Exhibitions, such as that of Tretyakov in the Russian Museum, also played an important role in the development of Russian art. At the end of the 19th century, the artistic status of icons had been in eclipse for approximately two hundred years, even though they were cherished as objects of religious veneration. During that time, many of them had been damaged, inappropriately repainted, or obscured by grime.
In 1904, Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity was restored to its full glory, and in 1913 a splendid exhibition of restored and cleaned icons was held in Moscow to mark the millennium of the Romanov dynasty. As a result, the rediscovered colours and stylistic idiosyncrasies of icon painting were explored and exploited by a number of painters in the first decade or two of the 20th century. Similarly, when Diaghilev mounted a huge exhibition of 18th-century portrait painting at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg in 1905, it resulted in a noticeable revival of interest in portraiture and in Russia’s artistic heritage as a whole.
International exhibitions (like the ones organised by the Golden Fleece magazine in 1908 and 1909), together with foreign travel and visits by foreign artists to Russia, allowed Russian painters to become acquainted with movements such as Impressionism, Symbolism, Futurism, and Cubism. What is particularly fascinating is to see how artists as diverse as Igor Grabar, Mikhail Vrubel, Marc Chagall, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova adapted these influences and used them to create their own art – often incorporating Russian elements in the process.
The First Master Of Russian Painting
Girl with Peaches. Portrait of Vera Mamontova, 1887.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 85 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Portico with a Balustrade, 1903.
Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 63 cm.
The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
To assess the creative endeavour of a major artist is to ask what makes him great, what is his main contribution to art? The answers to that question may vary widely. Some artists discover new facets of life, facets previously inaccessible to art. Others develop an entirely new approach to the painting of their time and blaze a trail to new painterly techniques. Still others consummate a whole trend in the evolution of art. Valentin Alexandrovich Serov, who stands apart in the Russian painting of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was all three – a great reformer, a pace-setter, and an artist who linked two important periods in Russian painting.
Serov began his career in the 1880s, when the realist artists of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions were at the pinnacle of their success. His first officially exhibited pictures, Girl with Peaches and Sunlit Girl, were done in 1887–1888. Several years earlier, his teacher Ilya Repin, an active member of the Society, had displayed his Religious Procession in Kursk Province, followed by the canvases They Did Not Expect Him and Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan. The foremost Russian history painter of the time, Vasily Surikov, completed his most outstanding creation, Boyarina Morozova, in the same year that Serov produced his Girl with Peaches.
When, on the other hand, the artist was painting his last masterpieces, The Rape of Europa and Odysseus and Nausicaa, Russian art was striving, not to recreate real-life scenes, but to paraphrase life, seeing in the artistic image a self-sustained artistic reality. It was now concerned not so much with analysing the relationship between man and society as with finding a new symbolism, a new mythology, and poetry to reflect the modern world.
This transition to a new set of creative principles that were to become the cornerstone of 20th-century art spanned the end of the 19th and the dawn of the 20th century, and Serov was fated to be the artist who carried that transition through. It can even be said that the road travelled by Russian art in the course of twenty-five years – from the late 1880s to the early 1910s – was the road from Girl with Peaches to the Portrait of Ida Lvovna Rubinstein.
Without violating any of his teachers’ traditions, the young artist initiated a new method which was to evolve further in the work of most of the artists of his generation. On that road he was sometimes overtaken and even outstripped by others. When this happened, Serov would size up those who had forged ahead, evaluating them soberly, often sceptically. But the scepticism would pass, and he would feel obliged to take up his brush again to keep from falling behind the times. Serov did not want to stand in anyone’s way; he was deeply conscious of his duty to Russian painting, to his school, his teachers, and his pupils. He spurned the privileges usually accorded to a master. He was no master, he was a toiler; in fact, to a certain degree, he was even a pupil. It was by dint of great effort that he lived up to his role as a leader. Serov was an artist who honed his extraordinary talent on the whetstone of prodigious industry.
Serov was not alone in his search for new trends in art. His life was marked by a long-standing friendship with Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, Alexander Benois, and other artists from the World of Art group. With many of them he shared common creative interests. This is especially true of Vrubel, with whom the artist was closely associated in his youth.
Winter in Abramtsevo. The Church (study), 1886.
Oil on canvas, 20 × 15.5 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Pond in Abramtsevo (study), 1886.
Oil on wood, 34.5 × 24.5 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Autumn Evening. Domotkanovo, 1886.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 71 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The two studied together and collectively dreamed of steering new courses in art. Their aspirations, however, did not entirely coincide. Vrubel broke with the traditions of the Itinerants and made an abrupt and unhesitating turn in another direction – to Symbolism, to a new style of painting, thereby dooming himself to temporary isolation. Vrubel developed rapidly, changing to another manner with the resolve of a genius, a true revolutionary in art. Serov, on the other hand, proceeded cautiously, weighing every step along the difficult road ahead before finally combining the old with the new.
Konstantin Korovin was a close friend of Serov’s in the 1880s and 1890s, and at the beginning of the 20th century he became his colleague on the staff of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. To the end of his days, though, Korovin never once stepped beyond the principles that he and Serov had evolved together. This was not the case with Serov, who outgrew these principles and went on to new discoveries.
The very juxtaposition of the three names, Vrubel, Serov, and Korovin – artists who, though bound by ties of friendship, were extremely dissimilar in their creative aspirations – reveals the complexity of Russia’s art scene at the turn of the century. Their various paths of development do not sufficiently reflect all the diversity of trends or personalities involved. Serov’s teacher Repin, after achieving unqualified success in the 1880s, attained new heights in the early 1900s with his huge group portrait of The State Council in Formal Session and a series of brilliant studies for it.
In the 1890s, landscape painting reached its zenith in the works of the Itinerants, with Isaac Levitan summing up its evolution, as it were, and at the same time opening new horizons in the art of painting. This was also a time when new trends and groups began to crop up and either coexisted or replaced one another; the World of Art, for example, was followed by the Blue Rose group and later by the Jack of Diamonds group. All these activities chronologically coincided with the creative endeavour of Serov.
It was a versatile endeavour in that its various component parts shared an affinity with one trend or another. Above all, the Moscow painters who began their move towards Impressionism back in the 1880s admired his early sunlit canvases, his rural landscapes of the 1890s, his