20 June 2004 23:52
Review: Critics: Art: The Russians are coming: Who is Russia`s Monet or its Constable? A thrilling exhibition
celebrates the landscape painters of Tolstoy`s era - many shown for the first time here - who spurned classical
studies to bring alive their vast
ByLine: LAURA CUMMING
'RUSSIAN LANDSCAPES in the Age of Tolstoy', opening next week, is an amazing exhibition. It is also about a
century late in coming to this country. You may think that a show of paintings made a hundred years ago or so, rarely
reproduced, barely mentioned in the West and never seen outside Russia before now, could hardly fail surprise, at the
very least. But you could say much the same of all the Tsarist tinsel in the vaults.
The truth is that Russian landscape painting has been ignored over here, if it was ever even noticed in the first
place. We know about traditional Russian icons. We know about the brief brave flight of the avant-garde - Malevich,
Goncharova, Tatlin, Stepanova - and its terrible ending in purge and censorship, before the silt-up of Stalinist dross.
Occasionally we may even get a glimpse of a great portraitist such as Ilya Repin.
But who hears about Russia's Constable? Or Russia's Monet, painting grain stacks in the Steppes? And how
can it be that we have never seen the extraordinary works of Arkhip Kuindzhi, who starts out painting the Dniepr by
moonlight in the 1870s and ends up producing the abstract sublime about half a century in advance of America?
Not the least thrill of this show, of course, is in seeing the landscape of Russia itself, the largest country in the
world, stretching all the way from alpha to omega. The solid sea of the Steppes, the snows of Siberia, the
near-perpetual darkness of remotest Arkangel: we're more famil iar with the Equatorial rainforests than the
unthinkable expanses of Mother Russia.
Russia, painted, is sun-struck corn and fathomless ice, glowing turquoise at midnight. It is thousand-mile skies - a
bird vanishing in the bright air - and prodigious gorges: a canoe thrown down like a speck on the Volga. It is
impassable winter, silver birches glittering in spring, swallows darting low enough to cast their shadow-doubles on
summer paths and a perspective so vast you feel you can almost see the curve of the earth's surface.
The first painting in this show is by Ivan Shishkin, Russia's great space-man. It is meant to knock you out and
it does: a picture of a forest glade so vast you can stare and stare without feeling the frame fencing you in. Maybe
people have been here - there's a track, chopped stumps - but they aren't here now, and their presence feels
supernaturally irrelevant. Every tree has its own character, and the filtering golden light reveals more of the deep
interior than the eye can ordinarily take in.
Shishkin (1832-98) was affectionately known to his many students as 'the accountant of leaves', yet that
seems to get him all wrong. His art is not about numbering God's gifts so much as valuing their enchantment, and
done with a complex aesthetic. There isn't a more beautiful Christmas tree anywhere in art than his lone pine,
twinkling with frosted snow, raised high upon a peak above a landscape that rolls away like a deep blue ocean in the
moonlight. Shishkin can hardly have clambered to the mountain-top to see it but his vision speaks true. Just as his tree
is as solitary as one of Caspar David Friedrich's yearning monks, yet more transcendent and electrifying.
Russian landscape art, itself a 19th-century phenomenon, didn't start out like this. Up until 1850 or so, their
vistas looked like everybody else's: classical ruins, aspects of Naples and Rome. Even those who never travelled
took something from Italy. Aleksei Venetsianov, father of them all, is a kind of Russian Renaissance master; his
paintings of women harvesters among the corn stooks so gracious, ethereal and still they could be secular Madonnas. His
sleeping shepherd, unconsciously gesturing at the soft landscape behind him with an open palm, is like a Piero angel
asleep. Heaven on Earth, and more specifically Russia.
To put people in was to do the right thing, to be socially concerned, alive to the state of the Motherland. In 1861
the serfs were emancipated; surely they must now appear in the landscape? As one newspaper thundered, deplor ing the
'emptiness' of Shiskin's art, 'landscape without people is pointless'.
But this could go two ways. There is an exquisite painting here by Grigori Soroka, himself a serf, of a river in late
afternoon, when the fishing is slow and the waters so tranquil they exactly reflect the fishermen and the white onion
domes far in the distance. People at one with nature. Contrast this with Vasily Perov's Last Inn by the Town Gate ,
which shows the Russian equivalent of a village in the Wild West, blocked by snow, ravaged by wind, and with a woman
freezing on a sledge along with her starving horse. 'Farewell' reads the legend above the saloon door: pure,
sensational propaganda.
But as the genre grows stronger the people disappear. The wispy woman coming down the path in Isaak Levitan's
impressionistic Autumn Day was supplied by Nikolai Chekhov, brother of the writer. There are no figures at all in The
Rooks Have Returned - Russia's favourite painting, its cherished Haywain - only the returning rooks of the title.
But return is everything. Until you understand that this an encomium to Russian fortitude, the long wait for renewal and
the spring thaw, Aleksei Savrasov's rough and scrawny painting may seem unaccountably popular.
Landscape is patriotic; landscape painters political. Or so it seemed in the Soviet era, when a painter such as
Shishkin could apparently be treated like a proto-Socialist Realist. Of course there is something heroic about these
journeys into uncharted territory, rather like the American painters bringing back images of the wild frontier. But the
artists in this show are never just reporters, or patriots, like so many of their US counterparts. The best of them are
pioneering art.
And best of all is Kuindzhi, who died in 1910 and whose work runs all the way from Realism and Romanticism through
symbolism to the 20th century avant garde. Kuindzhi has a gallery of his own and deserves it for his The Birch Grove
alone - that mysteriously beautiful image of gleaming verticals and bright water, strangely bisected by light and
reflection, like both sides of The Looking Glass
Kuindzhi's most famous work, Moonlit Night on the Dniepr , was so luminous that people thought it must be lit
from behind. And even now a picture such as The North seems to knock the back right out of the usual stage-set of
landscape painting, opening out into space barely limited by any visible horizon. Kuindzhi went even further in 1890
with a canvas that is almost entirely white: just a span of pale green, quite uninflected, beneath veil upon veil of
glowing light. Total reality, and total abstraction, in a painting simply called Landscape .
[The Observer] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
