Inside the darkly beautiful world of Mikhail Vrubel

The text below is the excerpt of the book Mikhail Vrubel (ISBN: 9781639199693), written by Mikhaïl Guerman, published by Parkstone International.

“The past looks passionately into the future.» – Alexander Blok

The artist Sergei Sudeikin recalled that, although the Vrubel room at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris was almost always deserted, Pablo Picasso stood there for hours. Such attention paid to a Russian artist wholly unknown in France on the part of a man who, while still young, had already earned himself a reputation as a bold shaker of principles is conclusive evidence of the start of a new dialogue between the West and Russia.

In his native land, few recognised Vrubel as an artist of exceptional talent. During his lifetime, he was poorly understood and little appreciated. In the early twentieth century, Russian painting was beginning to be taken seriously, and not only in Russia itself, and not only those fashionable artists who came to be called “Futurists” (in other words, the future exponents of the “classic Avant-garde”), but also those who stood apart from any mainstream movements. Russian culture had long, and justly, been greatly respected in Western Europe as mainly a culture of the written word, a literary culture. Since Turgenev’s time, Russian literature had occupied a serious place in the minds of enlightened readers.

Vrubel’s art was always at odds with the age. His paintings and drawings are evidence of a deep, burning individuality, multifaceted (often bombastic) symbolism, the affected ennui of the Art Nouveau, high tradition, yet with the obvious conformity of a salon painter. While his art was clearly of its time, sometimes paying tribute to it, even to excess, it was rooted in the classical tradition while para doxically being drawn toward the future. It combined the philosophical attitude and moral tension, inherent in Russian culture, with bold searches for new formal means of expression, something rare in Russian art. In a period when membership of one grouping or another and adher – ence to one platform or another were the norm, Vrubel’s loyalty was purely to himself.

Like Gogol, Alexander Ivanov, and Dostoyevsky, Vrubel never did create the great work of which he dreamed all his life – the great Demon. In general, he left relatively few completed works, and the majority of these are hardly worthy of his genius. Perhaps it was a period when an artist like Vrubel expressed himself more in the process of creation than in the paintings themselves.

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