Vasily Surikov

By Vladimir Kemenov

Born in Krasnoiarsk in 1848, Surikov died in Moscow in 1916. He is one of the great masters of history painting, and he occupies a special place in Russian culture. Like Delacroix, he believed that history was not a pretext for nice painting but an inexorable drama with neither culprits nor innocents but rather people driven by invisible forces. He was very knowledgeable about Russian history, and his paintings deal with crucial moments. He sought in historical events the answers to pressing problems of his time. Here is a book about a painter little-known in the West, analysed with understanding by one of the greatest Russian art critics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639199211

Book preview

Vladimir Kemenov

VASILY

SURIKOV

© 2022, Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© 2022, Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Image-Bar www.image-bar.com

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world.

Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-63919-921-1

Contents

Vasily Surikov His Life And Work

Historical Paintings

The Morning Of The Execution Of The Streltsy

Menshikov At Beriozov

The Boyarynia Morozova

The Taking Of The Snow Fortress

Yermak’s Conquest Of Siberia

Suvorov Crossing The Alps

Stepan Razin

A Princess Visiting A Convent

Portraits

Chronology

List Of Illustrations

Portrait of the artist Vasily Surikov, 1885. Oil on canvas, 32.9 x 38.1 cm. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

VASILY SURIKOV HIS LIFE AND WORK

The work of Vasily Surikov manifests an amazing fidelity of purpose. The artist put all his heart and soul into reflecting the history of his native Russia, resurrecting the distant past with brilliant veracity. He left only seven large historical paintings, each of which took several years to paint. All are outstanding for their vivid representation of Russian types and characters, underlying national flavour, authentic period atmosphere and profound understanding of the meaning and spirit of the events portrayed. As superlative achievements of realistic historical painting, they comprise a magnificent Russian contribution to world art.

Surikov’s talent as a historical painter revealed itself most powerfully in the 1880s and 1890s, the flowering period of the realist school in Russian art. Firmly linked with the progressive, democratically-minded people of his time, especially the group of painters who were known as the Itinerants (The Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions), he was conspicuous even in that heyday of Russian artistic talent for the astonishing originality of his creative thinking, for his work that is filled with the very breath of history.

The painter’s unusual background quite strongly influenced the development of his talent. He seemed ordained from childhood, spent in a remote Siberian town, to tackle tasks of great creative character.

Vasily Surikov was born on 24 January (12 January, Old Style) 1848, in Krasnoyarsk, into an old Cossack family. His Cossack forefathers from the Don had in the sixteenth century followed Yermak on his conquest of Siberia. Though the status and functions of the Siberian Cossacks had markedly changed by the time he was born, the painter was proud of his ancestry, retaining to his dying day fond notions about the old sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Cossacks: their typical forthright, independent and liberty-loving spirit, their patriotism in the defence of Russia from external foes, their elective system of self-government and so on. Indeed, he cherished the Cossack traits of courage, heroism and love of freedom as family heirlooms.

Siberia, Surikov’s boyhood home, left a store of impressions that were later to become the taproot of his inspiration. It was with such a background that Surikov came to St Petersburg to study at the Academy of Arts. The contrast was staggering. Life in the capital of European Russia had nothing in common with faraway Siberia. Surikov recorded his impressions in his first painting, dating from 1870, Monument to Peter the Great on Senate Square in St Petersburg. In his drawings for the Polytechnical Exhibition, he already evinced an interest in the activities of people living in the Petrine era (Peter the Great Dragging Sailing Vessels from Onega Bay and Peter and Menshikov with Dutch Sailors). At the Academy, Surikov drew the typical nudes and painted pictures of abstract biblical subjects as required by the syllabus. Having assimilated all that the Academy had to offer, Surikov retained intact in his work boyhood reminiscences and vivid mental images of Siberia. The artisanship has not marred his individual talent; on the contrary, it developed an independent attitude, one of firmly rejecting formal academic ostentation in historical painting.

Surikov himself said that at the Academy he developed an interest in three periods of ancient history. "At first, remote antiquity, mostly Egypt, then Rome with its empire that encompassed half the world, and, finally, the Christian world that arose on its ruins." Products of those years were his sketches for Cleopatra (1874) after Pushkin’s story Egyptian Nights, Belshazzar’s Feast (1874), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (1870s) and The Apostle Paul Defending the Dogma of the Christian Faith Before King Agrippa, His Sister Berenice and Proconsul Festus (1875).

Belshazzar’s Feast depicts the prophet Daniel interpreting the early demise implied by the fiery writing on the wall to the sinful Babylonian king. In composition, modelling and presentation the work is still typically academic, though it already manifests its creator’s temperament. King Belshazzar cosseted in luxury is contrasted to the prophet Daniel, whose uplifted hand points to the stern warning.

Making skilful use of the phosphoric brilliance of the writing on the wall, Surikov boldly modelled figures and objects. The half-naked bodies with arms and hands thrust out in an expression of despair seem marble-like in the stream of bluish light. The artist received the first prize for the painting. Printed reproductions of it drew the public eye to the young painter.

At the same time, Surikov produced his Princely Court (1874). This is the first picture by him on a Russian historical theme to have come down to the present day. (The earliest composition, The Murder of Dmitry the Impostor, from 1870, has not survived.) The young artist may not have achieved a uniform measure of success in all parts of the work, but it is clear from this early effort that his creative approach did not conform to that ordained by the Academy for assignments on mythological or biblical themes. The theme set this time by the professors of the Academy was "the clash of Christianity and paganism in the time of Prince Vladimir." It caught Surikov’s imagination and he decided to depict a moment soon after the adoption of Christianity when the Eastern Slavs still retained many heathen features in appearance and behaviour.

The Bronze Horseman, 1870. Oil on canvas, 52 x 71 cm. The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Belshazzar’s Feast, 1874. Oil on canvas, 81 x 140 cm. The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

The Princely Court, 1874. Oil on canvas, 80 x 129 cm. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Depicted in the canvas is a courtyard with a prince’s palatial residence. Sitting in state on the porch under a canopy of gonfalons and surrounded by clergy is an elderly prince. He is dressed in the ancient Russian style — an embroidered scarlet cloak, a fur-trimmed hat and red boots. In a gallery on the right, a seat of honour has been set up for the princess, too. She wears a crown studded with semi-precious stones and strings of pearls at the temples (like those of Byzantine empresses), and she is dressed in a resplendent brocade gown. Next to the prince, judging from his staff, mantle, and cowl, is the bishop appointed to Kievan Russia from Byzantium.

The yard in front of the porch is packed with people — a trial is taking place. In the centre of the left-hand group is a woman with her children: she is on her knees petitioning the prince. On the right is the respondent — the highly colourful figure of a Slav warrior of