Captured by Beauty. Academic and Salon Art in the Tretyakov Gallery

The Tretyakov Gallery thanks 'SeverStal' and 'British American Tobacco Russia' for their financial support in the organization of this exhibition.

"CAPTURED BY BEAUTY: RUSSIAN ACADEMIC AND SALON ART FROM 1830 TO 1910" IS THE TITLE OF THE EXHIBITION SCHEDULED TO TAKE PLACE IN THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY FROM OCTOBER 2004 THROUGH TO JANUARY 2005. THIS LARGE- SCALE PROJECT WILL CONSIST OF ABOUT 500 WORKS OF VARIOUS GENRES, INCLUDING PAINTING, GRAPHICS AND SCULPTURE, AS WELL AS MANY POSTERS, EXAMPLES OF ADVERTISING ART, POSTCARDS, PHOTOGRAPHS, FURNITURE, PORCELAIN, BRONZE AND GLASS AND VARIOUS LACQUER WORKS, COSTUMES AND EXQUISITE PIECES OF JEWELLERY. THE RANGE OF GENRES IS MATCHED BY THE VARIETY OF THE ARTISTS REPRESENTED, RANGING FROM THE FAMOUS TO THE VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN. BESIDES THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY, A NUMBER OF OTHER INSTITUTIONS, SUCH AS THE STATE RUSSIAN MUSEUM FROM ST. PETERSBURG, THE HISTORICAL MUSEUM AND THE MUSEUM OF DECORATIVE AND APPLIED ARTS FROM MOSCOW, AND MUSEUM COLLECTIONS FROM OMSK, TAGANROG, PERM, SERPUKHOV, PERESLAVL-ZALESSKY, NIZHNY-NOVGOROD, SAMARA AND MINSK, HAVE ALSO CONTRIBUTED TO THE PROJECT, AS HAVE PRIVATE COLLECTORS. A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF THE WORKS EXHIBITED WILL BE SHOWN FOR THE FIRST TIME.

Pimen ORLOV. October Holiday in Rome. 1851
Oil on canvas. 83.7 by 101.9 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery

Throughout the 20th century, the academic traditions of the 19th century were far from the major focus for Russian art critics, whose attention was directed towards the masters of "democratic realism”. Despite an obvious advantage in the sheer quantity of academic and salon art from the 19th century culture, it has been - and remains - under-researched, both factually and conceptually, when compared to the degree and depth of attention paid to the art of the Wanderers (peredvizhnik!); the result is a subjective, unbalanced representation of the artistic process.

The recent revival of interest in the field has been fuelled by a number of factors, not always connected to the need to assemble an objective picture of the artistic developments of the 19th century; among them is the growing market for Russian art, with special interest shown towards the works of Timofei Neff, Genrikh Semiradsky, Konstantin Makovsky, Yuly Clever, and, of course, Ivan Aivazovsky (who is currently the most highly-valued Russian landscape painter). As a result, many forgotten, or previously unexhibited, works from private collections that had been ignored and never purchased by museums in earlier years - when this kind of art was considered scarcely "artistic", but fit only to satisfy the needs of the bourgeoisie and Tsarist court, in other words "ideologically alien" - have flooded the market. The list is long: M. Scotty and O. Timashevsky, Valery Jacobi and M. Zichi, Semiradsky and Fyodor Bronnikov, K. Venig and Vasily Vereshchagin, Konstantin Makovsky and Alexander Kharlamov, Alexander Litovchenko and Klavdi Lebedev, Yuri Leman and Klavdi Stepanov, Yuri Klever and Arseni Meshchersky, Nikolai Sver- chkov and Richard Zommer... Often the only sources of information about them were old and brief reference books compiled by Fedor Bulgakov and Sergei Kondakov. The practice of authentication drew much closer attention to research on the art of such masters.

The growing interest in such academic art is evident. However, the central figures of salon academism, such as Semiradsky and Makovsky, not to mention their lesser-known colleagues, are still being "written off" as "bad" art by the professional critical mainstream. It remains a paradox that, while denying the ideology of art criticism of previous decades, yet not taking on the role of the defenders of Semiradsky and Makovsky (these masters need no such advocates), one can make an attempt evaluate this kind of art - one based, at least, on its own laws.

Obviously, the concepts of both "academism" and "salon art" are international ones. Though there were many general similarities between the generic and thematic structures of European and Russian academism, nevertheless certain "national" peculiarities existed in the Russian branch: for example, the abundance of pieces in the so-called "Russian style" - scenes from the "Boyars' Life in the 17th Century", and portraits of young girls in sundresses and kokoshniks (as with Makovsky, Lebedev and Venig). In the genre of landscape painting, views of Crimea and its palaces, that only underlined Crimea's reputation as a "paradise on Earth", can be separated from the rest and put in a special group (which includes Kondratenko, Krachkovsky, Aivazovsky and Lagorio). A number of painters with Polish "roots" (Semiradsky, Bakalovich, Kotarbinsky, Khlebovsky, Miodushevsky and others) were a major force in Russian academism from the middle of the 19th through to the beginning of the 20th century. Given the historical events of the time, they now belong not only to Polish, but also to Russian culture: all studied at St. Petersburg's Academy of Art, participated in academic exhibits, and their works are now in Russian museums. The same is true of the Baltic Germans, among whom are W. Moller, Karl Gun, I. Keler, Yu. Klever, Eugen Dukker.

19th century Russian art was caught between two opposite trends, which worked both for and against each other - realism and academism. In the second half of the century they formed themselves into artistic organizations: the "Union of Travelling Exhibitions" (the peredvizhniki), and the "Society of Exhibitions of Art". They were defined by their difference in artistic goals, as well as their concepts of a single possible interpretation of "beauty", concentrating differences in the aesthetic programs of the two directions, and providing Russian art with a new variety and tension.

The founder of the Tretyakov Gallery, Pavel Tretyakov, preferred the more democratic cultural wing. As a result, works by Makovsky and Semiradsky came into the gallery's collection from various sources only after Tretyakov's death. However, this makes it only more interesting to investigate further such a "plateau" of art as represented by so many painters, who may be considered something of a second "strand" of 19th century art, an alternative to Tretyakov's collection. With such oppositions now forgotten, the contemporary viewer is challenged when trying to understand the sources of the pathos of the intended asceticism and the repressive colouring, characteristic of works by Vasily Perov, Ivan Kramskoy, Vasili Maximov and Nikolai Yaroshenko.

When considering the 19th century, the two directions of salon-academism and realism can be considered a pair - like baroque and classicism. There are many qualities that appear to match, as well as contrast, like their profound psychological understanding of nature (or its opposite); something of an obsession with social and moral tribulations and asocial trends; the dominance of the themes of hard work, poverty, illness and death - and the boredom of everyday life - and the subjects of feasts, leisure, lovers' adventures; a sense of everyday banality set against the exotic; reality against myth; a sense of the contemporary, against the representation of historical themes; asceticism against passion; monochromatic, repressive colour palettes, which intentionally "reduce" the scale of artistic possibility, against bright and iridescent colours, with their special preference for pink, red and turquoise shades.

The occasional a-la-baroque grotesque of salon-academism has always attracted special attention. Fyodor Dostoevsky described the peculiarity, using an example of Aivazovsky in a very precise and ironic manner. Aivazovsky's love for unusual effects of nature gave Dostoevsky the opportunity to compare the painter with Alexander Dumas pere: "Dumas writes with incredible pace and ease, so does Aivazovsky. Both of them impress with impressive effects, simply because neither describes the ordinary; as a matter of fact, they tend to despise the ordinary... Their works always have an air of fictitiousness: Bengal lights, crackling, screams, wailing winds, lightning. Certainly, the Count of Monte Cristo is rich, but what is an emerald poison bottle for?"[1]. Defining the characteristics of Makovsky's colouring, the art critic V Chuiko wrote: "Extremely intense, brilliant colouring is the one quality of Makovsky that everyone seems to notice; it must be said, however, that the colouring is a little too variegated, over-the-top and eye-catching, and does not always precisely convey reality... Makovsky lacks a sense of proportion" [2]

However, it is not only excesses of form that can be attributed to this kind of art, but also excesses of emotions. The characteristics mentioned could show themselves both in the pathos of academic programmes, and in the exaltation of certain salon pieces. It is no coincidence that gypsy motifs and characters, birds, girls with guitars and scenes of festivities are so widely encountered in the works of the artists of the academic-salon movement. Such motifs definitely trigger a repercussion against the aesthetics of salon romanticism with its "beautiful suffering", "curls of silk" and eyes like "shining stars." V.V. Stasov wrote that F.K. Wintergalter and "the heart-throbs that make women's hearts melt at balls", Wintergalter and the composers of "sugar-coated romances that made both women and their lovers smoulder", are distinctly close to each other."[3] Another aspect of salon art is its display of tolerance for the weaknesses of human nature, serving a re-grouping purpose for the individual. As one collector and researcher of romance said: "Human existence without romance is incomplete and waning." [4] This is one of the secrets of its popularity. As for the question of the peculiarities of the salon and academism, Stasov could not but admit that there was "something that is deeply satisfying to our demands and our aesthetic feelings" [5] in this kind of art. Just like romance, academic-salon art appeals both to the aristocratic elite (its main customers were from the Tsarist court), as well as to the widest range of social classes that had access to its style through advertisements and post cards. Posters advertising tobacco and perfume, playbills announcing charity balls and concerts of popular "divas" - all of those devices used the cliche of the salon, and represented the thematic and stylistic variety of so-called "learned" art.

As for the masters of realism from the Wanderers' strand, they accepted the concept of beauty as more of an ethical concept than an aesthetic one - an area of the soul, not of the body. The fact that the idea of "pure beauty" became discredited with the ban on the sensual and erotic in the ascetic art of democratic realism led, among other things, to the fact that in the 1860s and 1870s the "nu" genre became a legacy of academic studios and salons. One of the main aspects that contributed to Semiradsky's success was the air of eroticism that can be traced in many of his works: his secret was in his ability not to go beyond the frames of decency, while keeping a balance between teasing eroticism, a pagan cult of nakedness, passionate gaiety and Christian values (as in "The Sinner", "Luminaries of Christianity", "The Temptation of St. Jerome").

While denying "unnecessary" beauty, the art of realism seems to long for beauty and harmony, as well as spiritual, moral and aesthetic perfection. "What if all infamy and filth is but a torment/ For the beauty, shining from afar...", guessed Innokenty Annensky. This torment "for the beauty, shining from afar", freed from the banality, filth, vulgarity and boredom of everyday life was expressed in the excessive colours of grandiose portraits by Makovsky, the classical idylls of Semi- radsky, the worship of the art of the Spaniard Mariano Fortuny, and the oriental tales of the sea "narrated" by Aivazovsky.

Sergei Makovsky, a well-known art critic and son of the artist, as an emigrant had the opportunity to review the panorama of the art movements of the second part of the 19th century from a certain distance - and he revealed its main "sin" as the failure to fulfill the will of "our prophets”, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Ivanov - in other words, the inability to "canonize" beauty. His rebuke is directed towards the art of the masters of the democratic rather the ascetic cultural wing, one that sacrificed beauty in its quest of truth, and the artists of salon- academism, for whom beauty is often used as a superficial form without any grace.

Sharing the latest art news from Rome with Pavel Tretyakov, Pavel Chistyakov wrote: "A painting by G. Semiradsky ("Luminaries of Christianity") was not sold - he asks for it too much money - 40,000 rubles. Just because one is crafty, brave and talented is no guarantee that he'll will be paid 40 thousand rubles. Honesty, ability and self-mastery are to be valued, talent is God's gift! In art, after craft and bravery, come shamelessness and impudence... In real art, that is considered low. Religion and art cannot be separated, religion is part of the human spirit. In other words, it might be good - but not sublime!" [6]

Despite the dramatic differences between the directions of salon-academism and democratic realism, in reality the artistic culture of the time cannot be accomodated by such a two-part scheme. No impenetrable wall existed between the two sides: the masters of democratic realism were often tempted by "beauty", entering into lengthy disputes with their opponents using their language, and competing with them in their field. The theme of the "fall" to a salon level in the art of Kramskoy, Repin and Polenov, among others, is still under-researched in contemporary academic studies. It is interesting to consider, in the context of academic and salon art, such works as "Spring" by Perov, "A Dragonfly" and "The Tsar's Amusement" by Polenov, Kramskoy's "An Unknown Woman" and "Moonlit Night", the portraits of N. Golovina, S. Menter and Baroness V Ikskul by Repin, Vasnetsov's "Sadko" and "Ivan-Tsarevich on the Grey Wolf", "A Scene from a Roman Carnival" by V. Surikov and "In Warmer Lands" by N. Yaroshenko, Serov's "Portrait of Z. Yusupova", Vrubel's "Girl with a Persian Rug in the Background", and specially-commissioned portraits by N. Bogdanov-Belski and I. Brodsky; as well as see how the salon-academic Orientalism is connected with the Turkestan and Indian series of Vereshchagin.

A very characteristic feature of 19th century culture is its "polistylism", something which is traditionally illustrated by examples from architecture and decorative and applied art. However, it characterizes painting as much as any other field: neo-classicism, the "Russian style", "faux rococo", Orientalism, European art of the Middle Ages. The composition of the exhibition and its catalogue is structurally divided into parts which match each of these styles, recreating a "journey" into art history - almost as if in some kind of a time-machine, through historical epochs and countries. Depending on the themes and subjects, the masters of the eclectic period chose their "language", picking one stylistic system or another. For instance, Jakobi happens to be both the author of the gruesome social canvas "A Halt for the Prisoners" (1861) and the painting "Jesters at the Empress' Anna Ioannovna's Court" (1872), a vibrant and "loud" piece in the style of the "second rococo", as well as of a "Moorish" series of works in the oriental style.

In order to preserve conceptual unity in the exhibition it was crucial to include furniture, porcelain, glass, costume and pieces of jewellery. As for the salon-academic paintings of the 19th century - called by V. Garshin "a factory of wall decorations" - they need to be considered predominantly from the viewpoint of applied and decorative art, which itself today is becoming a central subject of academic study. Such re-evaluations cannot possibly fail to touch on the subject of grand-scale easel-painting as well: many of the paintings of Neff, Makovsky, Semiradsky, Rizzoni and Stepan Bakalovich served to the greater extent as decorations and accessories for the interiors of the epoch of historicism. Special meaning in those times was also attached to the frames which truly matched the paintings themselves; the frames concerned are directly related to a stylistic system that came to be known as "historicism", or "eclecticism".

Frames for the works of Semiradsky, Bronnikov and Bakalovich were decorated with small ornaments of the leaves of the acanthus, or a stripe of meander faithful to classical antique style, and corresponding to the then-popular tastes for the antique. Makovsky preferred the more stylized forms of ornaments of the Renaissance, baroque and rococo. A vivid example of a true masterpiece of decorative art from the second half of the 19th century is the carved wooden frame for Makovsky's painting "In the Artist's Studio" (1881, in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery), where the absence of the frame would have diminished the effect of the painting itself. Thus, subject matter, style and the frame of the painting together "strived" to unify with the style of the interior itself. [7]

In regarding painting in this way as a synthesis of all the arts, it is possible to recognize the principles of future modernism, and both Semiradsky and Makovsky are good examples in such a context. Makovsky's shocking "omnivour- ousness", his unwillingness to go deeper into the psychology of the subjects he depicts - these are just instances of his different type of approach, his intuitive path to a completely different, non-easel painting attitude to art. He was "just as interested in landscapes as he was in genre scenes, or the ornamental motifs of Moscow Rus', decorative allegories, illustrations to fictitious heroic deeds, and all sorts of eye-catching fancy improvisations, including screens in the rococo style and golden chaise-a-porters with garlands of cupids." [8]

It was no accident that many of the artists from that circle were passionate collectors. According to Sergei Makovsky: "... my father collected Russian national artefacts out of preference: sundresses, dushegreykas [the warm woman's jacket], jerkins [a type of peasant women's garment], kokoshniks and kichkas [types of head dress of a peasant woman] decorated with pearls, jewels with diamonds, and glass pieces on multi-coloured foils, earrings, buttons, large fans. Goblets, pitchers, salt cellars, dishes, trays, crystal- glass, porcelain, majolica, bronze, candle holders, candelabra, sconces and miniature boxes, coffers and lace, embroidery, velvet, satin, brocade by arshines [a Russian measure equal to 28 inches] or by bits and pieces. Heavy chests were full of scraps of antique fabrics."[9] Extensive collections of antiques and other rarities were to be found in Semiradsky's famous house in Rome on the Via Gaeta. The artist surrounded himself with Persian rugs, oriental fabrics, tiger skins, weapons, ancient Greek vases, antique furniture, paintings, small bijoux and jewellery and many sorts of rare species of roses in pots. The collections became a rich source - a defining part of salon-academic art - which more and more came to concentrate on the cost-umes of the subjects and the splendour of their breathtaking interiors.

Like most other representatives of salon-academicism, Semiradsky was often accused of plagiarism, of using and simplifying the creative ideas of others, and of the lack of any sense of novelty and freshness of discovery in his works. His strength, however, lies in something else: the use of ready-made and available samples is indeed one of the main peculiarities of this kind of art. Yet such kinds of "fancy work", based on another's pattern, enable the artist to concentrate on form, as well as sharpen and polish the technical skills and refine the elements that made up a work of art. Semiradsky's level of mastery demanded a great deal of talent, and even more hard work.

The similarity with decorative art already mentioned can also be seen in the way that formal skill is accentuated. A certain device, or a combination of devices, is thoroughly "nursed" and then becomes the artist's trademark.

For example, I.Makarov's paintings were often compared to baiser (a light pastry made from the white of eggs and sugar), because of their specially-layered brush strokes. Makovsky was often called the "Russian Rubens" for his more "watery" painting technique, with the addition of varnish and roundish brush strokes. And it is easy to spot the jeweller's precision in all the objects and the brittle scarlet silk of the cardinals' mantles in the paintings of Rizzoni, complete with the dry elegance of their thin lines, which are somewhat reminiscent of medieval book miniatures.

The variety and refinement of Semiradskys painting skills is truly striking: their use of palette-knife and facing, drawing with the brush handle on still wet layers of paint, and the fine and precise drawing with thin brushes over the top layers that gives shapes a filigree look - all such techniques create an impression of unprecedented richness of textural effects. Viewers find themselves unwillingly trapped by the mastery of the artist; despite their thematic banality and emotional simplicity, Semiradsky's paintings are never boring.

The contemplation of artistic techniques, of the aestheticism of the very texture of artistic surfaces that had been already revealed in early works by the masters of salon-academic art, also predated transformations that took place around the turn of the century, when theme, subject and character all became of secondary importance, and colour, line and form became the main elements.

In 19th century art, academic and salon painting preserved a legacy of mastery and attention to formal artistic characteristics. Mikhail Vrubel considered only Ivanov, Kuindzhi, Semiradsky, Rizzoni and - with certain stipulations - Repin as real artists from among the Russians. In the earliest years of the "World of Art” movement Leo Bakst lectured his friends on Russian art: one of his main topics was the art of Semiradsky, Klever and Makovsky - a fact which is easy to explain, since in a time of confrontation and the comparison of academism and the art of the "Wanderers", inner and outer beauty, ethics and aesthetics, academism was a "personification" of a pan-aesthetic programme, directing the public to appreciate the aesthetics of form.

At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, a series of exhibitions devoted to academicism were shown in the West, as an opposition to impressionism - and they allowed a chance to examine impressionism itself from a different point of view. Analyzing this situation, G.Y. Sternin termed it a symptom of a change from an "impressionism-centrist" model of interpretation of the processes of artistic evolution, towards a "symbolism-centrist".10 Other exhibition projects of our current century prove similar interpretations: 2002 saw an exhibition in Venice, "From Puvis de Chavannes to Matisse and Picasso: In the Direction of Modernism", indirectly related to this theme. Its curators tried to show a genetic - and also de facto generic - connection between modernism and the academic-salon tradition that was a focal point of Puvis de Chavannes, and which received a new artistic meaning with the work of Matisse and Picasso.

Russian academic and salon art of the turn of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries is a very significant artistic phenomenon, one that has long been awaiting the critical spotlight and subsequent research. Today, the majority of the works that dominate its trends can be found in museum reserve collections and in private hands. The exhibition "Captured by Beauty" will provide both specialists and connoisseurs of art alike with new names and pieces, and stimulate the creation of a more objective picture of the development of Russian art while providing some sense of historical justice and tribute to painters who significantly contributed to 19th century culture; it will also promote a better understanding of the origins of certain artistic processes that came with the 20th century.

1. F.M. Dostoevsky. Complete Works in 30 volumes, L., 1979, V.19. p.162 (in Russian).
2. Chuyko V. An exhibition of paintings by K. E. Makovsky// Vsemirnaya Illustrazia # 1497, 1897 (in Russian).
3. Stasov V V Academicheskaya Vystavka1863 goda// Bib- lioteka dlya chteniya 186 February p.6 (in Russian).
4. Rabinovich V. Russkiy Romans, M., 1987, p. 29 (in Russian).
5. Stasov, V.V. Mamki i n'an'- ki nevpopad. //St. Peters- burgskiye vedomosti. 186,5 N. 290 (in Russian).
6. Pis'ma khudozhnikov k P M. Tretyakovu. In 2 volumes. M. 1960, V 2 p. 299 (in Russian)
7. The exhibition "Captured by Beauty" required a large amount of restoration. A special task when preparing the exhibition was the restoration of the unique author's frames, conducted by the employees of the Tretyakov Gallery V Stavtsev and V. Klepov.
8. Makovsky, S. Silhouetty Russkikh khudozhnikov. M. , 1999, p. 72. (in Russian)
9. Ibid p. 77.
10. Sternin, G.Y. Problema real'nosty v izobrazi- tel'nom iskusstve XIX veka // Sovetskoe Iskus- stvoznanie #1 M., 1978, p. 210-232 (in Russian)