8.11: Peredvizhniki
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An Introduction to The Peredvizhniki (The Wanderers)
Rejecting the Academy
Russia experienced tremendous sociocultural conflict in the early 1860s. In 1861, serfs were liberated and the resulting economic shifts radicalized a number of Russia’s younger intellectuals. In 1863, fourteen students at the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts refused to participate in the annual gold medal competition because they felt the required subject, “The Entry of Odin into Valhalla,” and the Academy’s continued insistence on the supremacy of history painting was completely irrelevant to contemporary Russian life. Rejecting the Academy had consequences; it meant rejecting the major patron in Russia—the tsarist government. As a result, a number of these artists were compelled to create their own exhibitions, when they could gain permission, in order to produce the income necessary to pursue their careers.
An unvarnished representation of contemporary life
In 1870, a number of like-minded artists formed The Society for Traveling Exhibitions (Obshchestvo peredvizhnykh vystavok), and became known as the Peredvizhniki or Передви́жники (sometimes called The Wanderers or Itinerants in English). This society had as its goals not only to create art that presented an unvarnished representation of contemporary life in Russia, but also to bring art out of the capitals and into the countryside—to the people—to create an art for the nation.
The first Peredvizhniki exhibition opened in St. Petersburg in November 1871 and then traveled to Moscow in early 1872. It was met with immediate acclaim by powerful critics such as Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov, who proclaimed it the dawn of a new day for Russian art. The early Peredvizhnki’s exhibitions were a curiosity—the first exhibition traveled to only four cities, but had a total of 30,527 visitors—but by 1877, the exhibitions were genuinely popular, attracting over 40,000 visitors a year and traveling to eight or more cities.
Some Peredvizhniki canvases were overtly political, such as Ilia Repin’s monumental, Volga Barge Haulers, which portrayed the inhumane conditions under which these men worked, but most were not.
Land & identity
Many of the Peredvizhniki gained fame for their depiction of the Russian land. The concept of the native land, rodina, had always been a significant factor in the conception of Russian national identity, but was rarely depicted in the fine arts. Aleksei Savrasov’s The Rooks Have Returned (Grachi prileteli), 1871 caused a sensation for its sensitive portrayal of the Russian countryside. In addition, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin’s depictions of the Russian forest and Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi’s dazzling images of moonlit nights in Ukraine celebrated the beauty of the diverse regions of the Russian Empire.
Despite the popularity of landscape subjects with the art-buying public, critics charged that landscape painting could not advance progressive political agendas and that it was an elitist art for a leisured class. Stasov and other critics demanded that landscapes include social commentary and put on view the hardships of life in the country. Isaak Levitan’s Vladimirka Road is one example of an attempt to respond to these charges by infusing landscape painting with political content. This seemingly unassuming landscape would have been recognized by the majority of Russian viewers as the road along which prisoners were marched to exile in Siberia.
No longer an opposition group
During the second half of the 1880s, the Peredvizhniki gradually lost their status as a progressive opposition group. The tsar’s family began attending exhibitions and purchasing pictures and members of the Peredvizhniki, such as Repin and Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov, were even invited to join the Imperial Academy of Arts, the very institution against whom many of the Peredvizhniki had rebelled just 20 years prior. Younger Russian artists were put off by the Peredvizhniki’s increasingly restrictive membership policies and turned to both indigenous art traditions and contemporary Western art practice to forge a path for modern Russian art.
In spite of this institutional acceptance, the Peredvizhniki continued to exist as an organization until 1923. Some members then joined the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsionnoi Rossii). Subsequently, Soviet critics recast the Peredvizhniki as politically progressive, hailing them as precursors to Socialist Realism.
Additional Resources:
Peredvizhniki exhibition video, National Museum, Sweden (English subtitles)
Ilya Repin, Krestny Khod (Religious Procession) in Kursk Gubernia
by BEN POLLITT
From Gogol to Google
If you’re a fan of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Gogol, then chances are you’ve probably seen a painting, or at least a detail of a painting, by Ilya Repin, the most celebrated Russian artist of the nineteenth century. Unlike his great literary contemporaries, Repin is not a household name in the English-speaking world, his work perhaps best known to us through the covers of our Penguin Classics. Things are changing though. Major exhibitions and publications have been bringing Repin and Russian visual art of the nineteenth century to our attention. Now, with rooms from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow uploaded onto the Google Art Project, we can examine in remarkable detail, some of the greatest examples of 19th century Russian Realism.
Ilya Repin
Repin’s work is often mentioned in connection with the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki, in Russian), a band of artists who exhibited their work, all distinctively Russian in character, across the country. Repin, however, only joined the movement in 1878, eight years after its founding, when his reputation as one of the leading artists of his generation was firmly established.
The most probable reason for this delay was Repin’s deep-seated anxiety about poverty. Born in penury to a peasant family in the Ukraine, at twelve he became an apprentice of a local icon painter. Later he went to the Imperial Academy at Saint Petersburg. The formal completion of his studies required that he find sponsorship to finance himself or else be forced into an impoverished life of a unqualified artist, who, working for his landowner, would be little better off than a bonded labourer. Desperate to avoid this fate, Repin eventually found a wealthy St Petersburg general to sponsor him. He fell to his knees and kissed the hem of the man’s dressing gown. As he stood up he noticed that he had never seen hands so smooth and soft, just the sort of person, in fact, that later in life he would refuse to paint for, declaring: ‘The peasant is the judge now and we must reproduce his interests.”
The Procession
Depicted is a panoramic view of a religious procession carrying the icon of Our Lady of Kursk in a gilded shrine. Behind the shrine two women with somber downcast faces carry the empty box, which would normally house the shrine. Their pious humility contrasts with the bloated and lumbering figures of the landowner and his wife who holds a shimmering golden icon.
The irony is apparent in the anything-but-holy looking figure of the priest, dressed in golden vestments, running a hand through his yellow hair. He alone engages with the viewer drawing attention our to the vanity of the proceedings.
To the left the mounted Cossack militia and priest stewards that preside over the procession, separate the poorest of the poor from the main body, one raises his whip in a menacing gesture. They are headed by a hunchbacked boy, the most positive figure in the painting.
He moves resolutely forward, while a man, perhaps his father, cruelly compels him on, his whip casting a shadow in the sand that divides the boy from the religious icon. What motivates him seems to otherwise than the gaudy display of vanities.
Unlike that other peasant artist, Millet, Repin takes pains to paint individual portraits of the people in the procession. Nowhere is this is more beautifully achieved than in the figure of the hunchback, for which several preparatory sketches exist, including a finely worked oil painting. The young man is shown as sensitive, dignified and without sentimentality. In the last half of the nineteenth century, peasants were frequently sentimentalized, but Repin clearly disdained this trend, which he found to his annoyance in the writings of the elderly Tolstoy. Speaking of the peasant, Repin wrote, “To descend for one minute into this darkness and to say ‘I am with you,’ is hypocrisy. To wallow with them forever is a senseless sacrifice. To elevate them! To elevate them to one’s own level, to give life—this is a heroic deed!’”
Mad Russia
Repin began his first version of the procession in 1876, shortly after his return from a three-year stay in France and Italy. Perhaps these experiences of other cultures sharpened his sense of the injustice in his own. The choice of subject was certainly rooted in a profound sense of personal hurt: “I am applying all my insignificant forces to try to give incarnation to my ideas; life around me disturbs me a great deal and gives me no peace—it begs to be captured on canvas,” he wrote.
By 1883 the subject had developed into a harsh record of contemporary life, incorporating various strata of Russian society. Though following a shared path, the crowd seems propelled by a heartless authority. The mounted police and the clergy who glower over the poor or stare out oblivious to their suffering, are presented as bullying and vainglorious.
Memories of Repin’s own childhood shaped the composition. As a young icon painter he would have regularly handled objects that inspired veneration in the hearts of the faithful and he would have witnessed many religious processions in the village where he grew up. Nevertheless, this is not a religious painting. Rather than creating an image of exultation, Repin is more concerned with the psychology of the individual and of the crowd itself, influenced no doubt by the crowd scenes of Courbet and Manet, too, whose work he greatly admired.
The complex social caste system of rural Russia is a world away from that of Courbet’s Ornans or Manet’s Paris though. Aside from the church, the state and the military, the average peasant was also liable to be oppressed within his own social ranks, the peasant class being divided into several subsections: those that could read and those that could not, those that had livestock and those with none, and so on, and so forth. Repin masterfully delineates these tensions within the painting.
Reception
The painting was purchased by Pavel Mikhaylovich Tretyakov, a textile magnate, who suggested changing the maids carrying the icon to “a beautiful young girl, exuding spiritual rapture”; a suggestion Repin did not follow up.
Some criticized the painting on the grounds of its depiction of drunkenness at a religious procession. Another, more nuanced criticism came from the artist Mikhail Vrubel who challenged Repin’s desire to “let the peasant be the judge now.” For Vrubel, it is the artist who should define taste, not the audience, accusing Repin of debasing art “to the level of a public statement.”
Vrubel’s criticism has held firm, reflecting the importance of modernism in defining twentieth century tastes. Stalin held Repin up as the master of Russian socialist art, a commendation that perhaps understandably has, for some art historians, placed him in conflict with the avant-garde. This, however, is to underplay Repin’s radical painterly style as well as the importance of the social message of his painting, a message that took great courage and even a greater sense of humanity to create.