Isaak Levitan, Lyrical landscape

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Contents Preface

6

11

Levitan and Nature

86

Foreword

8

12

Working Methods

94

Introduction

12

13

Secession Munich

102

1

Childhood

14

14

Secession Vienna

110

2

Serfdom and Nationhood

18

15

Cityscapes and Flower Paintings

118

3

The Moscow School of Painting

24

16

Diaghilev and the World of Art

124

4

Landscape Painting in Russia

34

17

Portraits

130

5

Levitan’s River Volga

40

18

Levitan’s Last Years, 1898-1900

136

6

Anton Chekhov

50

19

Levitan’s Legacy

142

7

Realism – Levitan and the Wanderers

58

Notes

148

8

Travels in Europe, 1890-94

66

Chronology

152

9

Major Works

72

Select Bibliography

154

10

The Cultural Scene, Moscow and St Petersburg

78

Index

156

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Chapters 1-3 pp.14-33

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Serfdom and Nationhood

businessman Chichikov trades in serfs whose names still appear on the government census although they have long been dead.

For state or ‘crown’ peasants, numerically approximately the same as privately owned serfs, life had been a little less harsh. They had usually received more land for their own cultivation, and were much less subject to interference from their masters. From 1837, a new Ministry of Agriculture, headed by Count C P Kiselev, had made efforts to develop peasant agriculture. Fostering a more paternalistic attitude among his officials, Kiselev tried to ensure a fairer taxation system and instituted the provision of basic welfare facilities, schools and medical services. Yet, as with serfs in private ownership, housing was crowded and unsanitary, without chimneys

and with dirt floors and, in wintertime, livestock stabled on the ground floors of village homes. Cockroaches invariably invaded the table at mealtimes and were even regarded as a sign of plenty.

Several paintings of the clergy from about this time indicate their lack of education and their fondness for vodka: for the unlettered there was little moral support from the Russian Orthodox Church. The artist Vasily Perov’s Village Easter Procession features drunken priests leaving a tavern as the procession begins, and Ilya Repin portrays an archdeacon as a gross and hirsute figure whose roseate complexion and huge belly betray his gluttony. Unsurprisingly, superstition was rife among the peasantry. There were many instances of their fear of change in the form of technical advances: they would refuse to answer newly

Self-portrait, 1880s Isaak Levitan Indian ink, brush and white on paper, 38 x 28cm Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Misa Moiseyev (study), 1882 Ivan Kramskoi (1837-87) Oil on canvas, 57 x 45cm Russian Museum, St Petersburg

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Chapters 1-3 pp.14-33

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The Moscow School of Painting city’s painting school was more suitable and represented a wise choice.

The Moscow School was fortunate to have on its staff the wellregarded teacher Vasily Perov (1832-82), for whom Levitan developed a great respect. Perov had himself studied at the School in the 1850s and had admired and made copies of the Dutch masters at a formative stage of his artistic development. Living in Paris from 1862-4, he was drawn to genre subjects and, working in the city streets, represented the poorest among its inhabitants; when he returned to Russia he felt impelled to convey the tedium and sadness of peasant life. In paintings such as The Last Tavern by the City Gates, which shows peasants leaving the warmth and comfort of an inn to begin their bleak, wintry journey home by open sleigh, Perov included a landscape element to indicate the expanses of empty countryside and snow-filled horizons they have to traverse.

Perov was also an accomplished portraitist, whose study of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, painted in 1872, remains the outstanding commemoration of the great novelist. The fifty-year old Dostoevsky is shown with considerable insight, his hands clasped over his knees as he sits keep in thought, dressed in a drab brown overcoat.

Perov thus brought to the School, and to the studio where Levitan worked with him, great feeling for his chosen subjects.

Several of his more outstanding students inherited his conviction that their art should bear witness to the hardship and despair prevailing among Russia’s poorer classes; and a number of Levitan’s contemporaries from there were to produce works revealing the humiliating poverty in which many Russian people still lived.

Levitan, though he later professed that his relatives had encouraged him to paint more ‘modern’ and therefore more marketable subjects, such as views of Moscow or other urban scenes, quite soon showed a preference for landscape painting.6 In March 1876 he was able to join the studio of the landscape master Aleksei Savrasov (1830-97). Savrasov’s methods were among the most advanced in the School, and he was an inspiring teacher. He believed implicitly in working in the open air and in studying nature 25

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Landscape Painting in Russia

Wet Meadow Fyodor Vasiliev (1850-73) Oil on canvas, 70 x 114cm Bridgeman

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mountainsides form the backdrop to In the Mountains of the Crimea, where a pair of oxen haul a cart up a rough mountain road. In other paintings it was often large-skied, flat expanses of land that appealed to him. From low-lying fields and meadowland he created tightly controlled, subtly coloured compositions such as Wet Meadow (1872).

Here storm clouds move away to leave an area of young grass washed by rain, and a pool of rainwater shining as it reflects the sky. Vasiliev thus moved on from Venetsianov’s quiet, sunny compositions, making the viewer aware of the beauty to be found in seemingly

unprepossessing scenery seen in all weathers, and imparting a sense of magnificence into the landscape. By the 1870s these two quite dissimilar artists had, in their different ways, ennobled a countryside which could otherwise have easily appeared featureless and tragic.

Alongside the creators of such imaginative and innovative images of the Russian terrain, there thrived more conventional artists who achieved success with representations in a more realistic mode. Best-known from this more traditional school were the exact contemporaries Mikhail Klodt and Ivan Shishkin, both born in

Chapters 4-5 pp34-49

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Levitan’s River Volga

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Chapters 4-5 pp34-49

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Levitan’s River Volga

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Chapters 6-7 pp.50-65

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Realism – Levitan and the Wanderers

The Laundresses, 1899 Abram Arkhipov (1862-1930) Oil on canvas, 97 x 65.5cm Novosti

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Chapters 8-9 pp.66-77

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Major Works

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Levitan and Nature

Last Snow (study), 1895 Isaak Levitan Oil on canvas, 25.5 x 33cm Russian Museum, St Petersburg

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Raised in a small, impoverished, rural settlement in Lithuania, and later subsisting for the most part in the streets of Moscow, Levitan nonetheless painted early studies of ponds, trees and other natural phenomena that revealed an unusually developed sensibility towards the natural world. His first experience of a very different landscape, when he travelled to the Crimea in 1886, considerably enlarged and refined this awareness. Levitan was awestruck on seeing the beauty and majesty of the region, and deeply affected by these new surroundings. A reverence for nature remained with him all his life, and is surely the foundation stone on which his graceful and persuasive landscape panoramas are built. His gifts enabled him to appreciate and portray both grandeur and delicacy, the swelling waters of the Volga or ferns growing by a forest path, each face of nature represented with equal conviction.

Teaching at the Moscow School of Painting from 1898, Levitan enjoined his students above all to ‘feel’ and understand nature. ‘Do not remember pictures’, he said, encouraging them to work outside en plein air, to look anew at their surroundings, to develop their visual memory for the natural scene and to liberate it from the superfluous. Although he sometimes recorded small, intimate corners of nature and also painted flowers, in general he believed that it was the overall concept of a landscape and the harmony of its colours that was significant, rather than isolated details.

There is, in many of Levitan’s landscapes, an indisputable vein of melancholy, which has often been attributed to his own disadvantaged upbringing and outlook on life. His friend Konstantin Korovin once heard him say ‘I would like to convey the sadness

spread everywhere in nature. That sadness for some reason is a reproach to me’. In actuality, however, Russia’s tragic history, the many hardships of her people, and simply the vastness of her terrain seem to have imbued her landscape with a certain melancholy, and such sadness is, perhaps, equally in the eye of the beholder.

Likewise, the spiritual aspect often noted in Levitan’s paintings could be said to reflect the unique and special spirituality with which ‘Holy Russia’ had long believed herself to be endowed, perceiving her own Orthodox Church as heir to Rome and Byzantium.

The poor but intellectual environment of Levitan’s childhood contrasted markedly with the life he experienced in Moscow and St Petersburg. His Jewish family background, with teaching based on the Talmud and maybe a bias towards the thinking of philosophers such as Spinoza,39 in which man and nature are one, made him distinct from other young Russians and at a distance, initially, from the mainstream of Russian intellectual thought. Frequent discrimination against Jews living in Moscow caused him profound anxiety. In 1879, for instance, following an attempt on the life of Tsar Aleksandr II, Jews were ordered to leave the city. Levitan, his brother and sisters were forced to live for several months some distance away in the village of Boldino, in Vladimir province, and only the intervention of influential friends enabled them to return.

The single surviving letter from the artist to one of his sisters, dated as late as December 1899, refers to his almost having had to move away from Moscow again, despite being an artist of renown, in as late as 1892, and of the ever-present difficulty for Jews of securing legal residence in the city.