Russian Painting. Peter Leek
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henchmen, painters turned to portraiture and other varieties of artistic endeavour. One result was a vogue for parsunas (from the Latin persona), pictures of living people similar in style to icons, but of a non-religious nature. These were usually painted on wooden panels, rather than on canvas. At first they were extremely stylized, and the emphasis was not so much on capturing character as on conveying the sitter’s place in society. But before long the parsuna gave way to a more realistic type of portraiture. For example, the portrait of Peter the Great’s jester Jacob Turgenev, painted by an unknown artist some time before 1696, has a psychological depth and an irony absent from most parsunas. The quizzical shrewdness of the jester’s expression and the way his powerful figure fills the canvas may have been meant to suggest that wisdom is not exclusive to princes, nor folly to fools.
6. Ivan Kramskoï, Portrait of Pavel Tretyakov, 1876. Oil on canvas, 59 × 49 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The Academy
The Academy of Sciences was established in Saint Petersburg by a decree of the governing senate on 28 January (8 February) 1724, following an order of Emperor Peter the Great. Peter the Great’s decision to build a capital that would be “a window on Europe” had considerable significance for Russian painting. First, he lured architects, craftsmen and artists to Russia from various parts of Europe, both to design and decorate the buildings of Saint Petersburg and to train their Russian contemporaries in the skills needed to realise his plans for modernizing the whole country. With similar aims in mind, he paid for Russian artists to study abroad and planned to establish an art department in the newly created Academy of Sciences.
After Peter’s death, these plans reached fruition with the founding in 1757 of the Imperial Academy of the Arts, which opened in earnest six years later. For more than a hundred years the Academy exerted a powerful influence on Russian art. It was supplemented by a preparatory school, where budding artists were sent when they were between six and ten years old. It was rigidly hierarchical, with titles ranging from “artist without rank” to academician, professor and councillor. Students who had the stamina to do so toiled at their studies for fifteen years. And, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was dominated by unquestioning acceptance of classical ideas. Russian artists frequently found the Academy’s regulations and attitudes frustrating, but it did have the merit of making a comprehensive and rigorous artistic education available to those who showed signs of talent.
Cross-currents in art
Initially the staff of the Academy included a preponderance of foreign – mainly French and Italian – teachers. As a result, Russian painting during the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries owed a great deal to the fashions prevalent in other parts of Europe, which tended to reach Russia with some delay. Given the distance from Saint Petersburg and Moscow to the Western European capitals, this lag is hardly surprising. But Russian painters did have considerable opportunities to familiarize themselves with Russian and non-Russian art, both thanks to the circulation of reproductions (often in the form of engravings and lithographs) and to the art-buying habits of the ruling class. As well as funding the Academy (including travel scholarships for graduates), Catherine the Great bought masterpieces of French, Italian and Dutch art for the Hermitage. During the French Revolution, her agents – and Russian visitors to Paris in general – were able to pick up some handy bargains, as the contents of chateaux were looted and sold off.
7. Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Peter the Great, 1717. Oil on canvas, 142.5 × 110 cm, Hermitage, St. Petersburg.
8. Victor Vasnetov, Ivan the Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf, 1889. Oil on canvas, 249 × 187 cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The Itinerants
However, although the Academy boasted a diverse and fairly liberal collection of foreign masterpieces, not all of the students were content. In 1863 – the year that the first Salon des Refusés was held in Paris – fourteen high-profile art students (thirteen painters and one sculptor) resigned from the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in protest against its conservative attitudes and restrictive regulations. Their next move was to set up an artists’ cooperative, although it soon became apparent that a more broadly based and better organized association was needed, eventually leading to the formation of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions.
The Society was incorporated in November 1870, and the first of its forty-three exhibitions was held in November 1871 (the last one took place in 1923). The four artists who spearheaded the Society’s founding were Ivan Kramskoï, portrait, historical and genre painter, who taught at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists school of drawing in Saint Petersburg before being given the rank of academician in 1869; Vassily Perov, portrait, historical and genre painter who taught painting at the School of Painting and Architecture in Moscow from 1871 to 1883; Grigory Miasoyedov, portrait, historical and genre painter who lived in Germany, Italy, Spain and France after completing his studies at the Academy in Saint Petersburg and was one of the board members of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions, and finally, Nikolaï Gay, religious and historical painter, portraitist and landscape artist, sculptor and engraver who also wrote articles on art. First a student at the university of physics and mathematics in Saint Petersburg, he entered the Academy of Arts as a teacher as of 1863.
One of their primary concerns, reflected in the name of the Society, was that art should reach out to a wider audience. To further that aim – perhaps inspired by the narodniki (the Populists then travelling around Russia preaching social and political reform) – they undertook to organize “circulating” exhibitions, which would move from one town to another.
And like the Impressionists in France (who also held their first exhibition in 1874), the peredvizhniki – variously translated as Itinerants, Travellers and Wanderers – embraced a broad spectrum of artists, with differing styles and a great variety of artistic preoccupations. But, initially at least, the Society was a more tightly knit organization, and ideologically its aims were more coherent. Living at the time when the writings of Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were awakening social consciences, most of the Itinerants were actively concerned with the conditions in which the ordinary people of Russia lived, and strove to stimulate awareness of the appalling injustices and inequalities that existed in contemporary society. The artistic movement that focused on these concerns came to be known as Critical Realism.
The emergence of Russian Avant-garde
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, modern Russian painters wished to confer upon art a vaster social resonance. To this end, they had to reconcile the profound attachment of Russians to tradition and the desire for renewal. The latter found expression in a wide variety of movements. Russian avant-garde offers multiple facets, drawing inspiration from foreign sources as well as those of its home country, making Russian art the spearhead of the worldwide artistic process at the beginning of the twentieth century.
A hundred years or so later, Sergeï Shchukin and the brothers Mikhaïl and Ivan Morozov purchased numerous Impressionist paintings and brought them back to Russia. In 1892 the merchant and industrialist Pavel Tretyakov gave his huge collection of paintings (including more than a thousand by Russian artists) to the city of Moscow. Six years later, the Russian Museum opened in the Mikhaïlovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg. Today it houses more than 300,000 items, including some 14,000 paintings.
Exhibitions, such as that of Tretyakov in the Russian Museum, also played an important role in the development of Russian art. At the end of the nineteenth century, the artistic status of icons had been in eclipse for approximately two hundred years, even though they were cherished as objects of religious veneration. During that time, many of them had been damaged, inappropriately repainted or obscured by grime. In 1904, Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity was restored to its full glory, and in 1913 a splendid exhibition of restored and cleaned icons was held in Moscow to mark the millennium of the Romanov dynasty. As a result, the rediscovered colours and stylistic idiosyncrasies of icon painting were