s tools, these horse forms may be related to the ornaments and ritual objects found in pagan burials, which were apparently exclusively related to women.¹⁰ In general, though, they may be seen as benign and protective beings that, in the course of time, came to be taken for granted as customary and necessary architectural elements.

Russian architectural ornament features some details derived from Byzantine sources (e.g., the motif of two birds flanking a bunch of grapes is similar to some pierced stone capitals at Ravenna), by way of icons, printed designs, or even details of carving in Russian churches. But to complicate matters, elements that are surprisingly similar to those of European Renaissance, baroque, and Empire styles of architectural ornamentation frequently appear in some façades; zoomorphic and floral ornaments similar to those found on other types of folk art are juxtaposed with columns, cartouches, swags, vases, bunches of grapes, pomegranates, and acanthus leaves evidently seen on European-style town dwellings or in prints showing such styles. The eclecticism does not detract from the most remarkable quality of Russian folk architecture: the complete integration of a variety of decorative forms and the expression of the main elements of structure and function through the visual elaboration of key architectural forms.

One of the most widely distributed types of domestic implement was the distaff or prialka used to hold wool or flax for spinning thread (fig. 13.5). Its basic form and method of use remained unchanged for centuries, as can be seen in representations on icons, in children’s toys and on the distaffs themselves. As the chief tool for one of women’s most important domestic tasks, the distaff was lovingly and elaborately decorated, often made as a gift from a young man to his fiancee or from a father to his newly married daughter. It was a symbol of the young woman’s assumption of the responsibilities of family life. Decoration was important for another reason as well. Girls and women often did their spinning together, making a festive occasion at which young men would entertain them with songs. They would wear their best clothes, and the carving or painting on the distaffs would count as part of their finery.

Most distaffs consist of a large, usually flat upright blade (lopastka) joined at the right angle to a base (dontse) on which the spinner sat and balanced the blade by the weight of her body. In the Iaroslavl region, the upright portion was generally in the form of an intricately carved tower or ladder, but in other regions it was usually flat and rather broad. Both the blade and the base offered ideal surfaces for embellishment, and the multiplicity of variations achieved by the use of standard decorative forms provides a rich field for the study of traditional techniques and styles.¹¹ The earliest and most important means of decoration was relief carving; three basic technqiues were used, as in almost all traditional woodwork. The most widespread was based on pyramidal or wedge-shaped incisions, which could be arranged in various ways to create rosettes, chains of zigzags or diamonds, overall diaper patterns and many other geometrical forms. Similar patterns were used in block-printed textiles. The second method involved scraping or planing to develop forms in shallow relief. The third and most adaptable was contour or outline cutting (uzor) with a sharp knife, which could produce a silhouette effect, particularly vivid in foliage patterns, or vigorous calligraphic lines. All these techniques were used in various combinations, sometimes with the addition of special regional variations, such as the use of inlay or incrustation practiced in the Gorodets region, in which thin veneers of oak, water-seasoned to raise the grain, were cut out to fit major areas of design, such as a horse and the cloak of its rider.

Painting was not as universal as carved decoration, but it also varied in style from region to region.¹² The main types included: representational painting of individual scenes, sometimes with dates or other personal inscriptions; decorative painting featuring stylized floral, animal, and human forms along with abstract shapes, painted quite freely in bright, unmodulated colors (chiefly red, yellow, and green); painting with clear, emphatic contour lines, which sometimes take on an expressive function almost independent of the colored forms, filling most of the surface with a lively interplay of curving and straight lines and patches of color; and finally, a comparatively late and simple manner of decorating, in which geometrical designs were filled in with various colors (red, yellow, and green were gradually replaced by blues, lilacs, yellows, and softer pinks in the nineteenth century). Several styles may appear in a single piece. The motifs used to decorate distaffs are quite varied but seem to adhere to certain established conventions. Traditionally, the upper section of the blade shows a comparatively formal composition of older motifs, such as the tree of life flanked by two figures on horseback, while the lower section may contain a genre scene.¹³ One example from the North Dvina region combines the traditional and genre elements in a remarkably natural way and is especially interesting because it shows a distaff in use. The domestic interior, in which two women work while their dog begs for attention, is enlivened by a luxuriantly twining vine bearing enormous blossoms (an example of the contour-line style mentioned above). Above the room, framed by a geometrical border, is a frieze of pigeons on a flower-strewn ledge (a domestic detail given an ornamental function), and above them, flanking the roof-peak, are two heraldic birds, which derive from a much earlier tradition. A painted distaff from Gorodets dating from the 1870s displays two scenes, one traditional and the other contemporary, separated by a band of flowers on a dark blue ground. Above, a tree with elaborate blossoms (the ancient tree of life) supports a brightly plumed bird and is flanked by two riders. This heraldic composition may be found in many other distaffs and in other media, most frequently in embroidered towel borders. Below the floral border is a tea-party scene with a hostess pouring tea from a samovar for her husband and inlaws, who have just arrived. Although the chair and table are only barely indicated, the details of costumes and such obviously prized possessions as the chime clock are carefully depicted.

In some cases genre scenes such as tea-drinking seem to take on almost ceremonial importance. In contrast to the informal but highly particularized party just described, a carved distaff from the Iaroslavl region, dating from 1835-36, shows a man and wife at either side of an enormous samovar, almost like heraldic figures flanking a tree of life. (fig. 13.6). The stylization of the figures contributes to the overall formality of the effect. The main features of the costumes and furniture are indicated with precisely the same abstract patterns used to enliven the borders, and this device, which is also used to define the paired figures of girls in the quadrille scene below, keeps the genre element firmly within the framework of the geometrical composition.

Sometimes the decorations on distaffs present amusing combinations of the traditional and the modern, the formal and the casual. One example from the remote Arkhangel region (late nineteenth century) combines two vigorous outdoor scenes—a paddle-boat with smoke streaming and flags waving above a horse-drawn sleigh flanked by two dogs—with a formal samovar motif (fig. 13.7).

Other objects for domestic use illustrate the ingenuity and inherent sense of style by which specific forms were made to express particular functions. For instance, a rubel in the Zagorsk museum, a tool for smoothing homespun linen, displays the full range of geometric patterns based on the traditional three-edged incision, and these patterns also echo the grooves on the utilitarian underside of the rubel. The handle on this piece was made in the shape of a horse, which might be imagined to gallop across the linen with the rocking motion of the tool. Saltcellars and dippers were frequently made in the shape of a duck with extended neck and beak. The shape is peculiarly appropriate to such vessels in both the formal sense and the more fanciful metaphorical sense: one might readily visualize a full-bodied duck floating on a lake or dipping under the water. Among the most individual examples of Russian wood sculpture are a beehive in the shape of a standing bear and two unique starling houses (a pair, dated 1870, fig. 13.8), which might well be portraits of the couple who owned them.

Even the few examples of traditional carved or painted woodwork that we have surveyed give evidence both of the artists’ notation of new phenomena, such as the steamboat and the rifle, and of their ability to integrate these new images into their traditional repertoires. Because the symbolic forms of earlier art—the tree of life, the bird, horse, mermaid, and so on—had lost their original religious or cult meanings and acquired new associations by the eighteenth century, it was possible for peasant artists to make use of these forms as primary design elements or even, without undue confusion, to bring them up to date (as in the hunting scenes with rifles or promenades with displays of recent fashions). Thus the iconographical elements were transmitted and preserved as decorative rather than symbolic forms.

It is also worth noting another aspect of traditionalism in folk art. Once the new genre scenes became established, they changed scarcely more than the most traditional motifs. The same kinds of scenes—teadrinking, going for walks or rides, a few interludes of domestic work—were repeated again and again, while other likely scenes, for instance, cooking or plowing, seem to be ignored. It is probable that some of these preferences for certain subjects were reinforced in the nineteenth century by the growth in importance of the regional markets at which craftsmen could sell distaffs, bowls, and other utensils.¹⁴ They would tend to repeat favorite motifs for trade, in order to fulfill a known demand.

The pioneering studies of Russian folk art by Voronov, Vasilenko, Nekrasova, and others stressed the fact that the arts of the Russian peasants were not static and unchanging, though they were slow to change. The preservation and repetition of certain traditional designs, special color combinations, and motifs, as well as the gradual adoption and integration of new forms, also seems to show something about the nature of peasant life in Russia: isolated from centers of activity and change, it had its own natural pace of development. Hard as the lot of the peasants was, no sense of disjunction or disharmony between the ancient and the recent or between the natural materials and the manmade decoration of their houses, clothing, and tools is to be found in the traditional peasant crafts.

SERF ARTISANS AND ARTISTS

Changes in the style and artistic level of Russian folk art in the late eighteenth century have been related to increasing contact between rural villages and large towns and trade centers and to the development of markets for particular handcrafted products. These markets were rapidly brought under the control of jobbers, who arranged sales and shipments (they bought wooden utensils and toys by the pound rather than the piece) and paid craftsmen small fixed wages for their work. The decline in quality that resulted from mass production was aggravated by the introducton of cheap, factory-made china and glass utensils in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wooden ware could not be made by hand at competitive prices, and many of the peasant artisans who, after the Emancipation decree of 1861, had left the land to work in village shops, were forced to migrate to the cities.

Paradoxically, a vogue for so-called style russe among the urban bourgeoisie in the late 1880s brought about a brief respite for the declining arts of woodcarving and painting. But the situation of the artists and the quality of production scarcely improved; the market for pseudo-Russian furniture and utensils was quickly absorbed by entrepreneurs, who paid artisans fixed wages and put them into an assembly-line production system based on the replication of designs (by pricking out the outlines from a paper pattern) and left no room for the invention of designs by individual artists. Even the well-meaning efforts of the Abramtsevo group to counteract the decline in the folk arts by giving peasants thorough training and maintaining standards of quality were inevitably self-defeating. Direct patronage, whether exploitative or enlightened, meant a loss of independence for the peasant artist.

From the point of view of patronage, the differences between peasant art and serf art are self-evident. Serfs were, by definition, required to fulfill the orders of their masters. Whereas the peasant carver of door frames or distaffs used techniques and motifs handed down through several generations, the serf artisan employed skills that he had been taught for purposes unfamiliar to him. Thus the integrity of authentic folk art—the natural harmony of folk art and peasant life stressed by admirers of the traditional Russian arts—was not relevant to serf art.

For practical reasons, the use of serfs was essential to the development of the luxury applied arts in Russia. As a case in point, the Englishman Francis Gardner, founder of the first porcelain factory in Russia, was eager to acquire serfs because he was afraid that free artisans, once they had received specialized training, would leave him to set up on their own.¹⁵ In the course of the eighteenth century, the rapidly expanding porcelain industry required many highly trained serfs and free peasants as well. One firm, actually founded by free peasants, made a commercial success of the manufacture of ordinary plates and bowls for use in inns.¹⁶

On a very different level were the palaces and country houses of aristocrats that were built, furnished, and cared for by serfs. The most spectacular and best-known example was the Ostankino Palace built by the serfs of Count Sheremetev at the end of the eighteenth century. The Sheremetev family was already known for its patronage of the arts, especially for its outstanding corps of serf singers and actors. Though singled out for their abilities and certainly better off than most serfs, these men were not expected to take joy in their work for its own sake, as the report on the building of Ostankino Palace (fig. 13.9) submitted by Count Sheremetev’s steward makes all too clear. “Our bonded artisans are working with all conceivable speed, idling neither on holidays nor Sundays, and toiling by candlelight from four o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night. And to expedite their labors, a hussar . . . has been detailed to supervise them.”¹⁷ The style of the palace and its furnishings presents an intriguing combination of Russian classicism and native ingenuity and fantasy. Built almost entirely of wood, like other great palaces of the period, it was decorated to suggest stonework and plaster. Columns carved from whole tree trunks were painted and burnished to look like marble; wood scrollwork, plinths, vases, and chandeliers were finished with bronze and gilt. The splendid inlay floor, an outstanding feature of the palace, combined a variety of purely formal patterns with designs from nature—flowers, ears of grain, lions, and human figures—in a way that might suggest some elements of traditional peasant woodcarving.

Affinities with the designs found in folk art raise the question of the individuality of the serf artisan and his opportunity for independent creative expression. The question of artistic autonomy did not, of course, mean all that it came to signify later in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, even though the majority of the serf artists have remained anonymous, there is evidence that by the early nineteenth century some of the proven masters were allowed some leeway in executing and even designing architectural ornament and furniture. Some pieces, while conforming to neoclassical taste in overall design, feature ornamental details resembling the rosettes and sunflower patterns of folk carving rather than the acanthus leaves and palmettes of European ornament (one such example was made by a serf of the Goncharov family in the 1820s).¹⁸ The presence of such motifs may indicate the owners’ taste rather than a feeling for such forms on the part of the artists. There is general agreement, however, that the magnificent design and execution of the architectural ornament, furniture, and other accessories at Ostankino, Pavlovsk, and Tsarskoe Selo represent more than the mere mechanical labor of artisans who followed the requirements of imposed, imported styles.

Decorative and applied art on a scale demanded by the imperial court and aristocracy of the eighteenth century required the training of hundreds of specialists in such arts as ornamental woodcarving, gilding, plasterwork, marquetry and metalwork, goldsmithing, and cameocutting, all necessary for the furnishing of the great palaces. Whole cadres of artisans, both free and bonded to the court, received practical training in specialized factories such as the Imperial Porcelain Factory, the Lapidary Works, and the Glass Works, and on major building projects. Those who worked at Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk were supervised by the major architects and masters of the period and were thus directly exposed to both the most recent court styles and the highest standards of quality.¹⁹ In addition, there arose a demand for serfs trained in oil painting, so that masterpieces could be copied when they could not otherwise be obtained. Such training was sponsored by the government, first in a special branch of the Academy of Sciences and later, from 1764, at the Imperial Academy of Arts.²⁰

In contrast to the applied arts, painting required not only the mastery of specific techniques but also an acquaintance with historical and mythological subject matter; the profession of painter, in the eighteenth-century sense of historical painter, was beyond the educational opportunities of most serfs. Indeed, to reinforce the distinction between the applied arts, which were still associated with the guild system, and the liberal arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, the statutes of the Academy of Arts expressly prohibited the enserfment of any graduate of the Academy.²¹ Despite enormous difficulties, some artists who were born into serfdom managed to achieve some degree of recognition and, having been granted their freedom, were even able to attend the Academy. It is worth noting, however, that among the known artists of serf background—Yurii Krylov, G. Kanoshenkin, Vasilii Raev, Vasilii Sadovnikov, Fedor Slaviansky, Grigorii Soroka, Vasilii Tropinin, and Sergei Zarianko among others—some specialized in the “minor” media of graphics and watercolors and painted mainly landscape and genre subjects, whereas none became known as a painter of historical scenes. In fact, a large proportion of their works belong to what might be considered a special category of subjects suitable for serfs: portraits of members of the owners’ families, views of estates with the masters’ houses, chapels, and peasant villages. There are also a few examples of scenes from the lives of the serfs—field work, a wedding feast, and, in an understandably sympathetic but laconic painting by an unknown artist, the selling of a female serf. Most of these works are reminiscent of lubki in composition—figures are lined up across the foreground; gestures and action are limited to a simple sign language; the setting is provided by a few standard forms of trees and houses. Some of the artists were undoubtedly complete amateurs, who modeled their work on a few samples of art in their owners’ possession and relied a good deal on observation. But there are many paintings by serf artists that show the effects of careful instruction in the principles of drawing and composition and the handling of colors.

The Academy and the esthetic standards of Western Europe had become almost universally accepted by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—even provincial towns had their drawing schools taught by graduates of the Academy—and the pervasiveness of the academic system played a role in reducing stylistic naivete and provincialism. Even the itinerant artists, who often combined the functions of peddler, storyteller, barber, portrait painter, and icon painter, and who were certainly outside the academic bailiwick, seem to have been touched by notions of professionalism. In the 1850s, a certain Trofim Chaplygin, an itinerant tailor and painter, entertained the young Ilia Repin and his friends with his lifelike (and mouth-watering) paintings of watermelons and other fruits and his fascinating portrayals of real people and mythological creatures. He also took pains to stock his small studio properly and to refer to his pigments by their special names (lazure, gamboge, tuche, and so on)—a habit that impressed the young Repin.²² By the mid-nineteenth century, most of those artists from serf or lower-class background who, like Repin, were fortunate enough to study at the Academy and so obtain the civil rank necessary for personal advancement, were anxious to disassociate themselves from serfdom and its deprivations and adapt themselves to the requirements of academic art as quickly and thoroughly as possible.²³

Two special cases of artists who received training in the academic tradition and yet did not lose their connection with their serf origins stand out in the art of the 1830s and 1840s. Vasilii Tropinin, born a serf, trained at the St. Petersburg Academy, was well known for his attractive portraits of both gentry and peasants and his delicately sentimental genre paintings (fig. 13.10). Aleksei Venetsianov, a small property owner who retired from his minor bureaucratic job in order to teach painting to the serfs on his own and neighboring estates, founded a distinctively Russian school of genre painting. Venetsianov, in particular, not only introduced new images of peasant life into Russian nineteenth-century painting but to some degree encouraged the qualities of freshness and immediacy of peasant art as he educated his pupils’ native talents.

CONCLUSION. FOLK ART AND EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENRE: STYLE AND IMAGERY

Can we say that the traditional arts of the Russian peasants had some direct influence on the styles of early nineteenth-century painting? The question might be approached in a variety of ways. Numerous details in paintings by Venetsianov and his pupils show the artists’ awareness of traditional handcrafts, costumes, and activities of peasant life. Some artists drew or painted subjects related to those favored by the makers of distaffs and peasant toys (the lithographs of Kapiton Zelentsov, Pavel Aleksandrov and Aleksandr Orlovsky, for instance, have their counterparts in lubki and clay and wooden toys). But European travelers in Russia also made accurate and sympathetic renditions of characteristic scenes from peasant life.²⁴ One cannot assume that the peasant background of certain artists imparted a native sensitivity for this genre. Instead, we might examine some aspects of the styles and imagery of early nineteenth-century genre painting in much the same way that we looked at a key aspect of traditional folk art of the period. Specifically, we can observe the assimilation of artistic practices and ideas derived from the academy, on the one hand, and the incorporation of typical features of folk art (color, treatment of figures, composition, decorative elements) on the other.

The work of Venetsianov himself shows his respect for the human dignity of his peasant subjects through a carefully wrought balance between realist observation and idealist harmony of forms. One of his early paintings, Threshing Barn (1821-23, Russian Museum), was, first and foremost, an attempt at scrupulous naturalism. The artist had one of the walls of the barn removed to admit light so that he could work on the spot with natural lighting instead of in the studio. Nonetheless, the clarity and calm of the scene, the harmonious arrangement of figures within the space, and the easy balanced poses and gestures correspond to the esthetic standards of neoclassical art and to the attitudes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment about the natural goodness and integrity of rural life.²⁵ Several of Venetsianov’s portraits of peasants, such as Girl Wearing a Shawl (1830s, Russian Museum) and Fortune Telling with Cards (1842, Russian Museum), while certainly careful and sensitive likenesses, tend at the same time to subordinate individual features to a more general image of the Russian peasant woman: an image of classical calm and wholeness, reinforced by the central focus and the broad dominant curves of the compositions. A painting showing the interior of Venetsianov’s studio as it appeared in 1827 by his pupil Aleksandr Alekseev, a freed serf, sheds light on the classical features of these portraits. The room contains a number of plaster casts from ancient sculptures as well as a live model—a peasant woman clothed in the traditional sarafan, blouse, and headscarf—and Venetsianov’s pupils are depicted working from both types of models. Venetsianov clearly intended his pupils to relate their observations of the particular model to their understanding of classical proportions and to associate the ordinary beauty of the peasant woman with the timeless beauty of antique sculpture. In a group of paintings of the 1830s, including Spring. Plowing (cf. Bowlt, fig. 6.7) and Summer. Harvest (both Tretiakov Gallery), Venetsianov developed the theme of the unity of the peasant and the land. The image of the young peasant woman leading a pair of horses across the fields, her baby growing up literally in the furrows, points to the continuity and measured pace of rural life, and the harvest scene, which shows no exertion but visually melds the laborers with the shocks of grain, focuses on a peasant woman seated in the foreground as a personification of the bounty of nature.

The works of some of Venetsianov’s pupils—most of them born serfs—present a similar harmonious image of the daily lives of peasants of central Russia.²⁶ The most talented, Grigorii Soroka, belonged to a landowner who, despite all of Venetsianov’s pleading, refused to give up the distinction of having his very own serf artist. Only with the Emancipation decree of 1861 did Soroka gain his freedom, but his life ended, tragically, a few years later. He was involved in an illegal movement to improve the lot of freed serfs and was arrested in 1864; sentenced to corporal punishment, he committed suicide. Despite the harshness of his own life, Soroka’s paintings, Fisherfolk (1840s, Russian Museum) and his views of Moldino Lake and his owner’s estate, betray no anguish or even discontent (see fig. 13.12). Even more than Venetsianov’s landscapes, these vistas, with their wonderful liquid reflections, luminous atmosphere, and the perfect harmony of architecture, landscape, and figures, represent an ideal image of peaceful, selfsufficient, and esthetically satisfying country life.

There is some irony in the fact that the first artists to take peasant life as the main subject of their art, Venetsianov and his pupils, though intimately familiar with all aspects of peasant life and committed to painting, as Venetsianov frequently said, “a la nature,” never really freed themselves from the idealization of rural life that was so much a part of the eighteenth-century outlook. In these same works, however, we can find certain affinities with the formal elements of traditional folk art. Scenes of provincial towns and country estates, such as Evgraf Krendovsky’s Square in a Provincial Town (1830s, Tretiakov Gallery), Ignatii Shchedrovsky’s Landscape with Hunters (late 1830s; fig. 13.11), and Grigorii Soroka’s A Chapel in the Village of Ostrovki (1840s; fig. 13.12), and interiors such as Soroka’s Study at Ostrovki (1840s, Russian Museum) and Lavr Plakhov’s Coachmen’s Room in the Academy of Arts (1834; cf. Taylor, fig. 7.4) show a feeling for the unity of an image and the subordination of small parts to the whole. These artists present details of a setting in all their variety of shape and texture and yet maintain the clarity of spatial relationships. The simple compositions based on firm horizontal divisions of the surface and clear vertical accents have much in common with the traditional arrangements of decorative borders around more open, central images in the ornamentation of distaffs and even on house façades. The attention to discrete details and the awareness of the organic relationship of details to structural form evident in these works suggest that an innate sense of design in these peasant artists was trained and encouraged, and not wholly altered, by the teaching of Venetsianov and, in some cases, exposure to academic art.

Although an appreciation of the visual and thematic affinities between traditional folk art and peasant genre painting of the early nineteenth century rests largely on a general sensibility rather than on direct evidence of the use of folk motifs by Venetsianov’s pupils, the strength of these affinities is impressive. From the perspective of only a few decades, the inherent unity of an identifiable folk esthetic and peasant life becomes still more clear. Paradoxically, it was the realist genre painting of the Peredvizhniki that seems to have disrupted the harmonious interrelationship of style and theme. Realism, as a philosophical attitude and as a style, did not allow for the omission of jarring details and the harmonious integration of the parts of an image to the whole. On the contrary, the critical intent of much of nineteenth-century realist art (in Europe as well as Russia) required the development of special stylistic devices most readily associated with verbal rather than visual expression.²⁷ In contrast, the esthetic and moral outlook of the earlier nineteenth century, which seems to have been shared by the humble painters who were Venetsianov’s pupils as well as by intellectuals familiar with the ideas of the Enlightenment, stressed harmony between man and nature and supported a degree of idealization necessary for harmony in the visual arts. In a curious way, the naïve expression of the peasant’s inherent feeling for the harmony of functional form and ornamentation in a wide variety of traditional arts may be seen to complement the more sophisticated and esthetically conscious integration of observation and idealization in the works of artists like Venetsianov and Soroka.

In a more general sense, the capacity of the folk artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to assimilate new experiences and phenomena and to integrate the specific details of everyday life into a visually coherent framework based on forms and patterns from the distant past—illustrated by a variety of decorations on distaffs—points to the essential vitality of the folk tradition. The role of a “folk esthetic” —which, as we have seen, must be a very elastic concept—in other aspects of nineteenth-century Russian art is a question for further investigation.

NOTES

1. Elena Polenova, letter to P. D. Antipova, April 16, 1885, in E. Sakharova, ed., V. D. Polenov, E. D. Polenova: Khronika sem’i khudozhnikov (Moscow, 1964), p. ii.

2. Polenova, Elizaveta Mamontova, and other artists who stayed at Savva Mamontov’s estate Abramtsevo, about 50 km. east of Moscow, began collecting folk art in the early 1880s, after having seen a peasant hut with a magnificent carved frieze in a nearby village; they started the carpentry workshop in 1883. The other major effort to revive traditional arts and crafts was undertaken by Princess Maria Tenisheva at her estate Talashkino near Smolensk. On both these art colonies, see John E. Bowlt, “Two Russian Maecenases. Savva Mamontov and Princess Tenisheva,” Apollo (December 1973): 444-53. The Museum of Folk Art in Moscow, based on the collection of crafts shown at the All-Russian Exhibition of 1883, was opened in 1885 and represents a more official aspect of efforts to preserve national arts; cf. N. Ivanova et al., Muzei narodnogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1972).

3. On the general goals of the Abramtsevo workshops, see Polenova, letter to Stasov, October 1894, in Sakharova, pp. 505-508. A similar idea was behind the founding of a craft workshop in the 1890s by the Moscow Provincial government and in the years just after the 1918 Revolution by the Soviet government.

4. Polenova, letter to V. Stasov, November 12, 1894, in Sakharova, p. 513.

5. The realist critic Vladimir Stasov published on Russian folk ornament in 1872 and articles on Russian architectural decoration and Slavonic and Oriental ornament in 1884-87; he corresponded with Polenova in preparation for an article he later wrote on her work. Cf. letters of Polenova and Stasov, May-November 1894, in Sakharova, pp. 502-13; V. Stasov, Stat’i i zametki, ne voshedshie v sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1954). The interest of a number of early twentieth-century writers and artists in ancient Slavic and Russian folk sources for art is exemplified by the theoretical writing of Aleksandr Shevchenko (e.g., Neo-primitivizm [1913], reprinted in Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, ed. John E. Bowlt [New York, 1971], pp. 44-54). Appreciation of folk art as expressive of national esthetic characteristics became widespread at about the same time that Russian icons were being rediscovered, cleaned, and exhibited, around 1913.

6. V. S. Voronov, “Krest’ianskoe iskusstvo” (Moscow, 1924), reprinted in V. S. Vornov, 0 krest’ianskom iskusstve (Moscow, 1972), pp. 28-129, was the first thorough discussion of this idea.

7. Among the major studies of traditional motifs and their relation to forms found in pagan art and artifacts are: Voronov; V. M. Vasilenko, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba i rospis’ (Moscow, 1947); Vasilenko, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba i rospis’ po derevu XVIII-XX veokov (Moscow, 1960), revised and reprinted in V. M. Vasilenko, Narodnoe iskusstvo. lzbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1974), pp. 19-149. (cf. esp. pp. 44-57 on sources for imagery of architectural deocration). G. K. Vagner, Mastera drevnerusskoi skulptury: Rel’efy Iur’eva-Pol’skogo (Moscow, 1966), pp. 29-30, notes affinities of iconography and style between ancient stone sculpture and folk sculpture. Vasilenko, “Narodnoe iskusstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka,” in Istoriia Russkogo Iskusstva 8.2 (Moscow, 1964): 567-616, esp. pp. 576, 585-89, discusses the question briefly.

8. Lubki are discussed by John E. Bowlt in chapter 12 of this book, “Nineteenth-Century Russian Caricature.” Because the term “popular art” may be misleading through its association with the “popular imagery” of broadsides and printed books, it is not used here.

9. The beregint and their derivation from early Slavic water deities are discussed by Vasilenko in “Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba’’ (1960), pp. 36-49, and in Istoriia Russkogo Iskusstva, p. 585, and by O. Kruglova, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba i rospis’ po derevu (Moscow, 1974), pp. 8-9.

10. Cf. Kruglova, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba, pp. 19-20.

11. V. S. Voronov was the pioneer in the classification of prialki on the basis of regional styles and techniques of decoration. Cf. Voronov, 0 Krest’ianskom iskusstve, pp. 204-28. Other major studies include: Vasilenko, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba (1960); S. K. Zhegalova, “Khudozhestvennye prialki,” in Sokrovishcha russkogo narodnogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1967); O. V. Kruglova, “Severodvinskie nakhodki,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (1960), no. 3, and Kurglova, Russkaia narodnaia rez’ba, pp. 10-23.

12. The transition from carving to painting as the primary decoration of prialki has been connected with the important role of icon painters in the region along and to the east of the Volga—both those painters attached to monasteries (around which regional markets were held) and itinerant icon painters, who were often in close contact with peasants. In particular, one Ogurechnikov is said to have taught a number of peasants the “secrets” of painting on a prepared ground with egg tempera in the 1870s. Cf. M. A. Nekrasova, “įstoki gorodetskoi rospisi i ee khudozhestvennyi stil’,” in Russkoe iskusstva XVIII veka, ed. T. V. Alekseeva (Moscow, 1973), pp. 156-77, esp. pp. 158, 166, referring to D. Prokop’ev, Khudozhestvennye promysly Gor’kovskoi oblasti (Moscow, 1933).

13. Nekrasova, p. 167. The author discusses the sources and importance of the figure on horseback, p. 171, which she relates to the cult of the bogatyr hero Egor the Bold (whose affinities with St. George may also be significant for folk art).

14. Vasilenko, Narodnoe iskusstvo, p. 38, and Istoriia Russkogo Iskusstva, pp. 601-602, notes the importance of markets and cites descriptions of a foreign doctor, traveling in the Nizhninovgorod region in 1805, of quantities of Khokhloma ware and other handcrafted goods, which were then being sold from a central market. Cf. G. Reman, “Makar’evskaia iarmonka,” Severnyi arkhiv (1822), no. 9.

15. Cf. Marvin C. Ross, Russian Procelains (Norman, Okla., 1968), p. 37.

16. V. A. Shelkovnikov and T. N. Iakovleva, “Dekorativnoe i prikladnoe iskusstvo pervoi poloviny XIX veka,” Istoriia Russkogo Iskusstva 8.2 (Moscow, 1964): 543.

17. Quoted in Alexander and Barbara Pronin, Russian Folk Arts (New York, 1975). P. 84.

18. Shelkovnikov and Iakovleva, p. 524.

19. Ibid., p. 519.

20. I. A. Pronina, “O prepodavanii dekorativno-prikladnogo iskusstva v XVIII veke,” in Alekseeva, ed., Russkoe iskusstvo XVIII veka, pp. 76-78, 82-86, gives a detailed account of the organization of the schools and the training.

21. Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1977), p. 3.

22. Repin describes several encounters with this folk artist in his autobiography, I. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe (Moscow, 1953), pp. 55-56, 64, 75.

23. Valkenier has discussed this point in relation to artists of peasant and lower-class background in the mid-nineteenth century, Russian Realist Art, pp. 10-16.

24. Cf. G. Kornelova, Stseny Russkoi narodnoi zhizni kontsa XVIII —nachala XIX vekov (Leningrad, 1961), illustrating engravings by J.-B. Le Prince, Christian Geisler, John Atkinson, and others now in the Hermitage, Leningrad.

25. I discussed this subject in an unpublished talk, “Representation of the Peasantry in Early Nineteenth-Century Russian Art,” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, April 10, 1976.

26. On the work of Venetsianov and his pupils, see especially G. Iu. Smirnov, Venetsianov and His School (Leningrad, 1973). On Soroka, see K. V. Mikhailova, Grigorii Soroka, exhibition catalogue, Russian Museum (Leningrad, 1974).

27. The Russian realist painters did not emulate the “naive” forms of folk art, in contrast to mid-nineteenth-century French realists, particularly Gustave Courbet and his circle, whose interest in popular imagery and in traditional provincial customs was reflected in a deliberate stylistic primitivism in some of their works. (See Meyer Schapiro, “Courbet and Popular Imagery. An Essay on Realism and Naivete,” Journal of the Warburg and and Courtauld Institutes 4 [1941]:164-91.)