INTRODUCTION The Tretyakov Gallery is the largest museum of Russian art, and has become a symbol of Russian identity and culture. The Gallery owes its creation to the Moscow art collectors and businessmen Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov, both of whom were well-known patrons of Russian art and culture. The Tretyakov brothers’ collection was donated to Moscow in 1892. Today, the Tretyakov Gallery has two main locations. The historical building on Lavrushinsky Lane houses and exhibits the world’s foremost collection of masterpieces of Russian art from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. This building also displays Russian painting, sculpture and drawings from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Works of graphic art that require specific lighting conditions are exhibited in specially equipped rooms. The ‘Treasury’ rooms showcase applied art, miniatures, icons in precious caskets and sacred church objects and vessels. The second building, the New Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, houses Soviet and Russian fine art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The main focus of the exhibits here is the diversity of twentieth-century painting styles. The Gallery exhibits a unique collection of works by the Russian avant-garde, including works from the famous collection of George Costakis. Alongside works by Soviet artists from the 1930s to the 1950s, the exhibits include unofficial paintings from this time, as well as works by Russian masters who lived abroad. During the late 1990s the Gallery began to expand its collection of contemporary works of art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and today it houses a serious collection that reflects the artistic processes of recent decades. In the 1980s the following Moscow ‘house museums’ became part of the Tretyakov: the Victor Vasnetsov Museum, the Apollinary Vasnetsov Memorial Flat, the Anna Golubkina Memorial Studio and the Pavel Korin Memorial House. In 1992 the Church of St Nicholas in Tolmachi, dating from the seventeenth century, also became part of the Tretyakov Gallery. Today it functions as both an exhibition hall and a working church. The Tretyakov Brothers’ Museum, which will be opened at the end of
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2020, and the Moscow Conceptualism Museum in the former workshop of Ilya Kabakov, which the Gallery acquired in 2019, are currently under construction. The Tretyakov Gallery is a unique museum complex combining a classical museum approach with dynamic development. The Gallery reflects the thousand-year history of Russian painting, sculpture and drawing and houses the most important works of national art. At the same time, it is a new kind of modern museum, responding to the visitor’s viewpoint and open to artistic research and creative experimentation.
INTRODUCTION
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Dmitry Levitsky b. 1735, Mayachka village near Poltava – d. 1822, St Petersburg
Portrait of Prokofi Demidov, 1773 Oil on canvas, 232.6 × 168.8 cm Acquired in 1930 from the State Russian Museum, Leningrad Inv. No. 13427
The portrait of Prokofi Demidov by Dmitry Levitsky, a brilliant Russian painter from the second half of the eighteenth century, is one of the best examples of portrait art of the time. It was commissioned in 1771 for the council chamber of the foundling hospital, of which Demidov was patron. The eldest son and heir of a mining industrialist in the Urals, Demidov received a brilliant education in Europe, and was one of the most enlightened nobles of his time. He donated a lot of money to the foundling hospital and to the University of Moscow and had a reputation for being a great eccentric. Demidov had a diverse collection of minerals and plants, books, paintings and marble sculptures. He also studied the life of bees and wrote a book about them. This formal portrait of Demidov is quite unusual: it depicts a rich nobleman in his dressing gown, housecap and slippers against a backdrop of monumental columns and baroque drapery. Instead of leaning against the base of the column, as was customary in representative portraiture of the time, here Demidov is resting against a tin watering can, next to which are tulips and an herbarium. With his right hand, Demidov is pointing in the direction of the foundling hospital. Along with the pots of flowers, all of this creates an allegorical composition, in which flowering plants symbolise the young orphans under the care of an enlightened nobleman. The uniqueness of this monumental portrait is also underscored by Demidov’s facial expression: instead of depicting the more customary ceremonial mask and indulgent smile on the lips – the painter has chosen a more complex characterisation of an extremely unusual person. Demidov’s eyes suggest irony and sadness, which in real life he concealed behind the extravagant behaviour of a rich eccentric.
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PORTRAIT OF P.A. DEMIDOV
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Aleksey Venetsianov b. 1780, Moscow – d. 1847, Poddubye village, Vyshnevolotsky district, Tver
In the Ploughed Field. Spring, first half of the 1820s Oil on canvas, 52.3 × 66.7 cm Acquired before 1893 by P.M. Tretyakov Inv. No. 155
Aleksey Venetsianov is one of the most charming of Russian painters. For many years he was considered the founder of the so-called peasant genre. What is nowadays considered remarkable in his work is the rare combination of the universal, rooted in all the richness of post-Renaissance culture, with the deeply national, allowing him to be considered the first artist of the Russian school. The painting In the Ploughed Field. Spring is built on the subtlest nuances of colour, light and meaning. Along with the works Cutting Hay and Harvesting. Summer (both from the mid-1820s, State Tretyakov Gallery), In the Ploughed Field is considered part of the ‘Seasons’ cycle. This immediately brings to the viewer’s mind classical prototypes, raising these farming scenes to a level of universality that is unusual in Russian painting. The girl depicted in the centre of the canvas is wearing an elegant sarafan – dressed in this way for work in the fields on the first day of spring, she appears to hover over the ploughed field rather than walk on it, hovering like Botticelli’s angels or his Flora, the goddess of blossoming nature. Venetsianov’s peasant girl is reminiscent of Raphael’s famous Sistine Madonna, who, as a representation of the most sublime ideal of beauty, was an object of worship for artists in the 1820s. The girl’s gaze is directed at a child playing with a garland of blue cornflowers – this is not a genre painting, but a reference to the Sistine Madonna as mentioned above, and a representation of childhood as a time where everything exists as a possibility in the future. The thin tree trunks on the right of the painting take the viewer back to the Renaissance, conjuring up the canvases and frescoes of the Italian masters. Nonetheless, here is a work that can rightly be considered the embodiment of what is ‘Russian’ in painting.
IN THE PLOUGHED FIELD. SPRING
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Vasily Perov b. 1833, Tobolsk – d. 1882, Kuzminki village, near Moscow
Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1872 Oil on canvas, 99.6 × 81 cm Acquired from the artist in 1872 by P.M. Tretyakov Inv. No. 386
This portrait of the great writer, one of the most important figures of the literary world, famous for turning the human soul inside out and capturing both its terrible and noble sides, is one of the most piercing in Russian art. Vasily Perov painted it on commission from Pavel Tretyakov for a gallery ‘of faces that are dear to the nation’, and he produced an image that incorporates incredible depth and vulnerability. According to Dostoyevsky’s wife’s reminiscences about the creation of the portrait, which still exist today, Perov came from Moscow to St Petersburg and within a week visited Dostoyevsky, finding him ‘in a wide variety of moods’, and during their conversation, he ‘caused controversy’. In the words of Anna Dostoyevskaya, Perov managed to capture ‘a moment of creativity’. At the time, Dostoyevsky was laboriously working on the novel Demons (also known as The Possessed), one of the most terrifying and controversial of his works. We see a man immersed in himself, wracked with all the tension of creative thought and deep reflection on the most important issues for Russian literature at the time. His pale face with reddened eyes and suspended gaze seem to bear the burden of the moral choices facing humanity. And then it strikes you that the image of the writer is reminiscent of the appearance of the Saviour in Ivan Kramskoy’s painting Christ in the Wilderness (1872, State Tretyakov Gallery), painted the same year. The similarity is accentuated by his firmly clenched hands, the suffering visible on his face, and the premonition of further torments to come – both physical and moral. The portrait of the great writer becomes a metaphor for the Way of the Cross, through which every true creative personality gives substance to the conscience of their era.
PORTRAIT OF FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
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Ivan Kramskoy b. 1837, Novaya Sotnaya, a suburb of Ostrogozhsk, Voronezh Province – d. 1887, St Petersburg
Christ in the Wilderness, 1872 Oil on canvas, 184 × 214 cm Acquired from the artist by P.M. Tretyakov in 1872 Inv. No. 651
C hrist in the W ilderness is one of the most significant works of Russian painting, following in the tradition of ground-breaking interpretations of biblical themes established by the painter Aleksandr Ivanov. Ivan Kramskoy was an admirer of Ivanov’s work The Appearance of Christ Before the People (The Apparition of the Messiah) (1837–57, State Tretyakov Gallery) and saw the task of a true artist as one of ‘placing a mirror before the eyes of the people, such that their hearts might tremble in alarm’. Kramskoy’s painting was first shown in 1872–73 at the second exhibition of the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki – Itinerants or Wanderers), by which time Kramskoy was already an established portraitist. It provoked a very mixed reaction from the public – the image of Christ came as too much of a surprise, and at the time it was often referred to as the ‘Russian Hamlet’. Nevertheless, the main issue raised by this painting, which Kramskoy claimed had been painted ‘in tears and blood’, is not about moral choice, as it may seem at first glance, but the incredible, painful focus on Christ’s decision to sacrifice himself and, by his example, to show mankind the way to rebirth and moral enlightenment. The image of Christ sitting in the wilderness against a backdrop of a predawn sky, his gaze turned inward and his hands clenched tightly, recalls Vasily Perov’s painting of the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who espoused the idea of following the path of rebirth through Christ, and who was also highly regarded by Kramskoy. The painting is based on the simplest of formulaic compositions, the use of colour is restrained, and the whole appearance of Christ has been positioned by the artist as ‘the centre of divinity in the very heart of the human spirit’ – prompting a deep, empathetic response from the viewer to the significant moment they are witnessing.
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CHRIST IN THE WILDERNESS
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Fyodor Vasilyev b. 1850, Gatchina – d. 1873, Yalta
Wet Meadow, 1872 Oil on canvas, 70.5 × 115 cm Acquired from the artist by P.M. Tretyakov in 1872 Inv. No. 905
This painting by the young landscape painter and student of the famous Ivan Shishkin, is a true masterpiece of Russian landscape painting. The 22-year-old Fyodor Vasilyev was suffering from tuberculosis when he painted it from memory in the Crimea, where he lived for the last two years of his life. Cut off from the artistic milieu of St Petersburg and surrounded by the exotic beauty of the Crimea, he kept returning to these most simple, central and northern Russian landscapes, unaffected by external influences. Wet Meadow is an incredible work in terms of maturity and artistic interpretation, a work that would be at home in the appropriate section of any Western European museum. Although the canvas itself is not large-scale, the painting gives the impression of something vast, epic and truly experimental. No other Russian painter before this ‘brilliant boy’, as Ivan Kramskoy used to call him, was able to capture the world of the Russian landscape in Vasilyev’s all-encompassing style. Plains, marshes, trees, clouds, the deceptive appearance of the textured vegetation in the foreground – everything is incredibly simple, ordinary, easy and simultaneously majestic and universal. Boldly anticipating the innovative experimentation of the landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi, Vasilyev plays with the effect of a dark sky after a thunderstorm, with other elements of the sky breaking through the clouds in amazingly beautiful sunlight, such that, in Kramskoy’s words, it becomes ‘simply terrifying’. Vasilyev’s style is far from an inclination to naturalistically include the smallest details, yet at the same time it clearly manages to a convey a striking sense of a ‘finalised’ painting, also much admired by Kramskoy. On closer examination, the illusory foreground of the painting acquires a bold, almost post-impressionist effect, anticipating the paintings of coming decades.
WET MEADOW
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This edition © Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd, 2021
The State Tretyakov Gallery would like to express sincere gratitude to Azamat Kumykov for support of this edition.
Text and photography © The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2021 First published in 2021 by Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd Registered address: 27 Old Gloucester Street London WC1N 3AX UK www.scalapublishers.com In association with The State Tretyakov Gallery Lavrushinsky Lane, 10 Moscow, 119017 Russia www.tretyakovgallery.ru ISBN: 978-1-78551-283-4 Project Coordinator – Olga Borodyanskaya Project managed by Laura Fox Designed by Linda Lundin, Park Studio Translated into English by Laila Friese with editing by David Price in association with First Edition Translations Ltd, Cambridge, UK Printed in the Czech Republic 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of The State Tretyakov Gallery and Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd. Every effort has been made to acknowledge correct copyright of images where applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentional and should be notified to the Publisher, who will arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints. Director’s Choice is a registered trademark of Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd.
Front Cover: Mikhail Vrubel The Demon Seated, 1890 (See pp. 44–5) Frontispiece: Fyodor Vasilyev Wet Meadow, 1872 (See pp. 28–9) Back Cover: Isaak Levitan Over Eternal Quiet, 1894 (See pp. 48–9)
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