From the history of russian painting

ICON PAINTING. From its very beginning Russian icon painting displayed its unique characteristics. Moreover, it often happened that certain works created by the Byzantine masters actually became component parts of the history of Russian painting and became important elements in the artistic life of ancient Russia. For example, the works of Byzantine artist Theophanes the Greek, who, in Novgorod and Moscow, found a second home and a wide scope for his artistic activities.

Ancient Russia reprocessed this foreign experience, she dictated her own conditions to those who came from afar bringing her their creative strength, and, ultimately, she selected exactly what she wanted.

The works of the 14-th and 15-th centuries were produced at a time of great creative tension and excitement in Russian life, at a time of great creative impulse. It was then that ancient Russia was gathering her strength to shake off the Mongol and Tatar yoke, it was then that the Russians scored their first great victory, one that determined their subsequent successes in winning back their land and driving out the foreigners. The ecstatic tension in the painting of Theophanes the Greek was replaced by the radiant clarity and harmony of Andrei Rublev.

His famous icon "Old Testament Trinity", painted early in the 15-th century, moves us to this day. Mexican, American, Italian and French artists speak of it with admiration. Look at it. You can see a painting that sings. The bowed heads of the angels give a feeling of rhythm, of melody. The amazingly plastic lines convey tranquility, the inner calm that makes for contemplation and reflection.

The icon was commissioned as a tribute to St.Sergius Radonezh, the founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery, who strove for the unity of Russia and took an active part in the preparation for the Great Battle of Kulikovo against Tatars and Mongols.

Rublev omitted the details of the Old Testament story and painted angels seated at a table with a sacrificial cup in the middle. The shape of the cup is repeated in the outer lines of the composition and the inner contours of the two angels on the sides. The cup of the Trinity may be regarded as a token of the necessity of sacrifice for the sake of saving mankind. The wonderful sunny colours have suffered from the ravages of time, but the rhythm is faultless.

In the 17-th century icon painting began to lose its former qualities of generalization, ideality, and completeness. Gradually, the old characteristics disappeared as new ones took their place. Art began to turn to tangible reality.

SENTIMENTALISM. Three artists denote the apogee of the advancement of Russian painting in the second half of the 18-th century - Rokotov, Levitsky, and Borovikovsky.

Of the three, Rokotov seems the most inspired. The emotional reflections of his models are delicate, almost elusive, and they seem to reflect the process of self-awareness that Russians experienced throughout the 18-th century: it was a process that terminated later, with the Pushkin era, when Russian romanticism was nearing its end. Rokotov lifts the veil from our darkest secret, the recess of the soul. But a mystery remains concealed behind some strange invisible screen, it lives on in the eyes of Rokotov's sitters. Rokotov reveals the beauty of man through his own pictorial equivalent of this spirituality: he constructs his gentle and precious color scale on a complex of tones that "slide" and interfuse. Look, for example, at the portrait of Novosiltseva.

A rather different quality is identifiable with Levitsky. Levitsky was remarkably accurate in depicting what he saw. This was both true of his human characters and of the concrete world before him. He seemed to touch the silks and satins with his hands, his artistic fingers seemed to brush against the delicate surface of skin.

In their art Rokotov and Levitsky seem to represent two sides of the 18-th century. They express an interest in the beauty both of the spiritual and physical, two conditions, of course, that intertwine and communicate in the very craft of art.

Borovikovsky was a product of the turn of the 18-th and 19-th centuries. He adhered to specific types of portraiture, but always expressed a softness of emotion not only in his treatment of character but also in his subtle perception of color and skillful harmonies of them. The best of his creations is the portrait of Maria Lopukhina.

EARLY ROMANTICISM

Romanticism in Russian painting of the first thirty years of the 19-th century progressed spasmodically without any theoretical support. At the beginning of the century Russian painters absorbed the mood of the time and sensed the future. In addition, writers greatly influenced some painters, especially Kiprensky and Orlovsky, the two most consequential figures in Romantic painting in the first twenty years of the century. Take, for example, Kiprensky's portrait of A.Pushkin. After seeing it, the great poet said: "I see myself as in a mirror, but the mirror flatters me".

No other portraitist of Kiprensky's stature emerged in Russia at the beginning of the 19-th century, but one or two of his contemporaries deserve a mention.

The work and personality of Alexander Orlovsky /1779-1832/ were interesting and varied. Orlovsky was always on the lookout for the new and the curious, emphasizing and exaggerating any unusual physical or psychological features he could find- or sometimes invent!- in his subjects. He was a very innovative caricaturist...His finest works, however, are undubitably his portrait drawings /mainly in Italian pencil/, which almost reach the standard of excellence set by Kiprensky.

Neither Kiprensky nor Orlovsky was a professional landscape-painter and they hardly ever painted "pure" lanscape, but this genre was also much influenced by the Romantic movement and was second in importance only to portraiture in the 1830s. The harbinger of this development was Silvester Shchedrin /1791-1830/. It was he who initiated the "Italian period" which, in the work of Mikhail Lebedev and later Alexander Ivanov, produced the best of Russian landscape painting until the middle of the 19-th century.

Shchedrin stepped at the threshold of late Romanticism. Three years later after his death Karl Brullov's painting "The Last Day of Pompeii" crossed this threshold.

EARLY REALISM. Early realism began to come into its own in the early 1820s, the decade which saw Tropinin's and Venetsianov's work mature. Tropinin, Venetsianov and his students generally make up the group of nineteen-century Russian painters associated with early Rea-lism, which coexisted without conflict with other styles.

Tropinin was interested first and foremost in the character of his sitters, and only secondarily in their mood and state of mind. His Moscow portraits are always simple, almost homely. His subjects reveal little sense of inner turmoil and appear to experience no spiritual excitement, totally unconcerned, apparently, with any of the profound questions confronting the rest of mankind. Even when the model demands a Romantic interpretation, that interpretation is modified by Tropinin's characteristic inclusion of everyday detail. This applies particularly to the portrait of Alexander Pushkin, done at the same time as Kiprensky's portrait of the poet. Like all Tropinin's models, Pushkin is shown wearing a dressing gown, though he is, admittedly, in a moment of inspiration.The concentration in his face, and the sharp turn of his head, are in some contrast to the relaxed, domestic setting. His poetic soul seems totally at variance with the homely dressing gown. Tropinin's interest in the atmosphere and physical conditions in which people lead their lives culminated in the development of a particular style which combines portrait with genre.

Venetsianov was the first Russian painter to discover and appreciate nature in its free and pristine state. His understanding of nature was the result of a scrupulous study of the heavens and the earth. He paid great attention to the foregrounds of many of his paintings, filling them with painstakingly depicted ploughed land, grass, stones and leaves.

By the 1840s the movement had already many adherents. Some members of Venetsianov's circle broadened the boundaries of genre painting, touching on fresh and different aspects of life, depicting not only peasants but artisans and craftsmen, minor civil servants, scenes of city life. By the 1840s the movement had already many adherents.

THE REALISTS OF THE 1860s AND THE WANDERERS. In the second half of the 19-th century Russian art, in all its variety, was ranged between two opposite poles - the Realist and the Academic. Realism and Academism, admittedly, often approached each other and interacted, as painters were now attracted to one extreme, now the other. The pole of Realism, however, exercised the stronger pull.

In Russia, more than in any other country, the essential prerequisite of the Realists' approach was the direct confrontation of social problems. The sores of social life were so glaring that they simply cried out to be depicted on canvas or described in the pages of novels.

Vasily Perov /1834-1882/ was the main exponent of these new tendencies. He was the virtual leader of the painters in the "Men and Women of the 1860s" /shestidesyatniki/ movement, giving them a sense of direction and proportion, influencing their development and embodying all their conflicts and contradictions.

As the 1860s drew to a close the Russian Realists and the enlightened public came to the conclusion that the democratic tendencies, now so evident among painters, required some kind of systematic organization. It was at this point that the idea of a Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions was mooted; it was formed in 1870. The moving spirits behind the new collective were G.G.Myasoyedov, recently returned from a stay abroad, I.N.Kramskoi, who had already demonstrated his original talents at the time of "artistic rebellion" in 1836, V.G.Perov and N.N.Ge.

The society included nearly all the best painters in the country. It was an association of free painters, each able to exhibit and sell his paintings as he wished, and to take his full share of the profits derived from the exhibitions. The members of the Society, who became known as "peredvizhniki" /travelers or wanderers/, took upon themselves new obligations, namely, to take exhibitions to various cities and towns of the empire in order to introduce a wider public to the latest artistic achievements and developments; to educate the population at large; and struggle for social reform.

The peredvizhniki understood the need not only to depict villages, peasants and other ordinary folk, but to express their sense of hope, their faith in the future.