Art History Today

The Age of Tolstoy: Representing the Russian Landscape & its Peoples. Slides.

1) Apollinary Vasnetsov, Rurik and his brothers Sineus and Truvor arrive at Ladoga, oil on canvas, location unknown.

2) Monument celebrating the millennial of Rurik's arrival at Novgorod, Novgorod, 1870s.

3) Map of Russia.

4) Aleksey Gavrilovich Venetsianov, In the Ploughed Field. Spring, first half of the 1820s, o/c, 51.2 x 65.5 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

5) Ivan Kramskoi, Forester, 1874, o/c, 84 x 62 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

6) Photograph of Tolstoy, 1897.

7) Silvester Shchedrin, Terrace on the Seashore, Capuccini Near Sorrento,1827, o/c, 47.5 x 60 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

8) Ilya Repin, Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870-73, o/c, 131.5 x 281 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

9) Photo of Burlaps on the Volga River, 1900.

10) Silvester Shchedrin, New Rome. The Castle of S.Angelo, 1825, o/c, 45.6 x 67.2 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

11) Mikhail Lebedev, Ariccia near Rome, 1835, o/c, 55.5 x 45.5 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

12) Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy, Storm on the Steppes, 1890, oil on canvas, Novocherkassk Museum of History of the Don Cossacks.

13) Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemous, 1649, oil on canvas, 155 x 199 cm, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, (Coll of the Marquis de Conflands, Paris, 1772).

14) Aleksei Venetsianov, Harvesting in Summer, 1820, oil on canvas, 60 x 48.3 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

15) Isaak Levitin, Russia: Lake, 1900, oil on canvas, 208 x 149 cm, Art Museum, Novgorod.

16) Isaak Levitin, Evening Bells, 1892, oil on canvas, 87 x 107.6 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

17) Isaak Levitin, Spring Flood, 1897, oil on canvas, 64.2 x 57.5 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

18) Ivan Shiskin, Oaks, Evening, 1887, oil on canvas, 62 x 42 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

19) Isaak Levitan, Above Eternal Peace, study, 1894, oil on canvas, 150 x 206 cm, Tretyakov. Moscow.

20) Grigori Soroka, Fishermen, 1840s, oil on canvas, 67 × 102 cm, SRM, St Petersburg.

21) Aleksei Venetsianov, Sleeping Shepherd Boy, oil on canvas, 1823-26, 27.5 x 35.5 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

22) Fyodor Slavyansky, Venetsianov’s Study, 1830s, o/c, Tretyakov, Moscow.

23) Karl Briullov, The Last Days of Pompeii, 1830-33, oil on canvas, 456 x 651 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

24) Aleksey Savrasov, The Rooks have Returned, 1871, oil on canvas, 62 x 48.5 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

25) Mikhail Klodt, On a Plowed Field, 1872, oil on canvas, 71 x 131.2, Tretyakov, Moscow.

26) Lermontov, Pushkin and Gogol from the Millenium Monument, Novgorod, 1870s.

27) Orest Kiprensky, Portrait of S.S.Uvarov, 1815–1816, oil on canvas, 117.3 х 90.8, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

28) Anon., Portrait of Mikhail Lermontov, 1837, oil on cardboard, 36 x 28.1 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

29) Karl Briullov, An Officer and his Servant, 1830s, oil on canvas, location unknown.

30) Mikhail Lermontov, A Skirmish in the Mountains of Dagestan, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

31) Vasily Perov, Portrait of Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, 1874, oil on canvas, 116.5 x 89 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

32) Theodore Rousseau, The Oaks of Apremont, 1852, oil on canvas, 63.5 cm x 99.5 cm, Museé du Louvre.

33) Vasily Polenov, Moscow Courtyard, 1878, oil on canvas, 55.2 x 44 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

34) Vasily Polenov, Grandmother’s Garden, 1878, oil on canvas, 54.7 x 65 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

35) Ilya Repin, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in a Ploughed Field, 1887, oil on cardboard, 27.8 x 40.3 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

36) Ilya Repin, Portrait of Lev Tolstoy as a Ploughman on a Field, 1887, paper, lead pencil, 27.8 x 40.3, Tretyakov, Moscow.

37) Ilya Repin, Tolstoy in dressed in Peasant Costume, 1901, oil on canvas, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

38) Ivan Kramskoi, Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1873, oil on canvas, 98 x 75.5 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

39) Photograph of Tolstoy working in his study, 1908.

40) Isaak Levitin, The Vladimirka, 1892, oil on canvas, 79 x 123 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

41) Vasily Perov, Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1872, oil on canvas, 99 x 80.5 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

42) Map of Russia.

43) Nikolay Dobrovolsky, Crossing the Angara in Irkutsk, 1886, oil on canvas, Belygorod.

44) Vasily Surikov, Ermak’s conquest of Siberia, 1895, oil on canvas, 59 x 103 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

45) Anon, Ancient portray of Yermak, the first leader of the exploration of Siberia, 17^th cent.

46) Stroganoff Coat of Arms with two sables, Stroganoff Palace, St Petersburg.

47) A Russian sable, as illustrated in The Trapper's Guide, 1867.

48) Aleksander Sochaczewski, Farewell to Europe, oil on canvas, Museum Pawilon-X in Warsaw.

49) Farewell to Europe in situ.

50) Ilya Repin, Portrait of Pavel Tretyakov, 1901, oil on canvas, Tretyakov, Moscow.

51) Mikhail Klodt, Oak Grove, 1863, oil on canvas, 97.5 x 160 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

52) Lev Kamenev, Mist. The Red Pond in Moscow in Autumn, 1871, oil on canvas, 68 x 113 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

53) Isaak Levitan, Autumn Day, 1879, oil on canvas, 50 x 63 cm, Tretyakov, Moscow.

The Age of Tolstoy: Representing the Russian Landscape & its Peoples. (10)

A Brief Note on Tretyakov’s Landscapes.

Towards the end of the 1850s Tretyakov wrote to the landscape painter Apollinary Goravsky the following words:” I need neither richness in nature nor effective use of light: no miracles. Give me a murky puddle, so long as it contains truth and poetry. There is poetry to be found in everything, that is the artist’s business.”[1] This is the credo of the nineteenth-century realist painters who sought for honesty in nature. The majority of works by landscape artists were acquired in the 1870s and 1880s including works by Alexi Sarasov, Mikhail Klodt, Lev Kamenev, and Ivan Shiskin. Klodt sold Tretyakov High Road in Autumn and similar works at discounted rates. Shiskin was an especially favoured artist and friend; his Midday. On the Outskirts of Moscow was bought by Tretyakov from the Imperial Academy which pleased the painter. In the 1860s and 1870s Sarasov was an important artist in the life of Moscow where he taught landscape painting. His The Rooks have Returned (above) was exhibited at the inaugural exhibition of the Peredvizhniki or Wanderers Society, but eventually came into Tretyakov’s gallery. A measure of Tretyakov’s faith in these upcoming landscape painters can be seen in his gamble on the purchase of a small painting called Autumn Day in 1879. The author of this humble work was Isaak Levitan who went on to become the most famous landscape artist of his generation.

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[1] Cited in Galina Churak, “Landscape Painting in the Tretyakov Gallery” in Russian Landscape, 123.

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Out in the Cold: Images of Siberia.

Two juxtaposed images could stand for the idea of Siberia with its icy confines in the Russian imagination: Levitin’s The Vladimirka (1892) and Perov’s Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevesky (1872). The portrait of the great Russian writer is calm and contemplative; Perov, the “Russian Courbet” has captured something of the resigned pessimism of the author of Crime and Punishment whose linked hands may recall wearing the manacles in Siberia.[1] In that novel the famous student murderer Raskolnikov is sent to Siberia for his crime, a fictional episode that mirrors Dostoevsky’s own experience of the penal colony in his early life. Implicated in an anti-Imperial plot, Dostoevsky was put before a firing squad in 1849 but was reprieved at the eleventh hour. Profoundly influenced by the horrific mock-firing squad and its aftermath, Dostoevsky was changed forever.[2] Perhaps Dostoevsky travelled the bleak thoroughfare that Levitan painted in the Vladimirka or Vladimir Road which shows the road leading from Moscow to Vladimir, and then Nizhny Novgorod. Beyond that lay Siberia or “the sleeping land” (above) which was the locus of the fur trade during the era of Ivan the Terrible. Surinov’s Ermak’s (Yermak) Conquest of Siberia shows the eponymous Cossack fighting the inhabitants of Siberia which was a rich asset for the fur-trade. Ermak was employed by the powerful Siberian Stroganoff family whose coat of arms has two sables on either side of an eschuteon. Trading in furs would continue into the era of Catherine the Great who moved fur trade accounts from the Siberian Chancellery to her Personal Cabinet (her private treasury), thus possibly financing the acquisition of the Hermitage collection. Russia became increasingly important for the fur-trade with the deforestation of Europe, though Russia would lose trade from London in the fifteenth-century due to changes in fashion and the depletion of forest reserves. Finally due to changing patterns of trade and various other reasons, the Siberian fur trade went into decline Henceforth fur would be replaced by other commodities such as wheat. With the benefit of hindsight we are aware as we read of Tolstoy’s other ego Lëvin scything in the fields, or as we inspect Repin’s images of Tolstoy ploughing, that images of the landscape and its denizens, this idealised, measured view of Russia, the Slavic-inspired commune would eventually be swept aside by a brutalising, efficient machine in the form of Stalin’s collectivisation of agriculture within his Five Year Plan; these kolkhoz or collective Soviet farms were drastically different from the Russian communes of the previous century. As for Siberia, the word would no longer recall the fur trade, but would become shorthand for a cold, lonely exile often resulting in death and social oblivion at the hands of misguided ideologues.

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[1] Bunt, Russian Art: From Scyths to Soviets, 209.

[2] Dostoevsky fell into the net of the minister Liprandi who detected links between the St Petersburg intellectual elite and “folk Schismatics” in the Russian communes.

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Down on the Farm with Tolstoy.

A much more famous writer than Lermontov and Turgenev is the author of War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina - (1877) Leo Tolstoy. In the second novel, the rural aristocrat Konstantin "Kostya" Dmitrievich Lëvin is thought to be a self-portrait. Retiring to his rural estate from Moscow, Levin often follows the peasants out into the fields, and in one memorable episode in the novel spends a whole day scything which induces a sense of mysticism in nature and an acceptance into the collective of the peasants working on his land.[1] Tolstoy often worked on his own estate, and was drawn and painted in the act of ploughing a field by Ilya Repin (above). Influenced by the Moravian brothers and their colony at Hernhut, Tolstoy wrote: “In my mind there is much from my childhood, from the Quakers, from the Herrnhuters.” The Germanic settlement of Volga territory led to the creation of peasant communes, a romanticised notion of community which clashed with the westernized Russian elite. Fed by his own experience of Jewish colonists in the Ukraine, Tolstoy embraced this way of life. He also studied the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer which encouraged the Russian author to practice a form of asceticism in which work is the road towards compensation and salvation. Reading such spiritual guides as St Francis and Buddha who were born into wealth but chose “voluntary poverty,” yet abandoned everything and wandered through the land as mendicants, Tolstoy dressed like a peasant and farmed his own estates. Artists of the realist movement represented the great writer in this way. Leo Tolstoy was painted by Russia’s finest artists: Kramskoi painted his portrait and Repin depicted him ploughing and dressed in peasant costume. These portraits originated as a result of Tretyakov’s wish to have a portrait gallery of famous Russian figures executed, though it was mainly due to Kramskoi’s own initiative that his portrait of Tolstoy was made. The portrait was done on Tolstoy’s estate of Yasnaya Polyana at the time he was working on the novel Anna Karenina. Tolstoy acknowledged that the portrait was a success, and as the Tretyakov’s website puts it: “the emphatic simplicity of artistic language was dictated by the writer’s aesthetic views.”[2]

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[1] Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part III, Chap 4.

[2] Tretyakov web site.

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The Art of Describing in 19th Century Russian Literature

In his foreword to his translation of Lermontov’s short 1840 novel A Hero of Our Time, the modern writer Vladimir Nabokov observes how nineteenth-century Russian writers were indifferent to “exact shades of visual colour” which led to a hackneyed form of prose.[1] Nabokov was surprised at Lermontov’s use of clichéd description because the earlier poet was actually a painter as well as a poet. This interest in writing and the art of painting was prevalent in the early nineteenth-century as is proved by the remarks of the painter Aleksei Venetsianov:” The art of drawing and painting itself are no other than a weapon serving literature and, as a result, the enlightenment of the people.”[2] Downgrading painting to the position of the handmaid of literature was not acceptable to some persons: near the end of the century the St Petersburg artist Alexander Benois complained that the artists of the century were the “slaves of literature” and the painter Mikhail Vrubel (a pupil of Repin) strove to free himself of this bondage by recourse to his master’s art. The sort of art that Repin largely produced, big realist crowd scenes, small intimate dramas, were more the stuff of the novelists; but as Scheijen says this was not the case where landscape was concerned; the genre was not in thrall to literature since a landscape by its nature was “anti-literary.”[3] Intellectuals hostile to the arts hierarchy that privileged literature over painting could be found amongst the literati itself. The novelist Ivan Turgenev lived most of his professional life in France, and there he assembled a small collection consisting of seventeenth-century Dutch artists like Jacob van Ruysdael and Aert van der Neer. But he also had a taste for contemporary French landscape artists like Theodore Rousseau. Turgenev’s admiration for landscape affected his views on Repin and the realists whom he saw as indulging in “photographic realism” rather than the landscape artists who would capture what was “typical in a scene.” Turgenev befriended Russian landscape painters like Vasil Polenov who was working in Paris as the same time as Repin. Such canvases as Polenov’s Moscow Courtyard (above) and Evening in the Ukraine were inspired by reading Turgenev’s poetry and prose, most especially his collection of short stories- Sketches from a Huntsman’s Album (1852) which contained illustrations by Turgenev himself.

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[1] Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (Doubleday, 1958), trans. Vladimir Nabokov in collaboration with Dimitri Nabokov, xv.

[2] Cited in Sjeng Scheijen, “Slaves of Literature: Literature, Visual Art and Landscape Art” Russian Landscape, 89.

[3] Ibid, 89.

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Going Native.

One of the most ingrained ideas in the history of Russia is that its culture originated elsewhere; in the words of Etkind- “the fruits are national, the roots are foreign.”[1] National pride wasn’t really internally generated, but stemmed from associations with different tribes like Rurik’s Normans who had been part of Russia’s early history. So we have a phenomenon in which outsiders become naturalised and then try to colonise other scattered peoples across the great breadth of Russia. In the seventeenth-century the German-born Catherine the Great brought nomadic tribes of the Orenberg province (later named Kazakhs) under Russian sovereignty.[2] Catherine’s court was even viewed as Tartars, and this was part of an “orientalising process” in which Russians took on the appearance and characteristics of what were perceived as exotic peoples. The orientalising tendency can be seen in some of the portraits of the day, like the academic painter Karl Briullov’s double portrait of an officer with his servant which has a pronounced oriental ambiance (above). Something of this cultural osmosis is seen in the British in India, and in a similar way some Russians went “native.” From the writings of the poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841) (who was known as “the poet of the Caucasus”) through Pushkin with his interest in the exotic to Gogol with his travelling tales of the eccentric Russians in St Petersburg, Moscow and the Ukraine, intellectuals took more interest in the culture of native tribes and ethnic groups. Lermontov himself was a painter, and he tried his hand at a number of landscapes which are not important for their quality, but for what they betray about the poet’s interest in the local communities and customs of Russia.

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[1] Etkind, Internal Colonization, 114.

[2] IN 1763, just after her coronation, Catherine issued her Manifesto “that invited foreign colonists to settle in Russia and promised substantial benefits to the immigrants, such as free agricultural land, exemption from military service, relocation subsidies, free loans, and tax immunity for thirty years” Ibid, 128.

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A Portrait of the People.

As Vladimir Lenyashin correctly points out, the “true era of a Russian Renaissance is inextricably linked to portraitists”- not landscapists.[1] No matter how much one tries to argue for the origins of landscape painting in the early history of Russia, one always comes up against this fact- the portrait dominated as a genre. And of the many portraits executed, hardly any were of the real people: the peasants, the serfs, the rural native Russians. An “image of the people” only materialized with the promotion of landscape to a more respectable position in the history of art in Russia, but it had to compete with other genres like history painting. In the early phase of Russian landscape art however the rural dweller was still bathed in a soft, romantic glow; these peasants and fishermen seemed more the product of idealised views of the Russian peasant which blended lazy resignation and natural piety.[2] Such gentle scenes suddenly appeared much to the consternation of academic artists who were building the great compositions, the machines. Much under the influence of French realist painters like the School of Barbizon and artists like Theodore Rousseau, the quality of “Russianness” permeated painting. In Lenyashin’s words: Russianness in works like Repin’s Barge Haulers and Savrasov’s The Rooks have Returned conveyed “a national experience of nature, with its impressionable freshness and natural vision.”[3] Apart from the aesthetic dimension of this new Russian painting, what is also noticeable is humbleness, a quiet sense of making the best of an often very hard life. Small things and minor achievements (like ploughing a field) are celebrated, much at odds with the grandiloquence of the academic painters who favour scenes of ancient civilisations.

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[1] Vladimir Lenyashin, ““Everything Gravitates Towards the Landscape:” Landscape Painting in the Context of the Russian Genre System,” in Russian Landscape, 137-145.

[2] Lenyashin quotes the poet Anna Akhmatova: “I have learned to live simply and wisely, looking at the sky and praying to God.”

[3] Ibid, 140.

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The Landscape of Mood.

Levitan's work was a profound response to the romantic charm of the Russian landscape. Levitan did not paint urban landscapes; with the exception of the View of Simonov Monastery (whereabouts unknown), mentioned by Nesterov, the city of Moscow appears only in the painting Illumination of the Kremlin. During the late 1870s he often worked in the vicinity of Moscow, and created the "landscape of mood", in which the contour and condition of nature are spiritualized, and become vehicles for the conditions of the human soul. Typical in his work is a muted and nearly melancholic daydream amidst pastoral landscapes largely empty of human presence. Fine examples of these qualities include The Vladimirka Road, 1892 Evening Bells, 1892, and Eternal Rest, 1894, all in the Tretyakov Gallery. Though his late work displayed familiarity with Impressionism, his palette was generally subdued, and his leanings were more true-to-life and lyrical than optical or technical.

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Russian Tourism & Painting

While Russian academic artists were travelling through Italy and creating classical landscapes, others were actually taking an interest in drawing and painting their own land. This neglect of Russia’s geography by its own painters is highlighted by Dostoevsky’s aggrieved question: “Does there exist a Russian…who doesn’t know Europe twice as well as Russia.”?[1] In other words tourism did not exist in Russia; it was unattractive as a place of vacation or retreat for artists and the intelligentsia. Russia missed out on the aesthetic picturesque movement of the nineteenth-century, largely because of the European focus; but also because most of the descriptions of Russia were in writing: travel journals, diaries of educated tourists, and novels such as Gogol’s Dead Souls. Another factor was the vast geographical distances in Russia compared to Western Europe, not to mention the primitive accommodation available to the Russian tourist-artist. The landscape seemed unwelcoming too; this external hostility of the Russian countryside was thought to contain some inner, mystical quality that would reveal itself to the seeker only gradually.[2] The emergence of Russian tourism also coincided with renewed interest in the religious architecture, especially provincial churches and far-flung monasteries. The picturesque was rejected; history was embraced as monasteries and similar buildings on the outskirts of centres like Moscow and Novgorod. Levitin’s Evening Bells (above) is a good example of how the “holy and the picturesque” could melt together in a spiritual/artistic epiphany. This spiritual picturesque relied heavily on mood and atmospheric effects in nature; hence later nineteenth-century works like Vasily Polenov’s, Moscow Courtyard or the brooding landscapes of Levitin, one of the founder-members of the Moscow Group.

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[1] Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, cited in Christopher Ely, “The Picturesque and the Holy: Visions of Touristic Space in Russia, 1820-1850” in Architectures of Russian Identity: 1500 to the Present, eds James Cracraft, Daniel Rowland, (Cornell University Press, 2003), 80-89, 81.

[2] Ibid, 82.

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The Image of the People in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art

The image of the Russian peasant would have to endure an artistic revolution before it could truly be said to express Russian identity. Part of this struggle was fought on the terrain of genre and landscape painting which fought hard to escape the shackles of the classical tradition imposed on nineteenth-century Russian realist painters. If one wants to get an idea of how the image of the people in Russia drastically changed, then one need only compare Silvester Shchedrin’s Terrace on the Seashore (1827) with Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870) (above). It is immediately obvious even to the casual viewer that the image of the people has undergone a seismic shift resulting in a more socially aware art in which people and landscape are inseparable. Shchedrin’s appealing scene of bearded peasants and picturesque trees brings Russia to Italy with mixed results. Though assured, it is the product of studying the French neo-classical school which was the result of artists living in Rome and Florence. As David Jackson says, in paintings like Shchedrin’s Terrace, “the Steppes are indistinguishable from the Compagna” and “a street in Moscow suggests Rome, or a sunset on the Neva looks like evening on the Venetian Lagoon.”[1] By contrast Repin’s Barge Haulers offers no pretensions to the pretty or decorative; it is a painted social document which shows the exertion and toil of a gang of workers on a territory that was colonised by foreign peoples such as Germans who brought a disciplined work ethic to Russia. Like French artists in the enlightenment and romantic periods, Russian landscape painters were taught to use Italianate and classical models instead of seeking inspiration from their own soil and native traditions. Even Repin, the absolute exemplum of realist, socially aware painting could not escape this as he “was advised to erase studies from life, and instead copy Poussin’s ‘historic’ landscapes in the Hermitage.” Repin “found this copying from the masters an unacceptable practice and was unimpressed by the ‘artificial, darkened, unnatural’ works of the French master.”[2]

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[1] David Jackson, “The Motherland: Tradition and Innovation in Russian Landscape in Russian Landscape, eds David Jackson & Patty Wageman, (NG, London, 2003), 52-88, 53.

[2] Ibid.