The World of Art and Diaghilev's Painters

By Vsevolod Petrov

When, almost twenty years ago, we founded the World of Art, we had a burning desire to liberate Russian artistic activity from the tutelage of literature, to instil in the society around us a love of the very essence of art, and that was the aim we had when we took the field. We considered enemies all those “who fail to respect art as such”, those who either fasten wings to an old nag or harness Pegasus to the cart of “social ideals”, or reject the idea of Pegasus altogether. For that reason, we addressed ourselves to the artistic world with the slogan “Talents of all directions, unite!” And that is how in our ranks Vrubel immediately appeared alongside Levitan, Bakst alongside Serov, Somov alongside Maliavin. – Alexander Benois

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644618813

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Mikhail Vrubel, The Six-Winged Seraph, 1905. Watercolor, lead mine and black chalk on paper, 33.6 x 48.5 cm. Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg.

THE WORLD OF ART BY VSEVOLOD PETROV

In the history of Russian art, the late nineteenth century was a period of creative innovation and a fundamental restructuring of form.

In the 1890s, a new chapter was opened in the visual arts by a generation of artists who radically revised almost the entire range of established tradition. Authorities that had seemed immutable were suddenly toppled from their pedestals. The horizon of artistic creativity broadened, a new aesthetic emerged, and new trends arose, all in striking contrast to what the earlier art movements of the nineteenth century had propagated. The revaluation of values led to cardinal changes in the interpretation and understanding of creative objectives and techniques.

In all these processes, a preeminent, if not definitive role was played by the artists and art critics grouped around the journal Mir iskusstua [The Golovin]. However, in order to properly assess the historic significance of the artistic, educational, and organizational activities of that group, one must at least briefly review the general state of fin de siècle Russian art.

By that time academic painting was no longer the progressive factor, it had once been. However, due to governmental backing it continued to thrive exclusively as a reactionary trend serving the purposes of official art.

A crucial role in the reshaping of Russian art during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was played by members of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki or the Itinerants). Having achieved remarkable results in the 1870s, the Itinerants reached their peak in the 1880s. Genuine masterpieces appeared at practically each of the traveling exhibitions. At that time Vasily Surikov produced the Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, Menshikov in Beriozou, and Boyarina Morozova. Ilya Repin painted his Religious Procession in Kursk Province, They Did Not Expect Him, and many of his best portraits. A number of other well-known painters also took part in the society’s activities.

By the 1890s, having fulfilled their highly creditable social and historical mission of releasing progressive Russian painting from the shackles of the antiquated academic tradition and having developed a consistently realist method, the Itinerants had ceased to be innovative and were in danger of coming full circle.

Yet the creative potential that the Itinerants had introduced with their new approach was far from exhausted. In the 1890s, several of the younger painters represented at traveling exhibitions displayed superlative talent and largely contributed to the realist trend. One must inevitably mention Sergei Korovin’s Village Community Meeting (1893), which was shown at the 22nd Itinerant Exhibition, Nikolai Kasatkin’s Poor People Gathering Coal at a Worked-Out Pit and his study, Woman Miner, both done in 1894 and displayed at the 23rd Itinerant Exhibition, and, finally, Sergei Ivanov’s study of prisoner life that figured at the 28th Itinerant Exhibition. Each of the artists named built on those particular pieces to produce an extensive cycle of paintings.

Thus Sergei Korovin dedicated himself to the traditional Itinerant theme of peasant life, furnishing a probing reflection of the Russian countryside with the acute social problems that followed the abolition of serfdom in 1861.

Like Korovin, Sergei Ivanov originally concentrated on the peasant theme. In the 1880s, he produced a series of pictures about migrant peasants who had abandoned their native lands and trekked to Siberia in search of a better life. Later, in the 1890s, he embarked on a new cycle which portrayed life in prisons, stockades, and labour camps. Thematically, this cycle was particularly relevant during the period of political reaction under Tsar Alexander III with its surging tide of popular unrest. As Ivanov’s biographers rightly noted, for him this cycle served as a prelude for that subject matter which was to gain prominence in his work at the time of the first Russian Revolution (1905-07).

Boris Kustodiev, Model, 1919. Oil on canvas, 51.3 x 40.4 cm. Private Collection.

Valentin Serov, Portrait of Ida Lvovna Rubinstein, 1910. Tempera and charcoal on canvas, 147 x 233 cm. The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Valentin Serov, The Rape of Europa, 1910. Oil on canvas, 71 x 98 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Boris Kustodiev, Reclining Model, 1915. Charcoal, sanguine, and colored pencils on paper, 47 x 57 cm. Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg.

Nikolai Kasatkin went even further than his fellow Itinerants. He was the first among Russian painters to derive his themes and images from the life of the newest social class in Russia, the industrial proletariat that had emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The two works already mentioned marked the beginning of the artist’s extensive Miners cycle. The key painting of this cycle, Coal-Miners on Shift (1895), was shown at the 24th Itinerant Exhibition. The entire cycle had nothing of the Populist sentimentality so characteristic of the later genre paintings by the Itinerants.

Be that as it may, such artists as Sergei Korovin, Sergei Ivanov, and Nikolai Kasatkin did not set the tone for the traveling exhibitions of the 1890s. Among the later Itinerants the dominant role was shared by landscape painters, who imitated Isaac Levitan and Arkhip Kuinji, as well as genre painters the basic content of whose work was a dull, routine reality, unmarked by highlights or powerful, captivating emotionality had become the constant overall theme of the traveling exhibitions.

The traveling exhibitions arranged in the 1890s presented hardly anything comparable with the masterpieces of the previous decade. Now epigones were in command.

In the 1880s, at a time when the Itinerants appeared to hold undivided sway, the earliest signs of a barely noticeable revitalization of art were already there. Mikhail Vrubel, a painter of genius, began his artistic career. Konstantin Korovin displayed his brilliant talents. Novel lyrical intonation sounded in Isaac Levitan’s landscapes and in the pictures of the young Mikhail Nesterov. The twenty-year-old Valentin Serov painted his famous Girl With Peaches (Vera Mamontova), the first gem in the output of the gene ration that was destined to replace the Itinerants.

These artists, with the exception or Vrubel, participated in the traveling exhibitions mounted in the 1880s and 1890s, even though they far from fully shared the ideological and aesthetic concepts of the Itinerants.In reality, they were in many ways alien to the Itinerants. Small wonder that in his reminiscences Nesterov dubbed himself and his fellows the stepchildren of the Itinerants. They were becoming convinced that the day of the Pereduizhniki in Russian art was done and that the succeeding generation would have to search for new roads.

The Itinerant philosophy was even more categorically rejected by the progressive younger generation of artists who made their appearance in the 1890s. Igor Grabar, a budding painter who developed into a prominent artist and art historian, noted in his My Life: An Automonograph:

At first Korovin, Serov, Maliutin, Vrubel, Arkhipov, Ostroukhov and Levitan, and, after them, we the junior generation... came to realize that the way of Miasoyedov, Volkov, Kiseliov, Bodarevsky, and Lemokh [Itinerant epigones] was not our way, and that even the best Itinerants were fundamentally alien to us... We accepted only Repin and Surikov as understandable and close... We sought a greater dimension of truth, a more subtle understanding of nature, less convention, extemporization, less crudity, journeymanship, cliche...

The younger generation’s rebellion against the authority of their seniors, a typical fathers-and-sons conflict, sprang from the general conditions within which Russian social thought evolved at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Populist phase had given way to the new, proletarian period of the Russian liberation movement and the Itinerants’ decline was a symptom of the hopeless crisis and degeneration of the Populist ideology. The dawn of the twentieth century brought with it new social, moral, and aesthetic problems. However, for most Russian artists of the time, the process of creatively assessing its realities was an agonizing effort.

The increasingly complex conditions of the Russian art scene called for a new grouping of forces. One relevant manifestation was the appearance of the Abramtsevo Circle, an unofficial group of artists drawn together by the well-known Moscow art patron and social figure Savva Mamontov and named after his suburban estate. They included some of the major Itinerants, such as Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov, and Victor Vasnetsov, who sympathized with the progressively minded younger generation, but the dominant role in the circle was played by Konstantin Korovin, Valentin Serov, and Mikhail Vrubel. This young trio was instrumental in forming that creative atmosphere largely stripped of the superannuated populist dogmas of the latter-day Itinerants. The work of the circle’s members reflected certain substantial novel tendencies that were subsequently carried forward in early twentieth-century Russian art.

In 1885, Sawa Mamontov established his private opera company in Moscow, enlisting many prominent artists to work as production designers. This laid the foundation for a new type of stage decor that had nothing in common with traditional stereotypes.

Likewise in Abramtsevo, Mamontov organized workshops to revive the techniques and forms of Russian folk arts and crafts. Artists such as Vrubel and Golovin worked there, realizing their innovative concepts.

However, the Abramtsevo Circle proved unable to develop the novel forms of creative, educational, and exhibitional activity which Russia’s visual arts so badly needed.

Somewhat later this task fell to the group associated with theGolovin. By shaping new artistic forms, the members of this group brought new ideas, aesthetic concepts, and creative principles to the Russian visual arts. Although organizational problems seemed less important to them, such matters were also among their priorities.

The Golovin group, which gave rise to a forceful influential movement, formed in St. Petersburg in the early 1890s. Its nucleus comprised several young students, former members of the Society for Self-Education. This small, select circle was dominated by Alexander Benois, subsequently to gain fame as an artist, critic, and historian; Konstantin Somov, an Academy of Arts student, a future painter and graphic artist; Dmitry Filosofov, who later developed into a writer; Sergei Diaghilev, a gifted musician, who achieved renown as an art critic and illustrious impressario; and Walter Nuvel, a budding music critic. They were soon joined by another two young artists: Lev Rosenberg, better known by his pseudonym — Leon Bakst, and Yevgeny Lanceray. By virtue of their versatile talents and high cultural standards, the group was soon engaged in extensive activities that greatly affected the artistic life of the country.

The driving force behind many of the Golovin’s activities was Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), who combined a sensitive understanding of art with unquenchable energy and rare determination. In fact, he had a greater flair for assessing the artistic developments of the time than any of his fellows. His basic motivation stemmed from the firm conviction that Russian art had a role of global significance to play. He set himself the goal of uniting the finest Russian artists, of helping them to make their way into the European art arena, and, generally, as he himself put it, of exalting Russian art in the eyes of the West. He dedicated himself wholeheartedly to this objective, pursuing with persistence and fortitude, and capably surmounting every hurdle along the way.

In 1898, in St. Petersburg, Diaghilev organized an exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists, at which, for the first time, young painters came out in a united front against dreary Academy traditions and the vestiges of obsolescent trends. Diaghilev’s St. Petersburg group of Somov, Bakst, Benois, and Lanceray formed a close alliance with prominent Moscow painters, including Vrubel, Levitan, Serov, Konstantin Korovin, Nesterov, and Riabushkin. The Finnish section of the exhibition was dominated by the works of Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Albert Edelfeldt. This broad association, much greater than the original circle, served as the point of departure for Diaghilev to found the art journal which would become the ideological rallying center for early twentieth-century Russian art.

The Golovin journal came out for six years from 1899 to 1904. It was edited by Sergei Diaghilev, assisted by his entire St. Petersburg group. In 1901, Igor Grabar associated himself with the journal, eventually turning into one of the most industrious and influential art critics of the time. Diaghilev and his colleagues mounted annual exhibitions bearing the same name as the journal in which many