Vrubel

There are certain quintessential artistic phenomena associated with the name Savva Mamontov that, to a great extent, defined cultural life in Russia in the 1880s and 1890s. These include the Abramtsevo (Mamontov) Artistic Circle, which made significant advances in set design, architecture, painting and decorative and applied art; the Russian Private Opera, the birthplace of the leading school of national set design and home to brilliant performers headed by Feodor Chaliapin; and the carpentry and ceramics workshops linked to Yelena Polenova and Mikhail Vrubel, which, in many ways, set the tone for Russian Art Nouveau.

The composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and the painter Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) were among the greatest Russian artists of the Silver Age. They did, however, belong to different generations - Vrubel’s entire career fit into this exceptional period in Russian cultural life, whereas Rimsky-Korsakov began writing music as early as the 1860s. Nonetheless, the composer reached his prime and created his best work in exactly that era, the late 19th to the early 20th centuries.

“Painting, like music, like a poet’s verses, should always inspire enjoyment in the viewer. Beauty alone is what artists gift their viewers.” This phrase belongs to Konstantin Korovin, but many artists working at the turn of the 20th century would have been willing to put their names to it, and none more so than his friend, Mikhail Vrubel, bewitched as he was by the music of an “entire person”, by that national, intimate note which he strove to “capture on canvas and in ornament.”

Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910) holds a unique place in the history of Russian art. On the one hand, he belonged to the legendary cohort of Russian Art Nouveau artists. According to his contemporaries, it was in his oeuvre that “we find the saddest and most beautiful artistic expression of the time” In a newspaper article on the occasion of Vrubel’s funeral, the celebrated Russian artist and art historian Alexandre Benois predicted: “Future generations, should true enlightenment shine upon the Russian public, will look back at the last decades of the 19th century as ‘the era of Vrubel’.” Nevertheless, there is clearly a great gap between Vrubel and his artistic milieu: he seems to be much more in touch with the future than with the world around him. “Here is what I do know: I can only stand in awe of the mysteries that Vrubel and others like him begin to reveal to mankind once in 100 years. We are unable to see the worlds that were open to them, and so all we can do is utter this feeble, indifferent word: ‘genius’.

Pencil drawing is one of the oldest art forms, the source of all visual arts, recording the inception of an idea and the stages of its further development. But drawing also has a life of its own as an independent art form with a distinctive language, specific rules and history. Pencils come in many different varieties - silver, lead, graphite, black chalk, wax, coloured pencils, lithographic pencils and other types - and the word also refers to a large number of similar media which can be categorized as the techniques of “dry drawing”, like charcoal, sanguine and sauce. There is an almost limitless variety of techniques involving the use of these materials, and they serve to show off a particular artist’s individuality, sense of form, innate talent and level of skills. A drawing in pencil, charcoal, sanguine or sauce is the best reflection of its creator’s temperament and character. From the vast variety of pencil and pencil-related techniques every epoch chooses those that suit it best. The age of classicism treasured the austere beauty of linear drawing, romanticism - the contrasts and the picturesque quality of strokes; for the “Peredvizhniki” (Wanderers) artists, pencils were “modest workers”, and the modernist movement re-invented the selfsufficiency of lines and the aesthetic value of the process of drawing as such.