From the Golden Age to the Silver Age
Eleonora Paston
В.Д. ПОЛЕНОВ Березовая аллея. 1880 Этюд Холст, масло. 60 × 31 © Музей-заповедник «Абрамцево» Vasily POLENOV Birchwood Alley. 1880 Study Oil on canvas 60 × 31 cm © Abramtsevo MuseumReserve
В.Д. ПОЛЕНОВ ↓ Речка Воря. 1880 Этюд Холст, наклеенный на картон, масло 38,8 × 23,5 © Музей-заповедник «Абрамцево» Vasily POLENOV ↓ The Vorya River. 1880 Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard. 38.8 × 23.5 cm © Abramtsevo MuseumReserve
youth! / With a bitter smile on my lips, I smell your scents, / Which once filled the air of my childhood.”13 “Grandmother’s Garden” became simultaneously an homage by Polenov to the Golden Age and one of the first paintings to usher in the Silver Age of Russian culture. The mood of the third work in Polenov’s loose trilogy, “Overgrown Pond”, is poetic and dreamy: the landscape’s lyrical essence is clear thanks to a kind of “dialogue” between the old park and the pensive figure of the young woman, a perfect harmony of feeling. In the 1880s-1890s Polenov would go on to develop this new motif – of escape from the hardships of reality into the world of nature – and it will later become even more prominent in the work of Polenov’s younger friend, the artist Mikhail Nesterov. All three of Polenov’s landscapes immediately became the focus of both public admiration and critical attention. A typical review, published in 1879, is indicat ive of such reactions: “The choice of subject [for ‘Grandmother’s Garden’ - E.P.] betrays a genre painter, not a landscape artist, and a romantic painter at that, insofar as any Russian painter can be romantic as it pertains to his works and images from Russian life... Similarly, ‘Overgrown Pond’ is no ‘mere’ pond... It is a pond with a story... Again, we see the work of a romantic in this painting... The Germans would call this composition Stimmungsbild, a painting that, first and foremost, strives to evoke in its viewer a certain mood; such works are the same to painting as elegies are to poetry.”14 The fusion of genre and landscape painting in Polenov’s works of the late 1870s was a clear indication of a new phenomenon in Russian art, one that would become widespread towards the end of the century. This indicated a convergence of genres, with landscape painting taking on an important “substantive” role, a phenomenon later termed “genre landscapization” by the art historian Alexei Fyodorov-Davydov.15 Polenov’s landscapes are also a source for the “event-free” genre, the concepts of which would be later developed by the artist’s students. Polenov’s impressive debut at the Society of Travelling Art Exhibitions was all the more unexpected since, nothing had seemed to predict any such breakthrough when he was studying at the Academy of Arts and later travelling in Europe on his Academy grant. The second part of the Tretyakov exhibition, dedicated to Polenov’s work after he was awarded that grant, is testament to that.
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The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine #3 (64) / 2019
Point of view
В.Д. ПОЛЕНОВ Заросший пруд. 1879 Холст, масло 80 × 124,7 © ГТГ Vasily POLENOV Overgrown Pond. 1879 Oil on canvas 80 × 124.7 cm © Tretyakov Gallery