19 June 2004 22:10
Weekend: RUSSIAN LANDSCAPES: THE STEPPE BEYOND: In 19th-century Russia, historical paintings were praised, landscapes branded ideologically unsound. Then 14 students rebelled and a powerful art form was born. By James Wood ByLine: JAMES WOOD
In 1995, I made my first visit to Russia. A relative was working for a branch of the World Bank, stationed on a collective farm outside Ryazaan, about six hours south of Moscow. Her quixotic project, dreamed up by the flailing Russian government, was the privatisation of the collective farms. The farm was really a village of about 400 people. Perhaps 80 of these were fit to work the land. We lived with an old widow, whose simple, low house blazed with beautiful little icons in every room. The house had a stove but no plumbing; a stinking deep hole in the field, roughly housed by a shed, was available for our needs. There were a few cars and Jeeps, but most of the ploughing was still being done by horse and cart. The farm's main office had the collected works of Lenin on its shelf. In the fields, there was no visible encouragement to imagine oneself in the 1990s rather than the 1890s. I spent my time there in a Russophile's trance. Alongside the radical strangeness of the environment, there was also an odd familiarity: I felt as if I had encountered it all before. Well, I had - in the pages of Gogol. In his novel Dead Souls, a rogue named Chichikov travels from estate to estate, proposing to landowners that they sell him their "dead souls" - the serfs these landowners used to own, and who have died, but who are still listed on the census returns as alive. It's a brilliant scheme. The landowners will get to "sell" serfs they no longer own, and Chichikov will gather his own list of apparently live serfs. Thus credentialed as a serf-owning gentleman, he can use this false wealth to secure a mortgage: the dead will be his surety. Imagine my feelings when, one afternoon, I watched several representatives of the World Bank plug their laptops into the chalky wall of the widow's bungalow. They were trying to take a census of the available "souls" on the collective farm. But this was hard to do, because the heads of families had been told that the greater their number of dependants, the larger would be their government grant. And so people had been trying to claim dead family members as live ones . . . The landscape also seemed eerily familiar. It was late March, and the giant's grip of winter was just easing. The endless icy fields were turning to black bog; at the end of the day, my boots were twice as heavy as when I had started out, little pontoons entirely encased in moist, tea-coloured clay. The enormity of the expanses and the lack of tall buildings or woods meant that one tended to see the world in two horizontal strips: the dark ground and the slightly less dark sky above. There was one landmark, a large ruined church, destroyed in the 1930s, the bones of its steeple rising over the village. I hadn't seen much Russian landscape painting, but what I had seen - mainly, without knowing it perhaps, the work of Isaak Levitan and Arkhip Kuindzhi - was staring straight back at me in the land itself. It was like seeing Salisbury Cathedral for the first time, but through the eyes of Constable. The marvellous new exhibition at the National Gallery, Russian Landscape In The Age Of Tolstoy, confirms my surmise. The landscape I had been inhabiting in Ryazaan is indeed the landscape of late-19th-century Russian painting. Here, gathered for the first time in the west (the only comparable show, at the Royal Academy in 1975, was far thinner), are Isaak Levitan, Ivan Shishkin, Aleksei Savrasov, Mikhail Klodt and many others (15, in all). Here, for instance, you can see The Thaw, painted in 1871 by the young artist Fedor Vasilev, who died in 1873, aged 23. In a characteristic Russian paradox, spring is beginning but seems to bring no joy, just the misery of chilly flooding. A vast green and brown expanse, punctuated by two or three spindly, half-dead trees, fills a large canvas. Enormous glowering clouds rear over the land. And just to the right of centre, like two defeated saplings, a dark, indistinguishable man is leaning over a child, both humans bundled like bears against the cold. Some thaw. Or you can see Arkhip Kuindzhi's Landscape: The Steppe, from 1890, which pushes the idea of two enormous horizontals - ground and sky - almost to abstraction. Hardly anything can be distinguished in this picture. There are no humans, no animals. The green ground is one band of colour, and the grey-green sky is another, lying thickly on top of it. It looks like a verdant Rothko. Kuindzhi used vast canvases (only in America were landscape canvases as big as this), and the effect of the two long swipes of colour is both serene and monotonous. It is the visual equivalent of the aural monotony Chekhov writes about in his story The Steppe, the constant drone of insects that fills the empty land night and day. Landscape painting has a short history in Russia. The Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, the only painting school, traditionally insisted on historical subjects. Ilya Repin, the great realist painter of the 1880s and 1890s, recalled being ordered, as a student, to rub out landscape studies and replace them with endless copying of Poussin from the Hermitage. The norm was the kind of thing Tolstoy describes in Anna Karenina, when Vronsky and Anna visit, on their honeymoon, a Russian painter in Italy. The artist, Mikhailov, is working on a large study of Christ and Pilate, and Tolstoy wonderfully describes how he is alternately proud and disgusted by his own work: "He saw a well-painted (or even not so well-painted - he now saw clearly a heap of defects) repetition of the endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, Rubens, with the same soldiers and Pilate." But in 1863, 14 students at the academy had had enough of this antiquarianism and walked out, forming their own cooperative, which became a group known as The Wanderers, who travelled the country organising exhibitions (Repin and Levitan were their best-known affiliates). These dissidents had to fight the ingrained idea, in a highly ideological society, that landscape art wasn't really about anything, that it lacked a political point. The 1860s, the decade in which a real native landscape tradition began to take root, was dominated by the critical realism of critics such as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. Art was supposed to bear unflinching witness to Russia's suffering and potential majesty. Landscape painting, which doesn't seem to tell a story or deliver a message, didn't obviously fit the bill. Belinsky had championed Dead Souls as an example of properly engaged political art, thereby slighting the non-political aesthetic dimension of that work. Such ideological bullying on the part of critics was really a dry run for the much more menacing imperatives of Soviet Realism in the 1920s and 30s, when writers and artists of any aesthetic originality would fear for their lives. But landscape painting found a way around, or through, this pressure. Of course, landscape does tell a story, and artists such as Shishkin and Levitan were able to make their paintings of forests and roads emblematic and near-allegorical. Levitan's The Vladimirka Road of 1892, is the most famous example. A brown and green track stretches from the foreground of the canvas all the way to the back, and into infinite distance, with low horizon and sparse foliage. The emptiness is both oddly peaceful and quietly mournful. But the title tells a story as efficiently as that of any Victorian genre-painting: the Vladimirka Road was the main highway for prisoners on their way to Siberia. Levitan, an old friend of Chekhov's, had intended to accompany the writer on his momentous trip to the prison colony of Sakhalin. This painting was his contribution - the road, as he put it, "on which so many people died on their long walk to Siberia". Likewise, Vasili Polenov's The Burnt Forest and Arkhip Kuindzhi's The Forgotten Village use their titles as a kind of code, whereby we can read off the landscape the actual (usually melancholy) meaning. The Forgotten Village (1874) shows two blocks of colour, the brown of the earth and the mottled grey of the sky, and then introduces at the level of the horizon, almost as an afterthought, a few low little huts and a single tree. There are no humans anywhere. The Burnt Forest (1881) is full of charred and stripped tree trunks, which seem almost to be writhing in pain. You almost miss a lone figure, a peasant woman hunched over her basket, of a piece with the twisted upright forms of the forest. Polenov, who was deeply influenced by Turgenev, might have been thinking of that writer's description of a ruined forest in his story Death: "The bitter, snowless winter of 1840 had not spared my old friends, the oaks and the ash trees. Desiccated and naked, covered here and there with diseased leaf, they rose sadly above the young trees . . there were some that had fallen down completely and lay rotting like corpses." Turgenev's collection of stories, Sketches From A Hunter's Album, which first appeared as a book in 1852, had a great impact on landscape painting. The book is full of long, detailed descriptions of fields and woods and birds (as well, of course, as peasants and landowners). One of the excellent essays in the exhibition catalogue (by Sjeng Scheijen) reminds us that Turgenev collected Russian landscape art. In addition to Polenov, Turgenev took a great interest in Kuindzhi and Repin, and tried, without much success, to promote these artists in France. Repin's own interest tended towards Tolstoy, whom he painted several times; Chekhov thought Repin deserved the same kind of status in art that Tolstoy had found in literature. And it's true that Repin's epic scenes, such as the paintings of Cossack soldiers or men hauling barges on the banks of the Volga, have a Tolstoyan precision and love of the real. (Repin, probably the most famous artist of this period, is not represented in this exhibition because he was not a landscape painter.) Only in Russia, one feels, would art and literature have worked so naturally together. It was Russian nationalism that provided the glue of amity. Russian writers, painters and musicians felt that they were involved in a common project, that of renovating the country's soul. You could be a westerniser like Turgenev (ie, one who felt that Russian needed to turn towards Europe for its model and salvation), or a Slavophile like Dostoevsky (ie, one who felt Russia must find that salvation in its Slavic roots), and yet the common bond remained, which was how to perform spiritual resuscitation on the motherland. This produces the marvellous paradox in so much Russian art and writing of the second half of the 19th century, of a bashful nationalism: an eager patriotism that does not offend, but on the contrary attracts us because it is so full of anxiety and melancholia. These paintings manage to be both anti-idealistic and grand at the same time, at once flatly real and majestically spiritual. The best-known alliance of writer and artist is between Levitan and Chekhov, who were exactly contemporaneous (both born in 1860, though Levitan died four years before Chekhov, in 1900) and friends from teenage days. They deeply admired each other's work and in a way both were beneficiaries of the more relaxed ideological regime of the 1880s and 1890s. Artists and writers were, at last, being left alone to follow their own talents. Both Levitan and Chekhov tended towards the anti-didactic, the non-story, the delicious absence of obvious message. Levitan is now considered the finest Russian landscape painter of the period, and Chekhov rated him over Cezanne and Monet. "No one has managed to achieve the simplicity and purity of conception which Levitan achieved at the end of his life," he once said, "and I do not know if anyone else will ever achieve anything like it." Both Chekhov and Levitan approached their art spiritually (for all that Chekhov was an avowed non-believer), and both were interested in removing, as far as stylistically possible, the artist from his own production. So in Chekhov's prose the metaphors and similes used are more often than not the kinds of images that his characters - frequently unlettered peasants - might have come up with. A bittern, crying at night, sounds like "a cow complaining at being locked up all night in a shed". Chekhov said that the best description of the sea he had come across was in a schoolboy's notebook: "The sea was very large." Levitan, likewise, said that he wanted to "discover and locate in my own country the most simple, the most intimate, the most commonplace and the most emotionally moving, that which often causes a sense of melancholia". His painting of 1894, Above Eternal Peace, shows a church and churchyard, seen as if from an aerial perspective, set high above a beautiful, empty expanse of dimly-lit water. The crosses of the graves are like little trees or bushes, natural and inevitable parts of the serene landscape. Death is simply an element of the land and its cycles in this beautiful painting. His Quiet Haven of 1890 depicts a monastery, with a simple bridge leading to it from the foreground of the painting. The eye naturally follows the bridge towards the monastery, so we become helpless pilgrims wandering towards the haven of the picture's title. In Chekhov's novella Three Years, one of the protagonists, Yulia, sees this painting in a gallery: "Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the little path further and further, while all around was stillness . . . She felt lonely, and longed to walk on and on along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset, was the calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal." When she gets home, the art she has on her walls seems fussy, too ornate, over- complicated. Friends of Chekhov said he made people become simpler and more direct in his presence. The exhibition catalogue dutifully notes the explicit reference to Levitan's work in Three Years, but a closer approximation comes, to my mind, in one of Chekhov's last stories, The Bishop, in which, as it were, both Quiet Haven and Above Eternal Peace are blended into the one canvas: "As the bishop was getting into his carriage to go home, the whole moonlit garden was filled with the merry, beautiful ringing of the expensive, heavy bells. The white walls, the white crosses on the graves, the white birches and black shadows, and the distant moon in the sky, which stood directly over the convent, now seemed to live their own special life, incomprehensible, yet close to mankind." "Incomprehensible, yet close to mankind" - that gets nearer than anyone has to the special genius of Levitan, and indeed to the spirit of many of the paintings in this remarkable exhibition Russian Landscape In The Age Of Tolstoy is at the National Gallery, London, from June 23 to September 12.
[The Guardian] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
