Brushstrokes Over Bombs – Rediscovering Russia Through Its Art

The text below is the excerpt of the book Russian Painting (ISBN: 9781783107506), written by Peter Leek, published by Parkstone International.

By the 1890s the Society for Itinerant Exhibitions had become so well established that three of its members (Repin, Polenov and Bogoliubov) were invited to draw up a new constitution for the Academy. Then Repin, Shishkin, Kuindzhi and Makovsky were appointed professors. But at the very moment when the Itinerants had succeeded in storming the heights of academia, the Society began to fall apart. Although it continued to hold exhibitions until the 1920s, there was internal bickering about who should be allowed to join or participate in exhibitions, and up-and-coming artists began to regard the Society as backward-looking and no longer a dynamic force. Moreover, new ideas about art were in the air. Realism and populism were out of vogue, replaced by a preoccupation with “art for art’s sake”. This manifested itself in numerous forms, ranging from Impressionism and Russian Art Nouveau to the abstract art of the 1920s and 1930s. As happened elsewhere (for example in France and Germany), the various movements gave rise to a plethora of groups, associations, exhibitions and magazines. Among the most influential of these affiliations was the one known as the World of Art. The World of Art (Mir iskusstva) was founded by a group of young artists, writers and musicians in Saint Petersburg and included Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, Leon Bakst, Yevgeny Lanceray, the writer Dmitri Filosov and the future impresario Sergeï Diaghilev, who was intent on “exalting Russian art in the eyes of the West”.

Diaghilev soon proved to be a promoter and motivator with an unusual ability to recognize artistic potential. In 1898, at the age of twenty-six, he staged an exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists, persuading a number of well-known Muscovite painters to participate – among them Korovin, Levitan, Nesterov, Riabushkin, Serov and Vrubel. The following year he launched a monthly magazine, also called Mir iskusstva, notable for the calibre of its principal contributors, which included Benois, Bakst and Igor Grabar. The magazine was only published for six years (until 1904), but partly because of its enthusiasm for the style moderne (as Art Nouveau was called in Russia), it had an immense influence not only on painting but on a variety of art forms.

When the World of Art society was reborn in 1910 (after the period of turmoil that followed the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905), it attracted a new wave of supporters, including Konchalovsky, Kuznetsov, Roerich, Sapunov, Serebriakova, Saryan and Kustodiev. The latter sketched one of their meetings as a preparatory study for a large-scale composition that was going to be “both decorative and realistic, monumental and true to life”. Despite these lofty intentions, it failed to materialize. Artists as diverse as Dobuzhinsky, Maliavin, Tatlin and Chagall took part in the exhibitions that the society organized, the last of which was held in 1924. But the World of Art movement had further ramifications. Diaghilev commissioned a great many members of the group to produce stage and costume designs for his opera and ballet productions, giving them an opportunity to work on a grand scale and to explore analogies between the rhythms of painting, dance and music. And because Diaghilev’s productions toured Europe, it helped them to become known internationally.

The artists associated with the World of Art were also fortunate in having an imaginative patron, the millionaire merchant Savva Mamontov – memorably portrayed by Vrubel and Serov – who was endlessly hospitable, encouraging them to stay at Abramtsevo, his country estate near Moscow, where he provided a creative environment for them to work. As well as establishing craft workshops, he invited well-known artists to participate in building and decorating a new village church, urged them to decorate pottery and other artefacts produced in the Abramtsevo workshops, and got them to design and paint scenery for his private opera company. Another generous patron was Princess Maria Tenisheva, who set up craft studios on her estate at Talashkino, near Smolensk, and also helped to finance Diaghilev’s magazine. Unfortunately a rift with the Princess, Diaghilev’s high-handedness, plus internal dissensions, contributed to the magazine’s demise.

When Mir iskusstva ceased publication, many artists who had belonged to the World of Art society transferred their allegiance to the Union of Russian Artists, which had been founded the previous year (1903) by disgruntled members from within the World of Art group. That it was based in Moscow was in itself significant. Founded in 1832, the Moscow College of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture had for a long time offered a more flexible and progressive alternative to Saint Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of the Arts. Several of the most influential Itinerants had studied or taught in Moscow, and Moscow painters such as Korovin, Arkhipov, Maliavin, Nesterov, Riabushkin, Yuon and Grabar, all of whom were to a greater or lesser extent influenced by Impressionism, emerged as a distinct group.

The World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists were in effect the forerunners of the most innovative period of Russian art, which spawned a bewildering array of artistic groups and movements, often with bizarre names, among them the Link, the Triangle, the Wreath and the Union of Youth. One of the most seminal was the Blue Rose group, which launched a highly influential monthly magazine, The Golden Fleece. Reviewing their first exhibition, held in March 1907, the Symbolist poet Sergeï Makovsky declared that the group was “in love with the music of colour and line” and described them as the “heralds of the new Primitivism”. Prominent exhibitors included Larionov and Goncharova (his lifelong companion and collaborator), Kuznetsov, the Miliuti brothers, Sapunov, Saryan and Sudeikin. Among the painters who influenced the group were Vrubel and Victor Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905), whose Symbolist paintings made a huge impression when Diaghilev organized a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1907. The Golden Fleece exhibitions held in 1908 and 1909 were notable for the participation of major French artists, among them Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, Fauves and Nabis.

Although Mikhaïl Larionov and Natalia Goncharova had joined the Blue Rose group and been active participators in the Golden Fleece exhibitions, their ideas were constantly evolving. Moreover, Larionov was an organizer of immense energy, and in 1909 the two of them, together with David Burliuk, set up the Knave of Diamonds group (sometimes translated as the Jack of Diamonds), which held its first exhibition in 1910. But before long Larionov and Goncharova felt the need to move on, and organized further exhibitions, as well as artistic debates and other events, including the Donkey’s Tail (1912), Target (1913) and No. 4 – Futurists, Rayonists, Primitives (1914). Most of the Russian avant-garde painters participated in the exhibitions of one or other of these groups – among them Burliuk, Chagall, Exter, Falk, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Konchalovsky, Kuprin, Lentulov, Lissitzky, Malevich, Mashkov and Tatlin.

An offshoot of the Knave of Diamonds was a group known as the Moscow Painters (1924- 26), which in turn was succeeded by the Society of Moscow Artists (1927-32). The latter, in particular, was dominated by “Cézannists” and had a noticeable preference for landscape and still life. Falk, Grabar, Krymov, Kuprin and Mashkov were members of both organizations, as was Aristarkh Lentulov (1882-1943), an idiosyncratic innovator who was also an energetic organizer and propagandist. A more eclectic association was the Union of Youth (1910-14), based in Saint Petersburg, which embraced Cézannists, Cubists, Futurists and Non-objectivists. Its literary section, called Hylaea (founded in 1913), formed an important link between writers and artists.

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