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27/09/04
Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy
The National Gallery, London
23 June-12 September 2004
Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy, at the
National Gallery this summer reveals a seminal period of Russian
art of which the west has scarcely been aware. Russian icons and
the early 20th-century avant-garde work of Malevich, Goncharova,
Tatlin, Stepanova are comparatively well-known and greatly admired,
in large part due to Camilla Gray's excellent study, The
Great Experiment in Art: Russian Art 1863-1922 published
in 1962.1 Nineteenth-century Russian landscape painting, however,
has not been shown here before. Many of the sentiments conveyed
by the paintings on show have been expressed in literature, so to
present the largely unknown work against a literary backdrop is
most appropriate. Russian authors of poetry and fiction from Pushkin
to Lermontov, Chekhov to Tolstoy and composers such as Tchaikovsky
and Musorgsky are all far better known than their artist contemporaries.
The major loan exhibition of 70 of Russia's best-known and
loved 19th century Russian landscape paintings was organised jointly
by the Groninger Museum, The Netherlands and the National Gallery,
London; in London it was sponsored by BP. Many have never been shown
outside of Russia and have not been available even in reproduction.
Outside of Russia there are almost no studies of 19th-century art.
The West's preference for the avant-garde movement which was
shaped in large part by French art and communist Russia's self-imposed
cultural isolation, has ensured that little art history of this
period has been published in this country.
The Russian art of this period has been strongly influenced by
nationalist sentiment, 'Russian artists sought to portray the
soul of Mother Russia … Russian Landscape artists wanted to
penetrate imaginatively into the very essence of their countryside.
For them, painting is a means, not an end in itself, not "art
for arts' sake".'2
Objective and dispassionate analyses will take the
modern historian so far, but the context of the period
is crucial to an understanding of Russian landscape
painting; a time of emotive, subjective and fiercely
intransigent debate, and the search for a national identity.
This was never likely to be a supine or merely decorative
genre, but rather an absorbing arena for artistic controversy.3
As the National Gallery's curator of 19th-century paintings,
Christopher Riopelle has pointed out, 'Landscape plays a central
role in the Russian imagination. The emptiness of the country's
vast reaches, the rigours of its climate, the difficulties of transportation,
and the intense isolation that long winter months impose, all contribute
to a specifically Russian sense of nature, different from - perhaps
more fatalistic than - that of elsewhere. In the age of Tolstoy
the landscape simply dominated the lives of most Russians.'
Fundamental to all the work in the exhibition is the vast scale
of the landscape. David Jackson uses the notion of Motherland as
embodied in one of Ivan Turgenev's stories, 'Its ethos,
and that of the land, is enmeshed in fierce national pride and lachrymose
nostalgia - a place of home, of the Russian soul, a common inheritance
- the root of the word filtering into those used for nationhood,
the people, birth, parents, mother and father. A vast, overwhelming
rural country encompassing huge mountain ranges, immeasurable Steppe,
the frozen North and sultry Mediterranean South, giant areas of
forestation and expanses of desert - nature, the land, rodina,
are concepts which permeate Russian thought, art, literature, music
and legend.'4
The exhibition covers the period 1820-1900, which coincides almost
exactly with the dates of Leo Tolstoy. In numerous passages of Tolstoy,
he writes with a painterly sensibility. In Childhood, Boyhood
and Youth, 'Harvesting was in full swing. The brilliant
yellow field was bounded on one side only by the bluish forest,
which seemed to me then a very distant and mysterious place beyond
which either the world came to an end or some uninhabited regions
began.'5 Apolitical artists found solace in the landscape when
the official policy determining acceptable content in art dominated.
Landscape painting found a position above the issues of conservatism
and liberalism, traditional and modern. The lack of sociopolitical
content meant that various factions could be satisfied, for ideas
in landscape were insinuated, not stated. For the most part, the
landscape in painting served to create national pride and unity.
For Tolstoy's Constantine Levin, '… the country was
the background of life - that is to say, the place where one rejoiced,
suffered and laboured.'6
The exhibition opens with the founder of Russian landscape painting,
Aleksei Gavrilovich Venetsianov (1780-1847) described as '…
an outsider in every way'.7 He had a varied career which included
initiating Russia's first illustrated satirical magazine (1808),
later banned by the authorities. He became an Academician (1811)
although he was largely self-taught, yet during the Napoleonic Wars
he created political cartoons which ridiculed the French and the
Francomania of the Russian aristocracy. In 1819 he left St Petersburgh
and settled on a small estate of Safonkovo in the province of Tver.
Venetsianov was an inspiring teacher and exerted great influence
on 19th-century Russian art, founding a school of realism that eventually
encompassed more than 70 artists. He '… painted with a
fresh vitality, avoiding academic rhetoric and concentrating on
modest scenes of rural Russia … images of ordinary people,
the Russian peasantry, at work and rest against a backdrop of agrarian
simplicity.'8 Unlike Russian artists who travelled abroad and
absorbed the influence of Italian painting in particular, Venetsianov
evolved a personal vision of great significance.
In the context of this exhibition Venetsianov's views on art
and the respective status of art and literature in Russia at the
time are pertinent. 'The art of drawing and painting itself,'
he stated, 'are no other than a weapon serving literature and,
as a result, the enlightenment of the people'.9 His views supported
the dominant view that a hierarchy existed where literature was
superior to the visual arts, furthermore, art and literature played
a seminal role in the enlightenment of the masses. Literature dominated
cultural debate from the 1840s, though by the end of the century
there were individuals who sought to redress the position. Landscape
was outwith the constraints imposed on history or genre paintings,
'… a landscape pure and simple, is by its very nature
anti-literary. It doesn't tell a story; its subject is nature
and not society, its aim is to arouse feelings and summon up reactions,
not to promote political attitudes.'10 That landscape painting
developed so strongly and independently of the critical infrastructure
of the Academy is itself a most interesting phenomenon.
Artists paid lip service to literature, for example, Ivan Ivanovich
Shishkin's, (1832-1898) 'In the Wild North' (1891)
takes the opening line of a poem by Mikhail Lermontov as its title.
The first whole room of the exhibition is devoted to the work of
Shishkin, whose work presented farm labourers, the noble peasant
with whom Tolstoy so identified, as the symbol of honest purity.
Their relationship with nature was central to their integrity. Shishkin
achieves this by a liberating sense of space achieved in visual
terms by lowering the horizon line. His paintings become a song
of praise to Mother Russia - the human presence is insignificant
against the vastness of nature. The sheer scale of his paintings
ensures monumentality in spiritual terms.
The exhibition includes work by 15 artists dating from 1820 to
the early years of the 20th century. Three rooms are devoted to
the most important artists of the age - Shishkin, Arkhip Ivanovich
Kuindzhi (1842-1910) and Isaak Ilich Levitan (1860-1900) - allowing
viewers to observe the individual achievements of these artists.
The first room shows the work of Shishkin whose work combines panoramic
vision with meticulous attention to detail. Shishkin's etchings
constitute an important aspect of his legacy; he became the foremost
engraver of the second half of the 19th century and was instrumental
in reviving the tradition of etching in Russia. Like Shishkin, Kuindzhi's
painting was informed by his trips to France, Germany, England,
Switzerland and Austria in the 1870s. Kuindzhi's landscapes
are characterised by their panoramic vision. His use of colour is
expressive. 'There is nothing in European art to compare to
Kuindzhi's landscape paintings,'11 claims Henk van Os,
in his catalogue essay, claiming that Kuindzhi blazed his own trail
to find the heart of Russian nature. Where Shishkin was described
as the 'accountant of leaves' for his exact attention
to detail, Kuindzhi's melancholic, lonely landscapes are almost
abstract.
Isaak Levitan was the artist that Chekhov so greatly admired, believing
that the Russians took landscape painting more seriously than the
French, yet it is possible to see in Levitan's work the influence
of Corot and Monet. Levitan described space in a completely different
manner to his contemporaries. His paintings consist of three overlapping
bands of colour, painted with a broad brushstroke. He creates an
absolute sense of space, an unforgettable picture of the Russian
landscape. 'This is no landscape icon, but certainly an iconic
painting of nature.'12 The difference between these three seminal
artists illustrates the vast range in Russian landscape painting,
especially of the second half of the 19th century.
By the 1860s an emancipating process had taken place for artists
with regard to the role of the Imperial Academy of Arts. In a broader
context, great changes took place in Russia that would have ramifications
in cultural terms. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and other
reforms aimed at tackling the crippling social divisions were undertaken
by Alexandr II. In 1863 a group of 14 artists had refused to paint
the set subject in order to attain the Grand Gold Medal. They formed
an artists' co-operative in order to gain independence. This
was an important development in the subsequent formation of the
'Wanderers', who from 1870 organised travelling exhibitions
and sought artistic freedom from the constraints of the Academy.
One of the founder members was Aleksei Savrasov, an influential
teacher at the Moscow School of Art who travelled extensively studying
from nature. He has been described as the founder of the 'mood
landscape'.
These developments were driven by the desire to challenge the supremacy
of history painting. Painting from nature in the landscape was low
in the Academy's hierarchy, for it supported no social cause,
yet in other parts of Europe landscape painting had acquired a higher
status. Shishkin had studied in Düsseldorf with Andreas (1815-1910)
and Oswald Achenbach (1827-1905). Their work was well known and
honoured in Russia and their influence was felt all over the world.
'The representation of reality, extreme precision and romantic
overtones: this mixture was Andreas Achenbach's secret menu
for success. Painting in this way he interpreted the traditions
of landscape art - including that of the Barbizon School for the
bourgeoisie of central Europe.'13
The influence of the Düsseldorf landscape tradition of this
period and the teaching there, can also be found in Australian and
American landscape painting. Indeed, 'Russian Landscape in
the Age of Tolstoy' resonates with the sense of awe and discovery
that one finds in the painting in Australia that addressed the phenomena
of discovering and recording the new frontiers of a strange and
sometimes menacing landscape. The influence of European art on Russian
art was immense, for there was easy access to painting in exhibitions
and reproductions. Russian collectors bought work by contemporary
Dutch, French and German artists.
The paintings of Mikhail Nesterov conclude the remarkable exhibition
of Russian landscape paintings. Perhaps the finest painting of his
on show is
'St Sergius of Radonezh' (1899). The relationship
between the figure and the landscape is first exemplified in the
work of Venetsianov whose painting shows the emotional link between
individual and landscape in Russian culture. Nesterov defined his
work as 'poeticised realism'. His works are heavily steeped
in the Christian spiritual tradition, and seek to define man's
search for the meaning of his existence through God, in the context
of the natural world filled with silence and tranquillity. In this
country the work of the Pre-Raphaelites was created within a similar
ethos. Nesterov created church murals in Kiev, Abastumani in Georgia
and Moscow. His portraiture was also significant.
Social change was so profound in 19th-century Russia that it is
not in the least surprising that painting of the same period can
be seen to have absorbed the complex and paradoxical cultural ramifications
of such change. Intellectually this exhibition is a remarkable and
demanding experience. The accompanying catalogue with scholarly
essays challenge so many notions we have of Russian art, and in
doing so demand that one comes to grip with the literary and political
history of Russia. Nationalism grew in all parts of Europe in the
19th century but in Russia the critics of the Tsarist regime monopolised
nationalist thought. Their aim was to define a way of life in contrast
to what they perceived as the imperial, ideologically corrupt values,
based on those of the West, introduced by Peter the Great. A typically
Russian experience could, perhaps ironically, be found in landscape,
hitherto an apolitical genre. In Slaves of Literature:
Literature, Visual Art and Landscape Art, Sjeng Scheijen sums
up the central issues of this superb exhibition with great poignancy:
People were quite ready to admit that the Russian landscape
was bare, barren and inimical yet saw in these very
things the tokens of an extraordinary spiritual wealth.
Deep in the Russian consciousness lies the conviction
that this forbidding climate, the poverty of the soil,
the social violence, the lack of human rights, the coarseness
and the alcoholism - in themselves repugnant are in
fact the well-spring of the resilience, energy and spirituality
of the Russian people. This mythical paradox, that Christopher
Ely describes as outer gloom and inner glory, is one
of the recurring motifs throughout Russian culture,
finding in landscape art its own particular and monumental
representation.14
References
1. Camilla Gray. The Great Experiment in Art: Russian Art, 1863-1922.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1962.
2. Henk Van Os. Russian landscapes: a première. In: Jackson
D, Wageman P (eds). Russian Landscape. Groninger: Groninger
Museum/London: National Gallery, 2004, 16-17.
3. David Jackson. The Motherland: tradition and innovation in Russian
landscape painting. Ibid, p.53.
4. Ibid, p.53.
5. Leo Tolstoy. Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (translated
by Rosemary Edmonds). London: Penguin Classics, 1964, p.32.
6. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (translated by Rosemary Edmonds).
London: Penguin Classics, 1978, p.257.
7. Henk Van Os, op.cit, p.17.
8. Jackson, op.cit, p.53
9. Quoted by Sjeng Scheijen. Slaves of Literature: Literature,
Visual Art and Landscape Art. Ibid, p.89.
10. Ibid, p.89.
11. Henk Van Os, op.cit, p.35.
12. Ibid, p.38.
13. Ibid, p.21.
14. Scheijen, op.cit, p.101.
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