The World of Art and Diaghilev's Painters

Vsevolod Petrov

Description

When, almost twenty years ago, we founded the World of Art, we had a burning desire to liberate Russian artistic activity from the tutelage of literature, to instil in the society around us a love of the very essence of art, and that was the aim we had when we took the field. We considered enemies all those “who fail to respect art as such”, those who either fasten wings to an old nag or harness Pegasus to the cart of “social ideals”, or reject the idea of Pegasus altogether. For that reason, we addressed ourselves to the artistic world with the slogan “Talents of all directions, unite!” And that is how in our ranks Vrubel immediately appeared alongside Levitan, Bakst alongside Serov, Somov alongside Maliavin. – Alexander Benois

Sujets

• Theater
• Russian
• Ballet
• Sergéi Diágilev
• Theatre
• Bakst
• Vaslav Nijinsky
• Sergei Diaghilev
• Serov
• Serge de Diaghilev
• Nijinsky

Informations

• Publié par: Parkstone International
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644618813
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

Vsevolod Petrov




The World of Art and
DIAGHILEV’S PAINTERS
© 2022, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA
© 2022, Parkstone Press USA, New York
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ISBN: 978-1-64461-881-3
Contents
The World Of Art By Vsevolod Petrov
Alexander Benois 1870-1960
Ivan Bilibin 1876-1942
Léon Bakst 1866-1942
Konstantin Somov 1869-1939
Valentin Serov 1865-1911
Alexander Golovin 1863-1930
Nikolai Roerich 1874-1947
Yevgeny Lanceray 1875-1946
Mstislav Dobuzhinsky 1875-1957
Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva 1871-1955
Boris Kustodiev 1878-1927
Zinaida Serebriakova 1884-1967
Igor Grabar 1871-1960
Nikolai Sapunov 1880-1912
Sergei Sudeikin 1882-1946
Dmitry Mitrokhin 1883-1973
Georgy Narbut 1886-1920
Sergei Chekhonin 1878-1936
List Of Illustrations
Mikhail Vrubel , The Six-Winged Seraph , 1905. Watercolor, lead mine and black chalk on paper, 33.6 x 48.5 cm. Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg.
THE WORLD OF ART BY VSEVOLOD PETROV
In the history of Russian art, the late nineteenth century was a period of creative innovation and a fundamental restructuring of form.
In the 1890s, a new chapter was opened in the visual arts by a generation of artists who radically revised almost the entire range of established tradition. Authorities that had seemed immutable were suddenly toppled from their pedestals. The horizon of artistic creativity broadened, a new aesthetic emerged, and new trends arose, all in striking contrast to what the earlier art movements of the nineteenth century had propagated. The revaluation of values led to cardinal changes in the interpretation and understanding of creative objectives and techniques.
In all these processes, a preeminent, if not definitive role was played by the artists and art critics grouped around the journal Mir iskusstua [The Golovin]. However, in order to properly assess the historic significance of the artistic, educational, and organizational activities of that group, one must at least briefly review the general state of fin de siècle Russian art.
By that time academic painting was no longer the progressive factor, it had once been. However, due to governmental backing it continued to thrive exclusively as a reactionary trend serving the purposes of official art.
A crucial role in the reshaping of Russian art during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was played by members of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki or the Itinerants). Having achieved remarkable results in the 1870s, the Itinerants reached their peak in the 1880s. Genuine masterpieces appeared at practically each of the traveling exhibitions. At that time Vasily Surikov produced the Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, Menshikov in Beriozou, and Boyarina Morozova. Ilya Repin painted his Religious Procession in Kursk Province, They Did Not Expect Him, and many of his best portraits. A number of other well-known painters also took part in the society’s activities.
By the 1890s, having fulfilled their highly creditable social and historical mission of releasing progressive Russian painting from the shackles of the antiquated academic tradition and having developed a consistently realist method, the Itinerants had ceased to be innovative and were in danger of coming full circle.
Yet the creative potential that the Itinerants had introduced with their new approach was far from exhausted. In the 1890s, several of the younger painters represented at traveling exhibitions displayed superlative talent and largely contributed to the realist trend. One must inevitably mention Sergei Korovin’s Village Community Meeting (1893), which was shown at the 22nd Itinerant Exhibition, Nikolai Kasatkin’s Poor People Gathering Coal at a Worked-Out Pit and his study, Woman Miner , both done in 1894 and displayed at the 23rd Itinerant Exhibition, and, finally, Sergei Ivanov’s study of prisoner life that figured at the 28th Itinerant Exhibition. Each of the artists named built on those particular pieces to produce an extensive cycle of paintings.
Thus Sergei Korovin dedicated himself to the traditional Itinerant theme of peasant life, furnishing a probing reflection of the Russian countryside with the acute social problems that followed the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
Like Korovin, Sergei Ivanov originally concentrated on the peasant theme. In the 1880s, he produced a series of pictures about migrant peasants who had abandoned their native lands and trekked to Siberia in search of a better life. Later, in the 1890s, he embarked on a new cycle which portrayed life in prisons, stockades, and labour camps. Thematically, this cycle was particularly relevant during the period of political reaction under Tsar Alexander III with its surging tide of popular unrest. As Ivanov’s biographers rightly noted, for him this cycle served as a prelude for that subject matter which was to gain prominence in his work at the time of the first Russian Revolution (1905-07).


Boris Kustodiev , Model , 1919. Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 40.4 cm. Private Collection.


Valentin Serov , Portrait of Ida Lvovna Rubinstein , 1910. Tempera and charcoal on canvas, 147 x 233 cm. The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.


Valentin Serov , The Rape of Europa , 1910. Oil on canvas, 71 x 98 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.


Boris Kustodiev , Reclining Model , 1915. Charcoal, sanguine, and colored pencils on paper, 47 x 57 cm. Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg.
Nikolai Kasatkin went even further than his fellow Itinerants. He was the first among Russian painters to derive his themes and images from the life of the newest social class in Russia, the industrial proletariat that had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The two works already mentioned marked the beginning of the artist’s extensive Miners cycle. The key painting of this cycle, Coal-Miners on Shift (1895), was shown at the 24th Itinerant Exhibition. The entire cycle had nothing of the Populist sentimentality so characteristic of the later genre paintings by the Itinerants.
Be that as it may, such artists as Sergei Korovin, Sergei Ivanov, and Nikolai Kasatkin did not set the tone for the traveling exhibitions of the 1890s. Among the later Itinerants the dominant role was shared by landscape painters, who imitated Isaac Levitan and Arkhip Kuinji, as well as genre painters the basic content of whose work was a “dull, routine reality, unmarked by highlights or powerful, captivating emotionality had become the constant overall theme of the traveling exhibitions.”
The traveling exhibitions arranged in the 1890s presented hardly anything comparable with the masterpieces of the previous decade. Now epigones were in command.
In the 1880s, at a time when the Itinerants appeared to hold undivided sway, the earliest signs of a barely noticeable revitalization of art were already there. Mikhail Vrubel, a painter of genius, began his artistic career. Konstantin Korovin displayed his brilliant talents. Novel lyrical intonation sounded in Isaac Levitan’s landscapes and in the pictures of the young Mikhail Nesterov. The twenty-year-old Valentin Serov painted his famous Girl With Peaches (Vera Mamontova), the first gem in the output of the gene ration that was destined to replace the Itinerants.
These artists, with the exception or Vrubel, participated in the traveling exhibitions mounted in the 1880s and 1890s, even though they far from fully shared the ideological and aesthetic concepts of the Itinerants.In reality, they were in many ways alien to the Itinerants. Small wonder that in his reminiscences Nesterov dubbed himself and his fellows the “stepchildren of the Itinerants.” They were becoming convinced that the day of the Pereduizhniki in Russian art was done and that the succeeding generation would have to search for new roads.
The Itinerant philosophy was even more categorically rejected by the progressive younger generation of artists who made their appearance in the 1890s. Igor Grabar, a budding painter who developed into a prominent artist and art historian, noted in his My Life: An Automonograph:
“At first Korovin, Serov, Maliutin, Vrubel, Arkhipov, Ostroukhov and Levitan, and, after them, we the junior generation... came to realize that the way of Miasoyedov, Volkov, Kiseliov, Bodarevsky, and Lemokh [Itinerant epigones] was not our way, and that even the best Itinerants were fundamentally alien to us... We accepted only Repin and Surikov as understandable and close... We sought a greater dimension of truth, a more subtle understanding of nature, less convention, extemporization, less crudity, journeymanship, cliche...”
The younger generation’s rebellion against the authority of their seniors, a typical “fathers-and-sons” conflict, sprang from the general conditions within which Russian social thought evolved at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Populist phase had given way to the new, proletarian period of the Russian liberation movement and the Itinerants’ decline was a symptom of the hopeless crisis and degeneration of the Populist ideology. The dawn of the twentieth century brought with it new social, moral, and aesthetic problems. However, for most Russian artists of the time, the process of creatively assessing its realities was an agonizing effort.
The increasingly complex conditions of the Russian art scene called for a new grouping of forces. One relevant manifestation was the appearance of the Abramtsevo Circle, an unofficial group of artists drawn together by the well-known Moscow art patron and