Mikhail Vrubel. The Artist of the Eves

By Mikhaïl Guerman

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910) was a painter whose art has been described as a Symbolist and Proto-Expressionist. He exerted a tremendous influence on Russian avant-garde painters. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Art in St. Petersburg, Vrubel made many trips to Italy and earned his living restoring medieval art treasures. This greatly influenced Vrubel's choice of subject matter, although he was also heavily influenced by the literature of his own country, which was then in full flower. The magnificent full-colour reproductions in this book of the Russian master, whose work deserves to be far better known in the West, will be a revelation to all who are unfamiliar with his work and a delight to the enthusiast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Dec 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639199693

Book preview

Mikhail Vrubel, Self-Portrait with a Shell, 1905. Watercolour, charcoal, gouache, red chalk, and pastel, 58.2 x 53 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

INTRODUCTION

The artist Sergei Sudeikin recalled that, although the Vrubel room at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris was almost always deserted, Pablo Picasso stood there for hours.[1] Such attention paid to a Russian artist wholly unknown in France on the part of a man who, while still young, had already earned himself a reputation as a bold shaker of principles is conclusive evidence of the start of a new dialogue between the West and Russia.[2]

In his native land, few recognised Vrubel as an artist of exceptional talent. During his lifetime, he was poorly understood and little appreciated. In the early twentieth century, Russian painting was beginning to be taken seriously, and not only in Russia itself, and not only those fashionable artists who came to be called Futurists (in other words, the future exponents of the classic Avant-garde), but also those who stood apart from any mainstream movements. Russian culture had long, and justly, been greatly respected in Western Europe as mainly a culture of the written word, a literary culture. Since Turgenev’s time, Russian literature had occupied a serious place in the minds of enlightened readers.

Vrubel’s art was always at odds with the age. His paintings and drawings are evidence of a deep, burning individuality, multifaceted (often bombastic) symbolism, the affected ennui of the Art Nouveau, high tradition, yet with the obvious conformity of a salon painter. While his art was clearly of its time, sometimes paying tribute to it, even to excess, it was rooted in the classical tradition while paradoxically being drawn toward the future. It combined the philosophical attitude and moral tension, inherent in Russian culture, with bold searches for new formal means of expression, something rare in Russian art. In a period when membership of one grouping or another and adherence to one platform or another were the norm, Vrubel’s loyalty was purely to himself.

Like Gogol, Alexander Ivanov, and Dostoyevsky,[3] Vrubel never did create the great work of which he dreamed all his life — the great Demon. In general, he left relatively few completed works, and the majority of these are hardly worthy of his genius. Perhaps it was a period when an artist like Vrubel expressed himself more in the process of creation than in the paintings themselves.

Mikhail Vrubel, Anna Karenina and Her Son, late 1870s - early 1880s. Illustration for the novel Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Pen and ink with sepia on brown paper, 39.5 x 33 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

THE EARLY YEARS

The time in which the artist lived was not an easy one for anyone. As the years went by, Vrubel’s art grew more complex and more remote from the tastes and aspirations of the period — a period which remained in many ways alien to him, as, indeed, he did to it.

It is possible, of course, to find touching, even dramatic episodes in the story of Vrubel’s childhood. There was his mother’s death when he was three years old; repeated moves — Omsk, Astrakhan, Saratov, St Petersburg, Vilno; a tender friendship with his older sister Asya (Alexandra Alexandrovna, who wrote memoirs about the artist and entirely supported him in the bad times). There were evenings at the piano (his step-mother was an outstanding musician), books to read, plays put on at home, and games which one of the future artist’s childhood companions recalled as being highly romantic.[4] It was the kind of life that was typical of any noble family in which the father was a senior civil servant.

By the time Mikhail Vrubel entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University in 1874, art already held a strong fascination for him, though not to such an extent as to make him turn his back on traditional university education. He probably chose law partly to follow the example of his father, a military lawyer, and partly because the law was the traditional way of obtaining a general education in the humanities. Even while still at school, Vrubel had taken drawing lessons. Neither his taste, nor strong preferences had yet developed, and he was interested in the same type of art as everyone else. He was attracted by Ivan Aivazovsky and Gerard Dou and even painted copies of their works. Once the young Vrubel reproduced from memory a copy of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement which had sent him into raptures. This informs us both of his phenomenal visual memory and interest in truly significant things.

He came across contemporary painting at the second exhibition of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions while it was in Odessa in the summer of Pampel. It was there that he saw Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness, Myasoyedov’s The Zemstvo Is Dining and many other canvases that were fairly innovative in terms of content, though not, of course, in terms of technique. The exhibition can scarcely have made a strong impression on him. Although Vrubel drew and painted a great deal in his later years at school and during his early years as a student, he had not as yet reflected on the essence and principles of art, and he was more deeply interested in literature than in painting. Vrubel’s literary tastes began to form early. He had a youthful attachment to Gogol, particularly his Dead Souls. This attachment to Gogol reflected itself in an excellent and penetrating knowledge of all his books and lasted a lifetime. The same was true of his love for Goethe, Pushkin, Lermontov, and later Chekhov. In adolescence, he was fascinated by Turgenev and again had an excellent knowledge of the writer’s work. Among the philosophers, he preferred Lessing and Proudhon but had a special fondness for Kant. Although he constantly chided himself for his laziness, even while still at school he knew German sufficiently well to read Faust, spoke French fluently, was studying English, and knew Latin well enough to give lessons. Vrubel was a true European. To him, knowledge was perfectly natural and it never occurred to him to be vain about it (except, perhaps, in adolescence).

Mikhail Vrubel, Salieri Pouring Poison into Mozart’s Glass, 1884. Black crayon on paper, 25.7 x 33.9 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Mikhail Vrubel, Portrait of Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, the Artist’s Wife, Wearing an Empire-Style Summer Dress Made to His Design, 1898. Oil on canvas, 124 x 75.7 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

From childhood, the future artist’s mind — typically for a member of the Russian intelligentsia — was saturated with literary associations. He loved historical fiction and the classics. His earliest drawings display a greater fondness for the exotic and abundant historical fantasy than for the direct observation of nature. And his illustrations too — the early ones and also those of the more mature period (the Demon is a separate topic) — are not devoid of banality. His excessively fanciful drawing for Anna Karenina (late 1870s - early 1880s) and the later illustrations for Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri (1884, made to be shown with the aid of a magic lantern) point rather to a love of striking lines and a somewhat baroque and, at the same time, decadent multiplicity of meaning, than to originality and strict taste.

We know far more about Vrubel’s passions than about his perception of public life. His youth in St. Petersburg coincided with what the Decadents called "the eves, that presentiment of unprecedented changes (Blok). Every age is difficult in its own way, but those years only seemed particularly troubled but were so in reality. From his youth, Vrubel was not a fighter in either camp, but only a chance visitor (Alexei Tolstoy). As far as one can tell, political events were of no great interest to him. As an intelligent individual, he perceived the malaise and harshness of the age — but scarcely more than that. Yet Vrubel happened to grow up in Russia among people whose problems were constantly those, which were then preoccupying the whole of humanity and the words Dostoyevsky pronounced in his famous speech about Pushkin in 1880 — Can a person really build his own happiness on the misfortune of others?" — could not have remained pure rhetoric for anyone. Vrubel’s spiritual tension expressed itself to a greater extent in art itself and in his relationships with those close to him than in a concern with public passions.

At the time it might have seemed that events had lost their natural, customary consistency. A particular writer or artist would combine in his work the tendencies and tastes of several generations. Pretentious novelties existed alongside overt banality; innovators returned to the classics; complexity appeared to be simplicity, while naturalness appeared to be affected. Liberal readers and viewers sensed the age to be one of deep decline; those who were active in the arts cursed the times in which they lived, while simultaneously revelling in them.

While still a young man, Vrubel realised that shared moral and even political convictions did not preclude the existence of extreme differences between artists (writers and musicians) as regards their methods and the actual language of art. Leo Tolstoy, who was concerned above all with the benefit art was capable of bringing to the wider public, wrote in all seriousness to Nikolai Gay: "Won’t you draw a picture about drunkenness?"[5] Gay was far more preoccupied with questions of how to create and how to express the essence of what he had created: "I constantly wanted to express his soul. It is clear that outward appearance cannot be of any interest. "[6] Even the ideologist of the Itinerant movement, Ivan Kramskoi, an entirely traditional artist, a realist in the most direct, down-to-earth sense of the word, felt the importance of the new poetic