1. Art of Russia at the end of the 20th century. The last decade of the 20th century in Russia was full of political and economic events that radically changed the situation in the country. The collapse of the Union in 1991 and a change in political course, the transition to market relations and a clear orientation towards the Western model of economic development, and finally the weakening, up to the complete abolition, of ideological control - all this in the early 1990s contributed to the fact that the cultural environment began to change rapidly. The liberalization and democratization of the country contributed to the development and establishment of new trends and directions in the national art. The evolution of art in the 1990s in Russia takes place with the emergence of trends inherent in postmodernism, with the emergence of a new generation of young artists working in such areas as, conceptualism, computer graphics, neoclassicism related to the development of computer technology in Russia. Originating from classical eclecticism, "New Russian neoclassicism" became a "multi-faceted diamond", combining various trends that did not belong to the "classics" before the era of modernism. Neoclassicism- This is a direction in art in which artists revive the classical traditions of painting, graphics, sculpture, but at the same time they actively use the latest technologies. British historian and art theorist Edward Lucy Smith called Russian neoclassicism "the first striking phenomenon of Russian culture that influenced the world artistic process after Kazimir Malevich." Neoclassicism demanded a different attitude to antiquity than that of the classicists. The historical view of Greek culture made ancient works not an absolute, but a concrete historical ideal, therefore, imitation of the Greeks acquired a different meaning: in the perception of ancient art, it was not its normativity that came to the fore, but freedom, the conditionality of rules that would later become the canon, the real life of the people . D.V. Sarabyanov finds neoclassicism a kind of "complication" of modernity. With the same probability, neoclassicism can be considered both late modern and an independent trend. In the work of the “new artists” there is no pure modernity or separate neoclassicism, they always act interconnectedly, the artists of the new academy combined several trends in the visual arts at once: avant-garde, postmodernism, classicism in the “collage space”. The works of the "new artists" are eclectic, combining computer graphics, etching, painting and photography. Artists digitized finished works, selected the necessary fragments and created collages, masterfully restoring the costumes and decor of antiquity. The combination of traditional methods with the capabilities of computer graphics programs has expanded the creative potential of artists. Collages were assembled from the scanned material, artistic special effects were applied to them, deformed, creating illusory compositions. The most prominent representatives of St. Petersburg neoclassicism in the early 1990s were O. Toberluts, E. Andreeva, A. Khlobystin, O. Turkina, A. Borovsky, I. Chechot, A. Nebolsin, E. Sheff. Neoclassicism Toberluts is one of the manifestations of romanticism. Her works embody the feelings of a person, dreams, nobility, something enthusiastic and turned to an unrealizable ideal. . The artist herself becomes the heroine of her works. Stylistically, O. Toberluts' work can be defined as neoclassicism, passed through the postmodern consciousness, as an eclectic world, which depicts ancient temples, Renaissance interiors, Dutch windmills and costumes from designer K. Goncharov as a touch of modernity. The limitless possibilities of computer graphics make the works of O.Tobreluts fantastic and supernatural. With the help of computer technology E.Sheff returns to ancient Greece, then to ancient Rome, creating images of ancient mythology in his collages. In series "Myths of Ludwig" the artist used photographs of Greek sculptures, architectural structures, superimposing the effects of antiquity on them. With the help of computer technology, the artist restores the originality of the Colosseum, conducting exciting excursions around it. Digital painting Shutov represents the emotional equivalent of his many hobbies. It contains both Greek classics and echoes of ethnographic research, as well as elements of youth subculture. Thus, it can be noted that the end of the 20th century was a turning point not only in the political and economic life of Russia, but also in art. In the 1990s, a powerful trend in the visual arts "new Russian neoclassicism" was founded. The development of computer technologies in Russia expanded the creative potential of artists, new artists, using new technologies, created classical works. The main thing is not technique and technology, but aesthetics. Modern art can also be classical. 2. The art of Russia at the beginning of the 21st century. A feature of the fine arts at the turn of the 20th - 21st centuries is that it became free from censorship oppression, from the influence of the state, but not from a market economy. If in Soviet times professional artists were provided with a package of social guarantees, their paintings were purchased for national exhibitions and galleries, but now they can only rely on their own strength. But Russian painting has not died and turned into a semblance of Western European and American art, it continues to develop on the basis of Russian traditions. Contemporary art is exhibited by contemporary art galleries, private collectors, commercial corporations, state art organizations, contemporary art museums, art studios or by the artists themselves in the artist-run space. Contemporary artists receive financial support through grants, awards and prizes, and also receive funds from the sale of their work. Russian practice is somewhat different in this respect from Western practice. Museums, Biennials, festivals and fairs of contemporary art are gradually becoming tools for attracting capital, investment in the tourism business or part of government policy. Private collectors provide big influence to the whole system of modern art. In Russia, one of the largest collections of contemporary art is held by the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art in St. Petersburg. Trends in contemporary art: Nonspectacular art- a trend in contemporary art that rejects spectacle and theatricality. An example of such art is the performance of the Polish artist Pavel Althamer "Script Outline", at the exhibition "Manifesta" in 2000. In Russia, he offered his own version of nonspectacular art Anatoly Osmolovsky. Street art(English) street art- street art) - fine art, a distinctive feature of which is a pronounced urban style. The main part of street art is graffiti (otherwise spray art), but it cannot be considered that street art is graffiti. Street art also includes posters (non-commercial), stencils, various sculptural installations, etc. In street art, every detail, trifle, shadow, color, line is important. The artist creates his own stylized logo - a "unique sign" and depicts it on parts of the urban landscape. The most important thing in street art is not to appropriate territory, but to involve the viewer in a dialogue and show a different plot program. The last decade marks the diversity of directions that street art chooses. Admiring the older generation, young writers are aware of the importance of developing their own style. In this way, new branches are emerging, predicting a rich future for the movement. New diverse forms of street art sometimes surpass in scope everything that has been created before. Aerography - one of the painting techniques of the fine arts, using an airbrush as a tool for applying liquid or powdered dye using compressed air to any surface. A spray paint can also be used. Due to the widespread use of airbrushing and the emergence of a large number of different paints and compositions, airbrushing has received a new impetus for development. Now airbrushing is used to create paintings, photo retouching, taxidermy, modeling, textile painting, wall painting, body art, nail painting, painting souvenirs and toys, painting dishes. It is often used for drawing pictures on cars, motorcycles, other equipment, in printing, in design, etc. Thanks to a thin layer of paint and the ability to smoothly spray it on the surface, it is possible to achieve excellent decorative effects, such as smooth transitions colors, volume, photographic realism of the resulting image, imitation of a rough texture with an ideal surface smoothness.
Topics and questions seminars;
Topic 1. Basic concepts of art history and art history.
Questions:
1. The problem of classifying arts.
2. The concept of "work of art". Origin and task artwork. Work and art.
3. Essence, goals, tasks of art.
4.Functions and meaning of art.
5. The concept of "style". Artistic style and its time.
6. Classification of arts.
7. The history of the emergence and formation of art criticism.
Issues for discussion:
1. There are 5 definitions of art. What is characteristic of each of them? Which definition do you follow? Can you formulate your definition of art?
2. What is the purpose of art?
3. How can you define a work of art? How do "work of art" and "work of art" coexist? Explain the process of the emergence of a work of art (according to I. Ten). What is the task of a work of art (according to P.P. Gnedich)?
4. List the 4 main functions of art (according to I.P. Nikitina) and four
possible understanding of the meaning of art.
5. Define the meaning of the concept of "style". What styles of European art do you know? What is "artistic style", "artistic space"?
6. List and give a brief description of the types of art: spatial, temporal, space-time and spectacular arts.
7. What is the subject of art history?
8. What do you think is the role of museums, exhibitions, galleries, libraries for studying works of art history?
9. Features of ancient thought about art: Surviving information about the first examples of literature on art ("Canon" by Polykleitos, treatises by Duris, Xenocrates). "Topographical" direction in literature about art: "Description of Hellas" by Pausanias. Description of works of art by Lucian. The Pythagorean concept of "cosmos" as a harmonious whole, subject to the laws of "harmony and number" and its significance for the beginnings of the theory of architecture. The idea of order and proportion in architecture and urban planning. The images of the ideal city in the writings of Plato (the sixth book of the Laws, the dialogue Critias) and Aristotle (the seventh book of the Politics). Understanding Art in Ancient Rome. "Natural History" by Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) as the main source of information on the history of ancient art. Treatise of Vitruvius: a systematic exposition of classical architectural theory.
10. The fate of ancient traditions in the Middle Ages and features of medieval ideas about art: Aesthetic views of the Middle Ages (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas), the leading aesthetic idea: God is the source of beauty (Augustine) and its significance for artistic theory and practice. The idea of "prototype". Features of medieval literature on art. Practical-technological, prescription manuals: “Guide of painters” from Mount Afaon Dionysius Furnagrafiot, “On the colors and arts of the Romans” by Heraclius, “Schedula” (Schedula - Student) by Theophilus. Description of architectural monuments in chronicles and lives of saints.
11. Renaissance as a turning point in the history of the development of European art and art history. New attitude to antiquity (the study of the monuments of antiquity). The development of a secular worldview and the emergence of experimental science. Formation of a tendency towards historical and critical interpretation of the phenomena of art: "Comments" by Lorenzo Ghiberti Treatises on special issues - urban planning (Filaret), proportions in architecture (Francesco di Giorgio), perspective in painting (Piero dela Francesca). Theoretical understanding of the Renaissance turning point in the development of art and the experience of humanistic study of the ancient heritage in the treatises of Leon Batista Alberti (“On the Statue”, 1435, “On Painting”, 1435-36, “On Architecture”), Leonardo da Vinci (“Treatise on Painting” , published posthumously), Albrecht Dürer (Four Books on Human Proportions, 1528). Criticism of the architectural theory of Vitruvius in "Ten Books on Architecture" (1485) by Leon Baptiste Alberti. Vitruvian "Academy of Valor" and its activities in the study and translation of the work of Vitruvius. Giacomo da Vignola's treatise "The Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture" (1562). Four Books on Architecture (1570) by Andrea Palladio is a classic epilogue in the history of Renaissance architecture. The role of Palladio in the development of the architectural ideas of baroque and classicism. Palladio and Palladianism.
12. The main stages of the formation of historical art history in the New Age: from Vasari to Winckelmann: "Lives of the most prominent painters, sculptors and architects" Giorgio Vasari (1550, 1568) as a milestone work in the history of the formation of art criticism. "The Book of Artists" by Karel Van Mander as a continuation of Vasari's biographies based on the material of Netherlandish painting.
13. Thinkers of the 18th century on the problems of style formation in art, on artistic methods, the place and role of the artist in society: Rationalism in art history. The classic theory of Nicolas Poussin. The theoretical program of classicism in the "Poetic Art" by Nicolas Buallo (1674) and "Conversations about the most famous painters, old and new" by A. Feliben (1666-1688).
14. Age of Enlightenment (18th century) and theoretical and methodological problems of art. Formation national schools within the general theory of art. Development of art criticism in France. The role of the Salons in French artistic life. Reviews of the Salons as the leading forms of critical literature on the fine arts. Disputes about the tasks of art criticism (evaluation of creativity or education of the public). Features of German art history. Contribution to the theory of fine arts by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Treatise "Laocoön" (1766) and the problem of the boundaries of painting and poetry. Introduction of the concept of "fine arts" instead of "fine arts" (shifting the emphasis from beauty to truth and highlighting the figurative-realistic function of art). The significance of the activities of Johann Joachim Winckelmann for the development of the historical science of art. Winckelmann's concept of ancient art and the periodization of its development.
15. Origins of Russian thought about art. Information about artists and artistic monuments in Russian medieval chronicles and epistolary sources. Raising questions about art in the social and political life of the 16th century. (Stoglavy Cathedral of 1551 and other cathedrals) as evidence of the awakening of critical thinking and the struggle of various ideological trends.
16. A radical change in Russian art of the 17th century: the formation of the beginnings of a secular worldview and the first acquaintance with European forms of artistic culture. Formation of artistic and theoretical thought. Chapter "On iconography" in the "Life" of Avvakum. "Essay on Art" by Joseph Vladimirov (1665-1666) and "Word to the Curious Icon Painting" by Simon Ushakov (1666-1667) are the first Russian works on the theory of art.
17. Active formation of new secular forms of culture in the 18th century. Notes
J. von Stehlin is the first attempt to create a history of Russian art.
18. New romantic understanding of art in critical articles by K.N. Batyushkova, N.I. Gnedich, V. Kuchelbeker, V.F. Odoevsky, D.V. Venevitinova, N.V. Gogol.
19. Art History of the Late 19th - 20th Centuries: Attempts to Synthesize the Achievements of the Formal School with the Concepts of Its Critics - "structural science" of artistic styles. Semiotic approach in art history. Features of the semiotic study of works of fine art in the works of Yu.M. Lotman, S.M. Daniel, B.A. Uspensky. The variety of methods for studying art in modern domestic science. Principles of analysis of a work of art and a problematic approach to the study of the history of art in the works of M. Alpatov (“Artistic problems of the art of Ancient Greece”, “Artistic problems of the Italian Renaissance”). Synthesis of methodological approaches (formal stylistic, iconographic, iconological, sociological) by V. Lazarev. Comparative-historical method of research in the works of D. Sarabyanov (“Russian painting of the 19th century among European schools. The experience of comparative research”). Systematic approach to art and its features.
1. Alekseev V.V. What is art? About how a painter, graphic artist and sculptor depict the world. – M.: Art, 1991.
2. Valeri P. About art. Collection. – M.: Art, 1993.
3. Vipper B.R. Introduction to the historical study of art. – M.: Visual arts, 1985.
4.Vlasov V.G. Styles in art. - St. Petersburg: 1998.
5.Zis A.Ya. Kinds of art. – M.: Knowledge, 1979.
6.Kon-Wiener. History of Fine Arts Styles. - M .: Svarog and K, 1998.
7. Melik-Pashaev A.A. Modern dictionary-reference book on art. – M.: Olimp – AST, 2000.
8. Janson H.V. Fundamentals of art history. – M.: Art, 2001.
Theme 2. Art of the Ancient World. Art of the era of the primitive communal system and the Ancient East.
Questions:
1. Periodization of the art of primitive society. Characteristics of the primitive art of the era: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze.
2. The concept of syncretism in primitive art, its examples.
3. General laws and principles of the art of the Ancient East.
4. Art of Ancient Mesopotamia.
5. The art of the ancient Sumerians.
6. Art of ancient Babylonia and Assyria.
Issues for discussion:
1. Give a brief overview of the periodization of primitive art. What are the features of the art of each period?
2. Describe the main features of primitive art: syncretism, fetishism, animism, totemism.
3. Compare the canons in the depiction of a person in the art of the ancient East (Egypt and Mesopotamia).
4. What are the features of the fine arts of Ancient Mesopotamia?
5. Tell us about the architecture of Mesopotamia on the example of specific monuments:
the ziggurat of Etemenniguru in Ur and the ziggurat of Etemenanki in New Babylon.
6. Tell us about the sculpture of Mesopotamia on the example of specific monuments: the walls along the Procession Road, the Ishtar Gate, the reliefs from the Ashurnasirpal Palace in
7. What is the theme of the sculptural relief images of Mesopotamia?
8. What was the name of the first Babylonian monuments of architecture? What was their
appointment?
9. What is the peculiarity of the cosmogony of the Sumero-Akkadian culture?
10. List the achievements in the art of the Sumero-Akkadian civilization.
1. Vinogradova N.A. Traditional art of the East. - M.: Art, 1997.
2. Dmitrieva N.A. Short story arts. Issue. 1: From ancient times to the 16th century. Essays. – M.: Art, 1985.
3. Art of the Ancient East (Monuments of world art). – M.: Art, 1968.
4. Art of Ancient Egypt. Painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts. – M.: Visual arts, 1972.
5. Art Ancient World. – M.: 2001.
6. History of art. The first civilizations - Barcelona-Moscow: OSEANO - Beta-Service, 1998.
7. Monuments of world art. Issue III, first series. Art of the Ancient East. - M.: Art, 1970.
8.Pomerantseva N.A. Aesthetic foundations of the art of ancient Egypt. – M.: Art, 1985.
9. Stolyar A.D. Origin of fine arts. – M.: Art, 1985.
Nowadays, designers are not considered artisans, but in the past, eminent craftsmen looked down on artists who worked in this area. Ilya Repin wrote: "To make carpets that caress the eye, weave lace, engage in fashion - in a word, in every way interfere with God's gift with scrambled eggs." Over time, the attitude towards fashion designers has changed - Kultura.RF tells how Russian artists became trendsetters.
Oriental motives
Leon Bakst. Costume design for the ballet "Narcissus" for the role of the Bacchae. 1911. Photo: porusski.me
Leon Bakst. Costume design for the ballet Cleopatra. 1910. Photo: artchive.ru
Leon Bakst. Costume design for the ballet "Carnival" for the role of Estrella. 1910. Photo: artchive.ru
Leon Bakst is best known as a painter and theater designer. However, it was he who first proved that the work of a costume designer is worthy of attention and admiration.
Performances by the Sergei Diaghilev Ballet Company in Paris in the late 1900s and early 1910s were overwhelmingly successful and popular. Exotic scenery and costumes created by Bakst produced a "hypnotic effect" on the audience. And from the theater stage, his ideas migrated to the auditorium. The artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky wrote: “The sophistication of bright colors, the luxury of turbans with feathers and fabrics woven with gold, the lush abundance of ornaments and decorations - all this was so amazing, it was so in line with the thirst for something new that it was perceived by life. [Charles Frederic] Worth and [Jeanne] Paquin - trendsetters in Parisian fashion - began to propagate Bakst".
Colored stockings, shoes decorated with rhinestones, shawls, scarves, eye-catching jewelry (long strings of fake pearls, jewelry with large stones, numerous bracelets on arms and legs), turbans, colored wigs, bright decorative cosmetics and much more - the fashion of the 1910s was formed under the huge influence of Bakst and his "oriental" works.
Soon, Leon Bakst began to influence European fashion from within the industry: he created sketches of costumes for fashion houses, drew patterns for fabrics and, as the painter Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin recalled, "dressed Paris with carnivorous oriental silks." Paul Poiret, one of the most prominent couturiers of that era, denied that he was inspired by the works of Bakst, but he was the first to offer cooperation to the Russian artist. It was during this period that Poiret's color scheme became unexpectedly bright - and one can see the influence of Bakst in this. In the future, Bakst and Poiret worked in similar directions, and many fashionable novelties were attributed to both of them: for example, harem pants as women's evening wear, extremely narrow "lame skirts" and multi-layered outfits.
Leon Bakst did a lot for world fashion and did not consider it unworthy of an artist. Shortly before his death, in an interview, he said: “There is no great and small in art. Everything is art".
avant-garde fashion
Natalia Goncharova. Costume design for Leonid Myasin's ballet "Liturgy" - Seraphim. 1915. Photo: avangardism.ru
Natalia Goncharova at work on a costume sketch. 1916. Photo: theartnewspaper.ru
Natalia Goncharova. Costume design for the ballet "On Borisfen" to music by Sergei Prokofiev. 1932. Photo: theartnewspaper.ru
The works of Natalia Goncharova today are considered the most expensive among all women artists, and she herself has become the most famous Russian artist abroad. The great-grandniece of Alexander Pushkin's wife, Goncharova, initially intended to become a sculptor. However, the artist Mikhail Larionov, whom she later married, advised her to take up painting—and Goncharova soon turned to arts and crafts.
In 1913 Alexandre Benois, painter, critic and art critic, wrote in his diary: “Goncharova's series of fashions is charming. The colors of these dresses are artistic, not cloying. Why am I only now learning that the artist has devoted her energies to updating women's clothing, why don't the famous fashionistas of Moscow go to her and learn from her? Fashionistas were late: Sergei Diaghilev invited Goncharova to Paris to work together on the scenery of the Russian Seasons, and the artist never returned to her homeland. It is believed that before leaving for France, Goncharova sold sketches of outfits to the famous craftswoman Nadezhda Lamanova, whose atelier was located not far from the salon, where the first exhibition of the artist was held in the same 1913.
In exile, Natalia Goncharova continued to collaborate with magazines and fashion houses - many sketches have been preserved. The Paris Fashion Museum also stores the outfits from Goncharova. Unfortunately, neither the names of fashion designers nor the names of those who ordered these works are known today, but it is obvious that bright decorative works one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde could not but attract attention in the 1910s. Even the appearance of Natalia Goncharova herself and her style - seeming carelessness and simplicity - were avant-garde and somewhat ahead of their time.
Accessibility and originality
Vera Mukhina. Costume design, Atelier magazine, 1923. Photo: fashionblog.com
Vera Mukhina and Natalia Lamanova. Sketch of a home dress from a headscarf. Photo: nlamanova.ru
Vera Mukhina. Sketch of a bud dress. Cover of Atelier magazine, 1923. Photo: casual-info.ru
The author of the legendary statue "Worker and Collective Farm Woman" Vera Mukhina was engaged not only in monumental art. She drew a lot, and even before the revolution she created a number of sketches for theatrical costumes and decorations for productions of the Chamber Theater, which, unfortunately, did not take place. And in the 1920s, she devoted a lot of time to applied art, including the creation of clothes.
The first in the USSR center for modeling everyday costumes, the "Modern Costume Workshops", the costume section of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences - Mukhina took an active part in everything. In 1923, the Atelier magazine was published - the first Soviet fashion magazine. One of his most striking models was the model Mukhina, dressed in a fluffy bud skirt and a red hat with wide brim. The sketches of the artist were also published in the Krasnaya Niva magazine.
Soon Vera Mukhina met Nadezhda Lamanova. In 1925, they jointly released "Art in everyday life" - an album with spectacular, but practical models that every Soviet woman could repeat at home. Lamanova acted as a theorist in this collaboration, and Mukhina embodied her ideas on paper. Then they took part in the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts and Art Industry in Paris. Modest models from the simplest materials with folk-style trim competed with luxurious outfits from European fashion designers - and very successfully: Mukhina and Lamanova received the Grand Prix "for national identity combined with a modern fashion trend."
In 1933, the Moscow House of Fashion Models was opened, and Vera Mukhina became a member of its artistic council. As Leon Bakst noted in his time, “artists are ahead of fashionistas.”
New clothing concept and unisex
Alexander Rodchenko. Varvara Stepanova in a dress made of fabric according to her own sketch, produced at the First Cotton Printing Factory. Photo: jewish-museum.ru
Alexander Rodchenko. Lilya Brik in a scarf with Varvara Stepanova's print. 1924. Photo: jewish-museum.ru
Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. 1920s Photo: jewish-museum.ru
The artist Varvara Stepanova is usually remembered together with her husband Alexander Rodchenko, an outstanding artist and photographer. However, the "violent Stepanova", as Vladimir Mayakovsky called her, was not only the wife and ally of the famous author. "The Amazon of the Russian avant-garde", a bright representative of constructivism, was able, as required by this direction, to abandon art for the sake of art. Or rather, forced him to serve ordinary people.
In 1922, the First Cotton Printing Factory opened in Moscow. Artists came to the aid of the production workers. Varvara Stepanova and her friend Lyubov Popova became textile designers and started designing prints for fabrics. Staples, chintzes, flannelettes, crepe de chines adorned drawings with clearly defined contours, abstract forms, non-objective Suprematist ornaments. In just two years of work at the factory, Stepanova developed 150 sketches, 20 of which were printed.
Alexander Rodchenko. Students in sportswear designed by Stepanova. 1924. Photo: avangardism.ru
Varvara Stepanova. Sketch of a tracksuit. 1923. Photo: avangardism.ru
Alexander Rodchenko. Evgenia Sokolova (Zhemchuzhnaya) demonstrates a tracksuit designed by Varvara Stepanova. 1924. Photo: casual-info.ru
At the same time, the artist taught at the textile department of the Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops. Stepanova also turned out to be a brilliant fashion theorist, developing a new approach to clothing. In the article "Today's suit is overall" she wrote: “Fashion, psychologically reflecting life, habits, aesthetic taste, gives way to clothes organized for work in various branches of labor,<...>clothes that can be shown only in the process of working in it, outside of real life it does not represent a self-contained value, a special kind of “works of art”. Stepanova suggested replacing decorativeness and embellishment with convenience and expediency. The new Soviet man needed new appropriate clothes. The tracksuits she designed with geometric patterns were comfortable and suited both men and women equally.
The LEF magazine even wrote about Popova: “Days and nights she sat over drawings for calico, trying in a single creative act to combine the requirements of the economy, the laws of external design and the mysterious taste of the Tula peasant woman. No amount of compliments or flattering offers could seduce her. She categorically refused any work for the exhibition, for the museum. “Guessing” a calico was incomparably more attractive for her than “pleasing” the aesthetic gentlemen from pure art..
Popova's geometric ornaments, drawn with a compass and a ruler, seemed at first unusual, and many considered them unsuitable for women's clothing. However, fabrics with new patterns were such a great success that in the summer of 1924, during the "Congress of Peoples" in Moscow, the samples were sold out "up to a arshin."
And in 1925, an international exhibition was held in Paris, the same one where the works of Vera Mukhina and Nadezhda Lamanova received the Grand Prix. Lyubov Popova also participated in it. The designer of the Soviet pavilion, Alexander Rodchenko, wrote to his wife, Varvara Stepanova: Textile drawings by Lyubov Popova 60, and yours 4 ". True, Popova herself never found out about this - she died a year before the exhibition.
The era of Peter I is of fundamental importance for all Russian art of modern times. Russia in all areas, including in the field of cultural construction, had to stand on a par with Western European countries. Peter understood the great importance for Russia of mastering the advanced artistic experience of the West. Works of Western European masters were purchased, pensioner trips were arranged at the state expense of Russian masters to study in Europe, foreign artists were invited to work and train Russian masters in Russia.
I. N. Nikitin. Portrait of an outdoor hetman. 1720s Canvas, oil.
Noting the changes in Russian art, we must not forget that they were based on a great historical heritage, were prepared by the previous course of development of artistic culture. In the art of the XVII century. new features have already appeared, for example, the construction of palaces, the genre of portraiture in painting began to be determined, but they were most fully revealed at the beginning of the 18th century. National traditions also decisively influenced the nature of the work of many foreign masters who worked in Russia.
A. M. MATVEEV Auto-answer with wife. Canvas, oil.
The essence of Peter's transformations in the field of culture is its "secularization". This means that art becomes secular, it ceases to serve the interests of only a religious cult. The very composition of art is being transformed, new types of artistic activity appear, genres, and finally, the pictorial language is changing. The basis of painting is observation, the study of the forms of earthly nature and man, and not following canonized patterns, as in the Middle Ages.
Among the genres of painting, starting from the time of Peter the Great and throughout the 18th century. the leading becomes a portrait. The work of two Russian portrait painters - I. N. Nikitin and A. M. Matveev marks the birth of the psychological portrait itself.
V. L. Borovikovsky. Portrait of A. G. and V. G. Gagarin. 1802. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow
Civil and palace construction of the Petrine era is a bright new period in the history of Russian architecture.
Subordinate to the tasks of practical life arrangement, art in Peter's time was understood as a high degree of skill - "arts" in any business, whether it be painting, sculpture or making a model of a ship or watch mechanisms. The fusion of art with technology, science and craft determines the special artistic and engineering character of the culture of the Petrine era. Not only the state, but also the largest cultural action of Peter I was the founding of St. Petersburg - the new capital of the young Russian Empire, which is becoming the center of new art.
A. G. Venetsianov. At the harvest. Summer. 1820s Canvas, oil. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
Art begins to serve the tasks of decorating life and everyday life, acquires, along with a monumental scope, a festive, magnificent and decorative character. These features were most vividly and perfectly expressed in the work of the great architect VV Rastrelli - the builder of the Grand Palace in Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg - brilliant examples of the Baroque style.
Second half of the 18th century - the time of a powerful brilliant flowering of Russian art of modern times. The time for apprenticeship with Europe is over. Established in 1757, the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts becomes a forge of national artistic personnel. The system has been streamlined art education, contacts with the European cultural world have become more focused. The beginning of the activity of the Academy of Arts coincided with the establishment of classicism - a style that opposed the decorative splendor and extravagance of the Baroque with strict logic, reasonable clarity and proportion, which are rediscovered in classical works of ancient art and the Renaissance. In architecture, this is the time of the activity of such outstanding architects as V.I. Bazhenov - the author of the Pashkov house in Moscow, M.F. Kazakov - the builder of the Senate building in the Moscow Kremlin and many public and private buildings in Moscow, I.E. which built the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg, C. Cameron - the creator of a magnificent palace and landscape gardening ensemble in Pavlovsk near St. Petersburg. The rise of domestic sculpture in the work of F. G. Gordeev, I. P. Martos, M. I. Kozlovsky, F. F. Shchedrin is also associated with the era of classicism. The portrait sculpture of F. I. Shubin is distinguished by exceptional psychological insight, courage and flexibility of artistic techniques, alien to any conventional schemes. Evidence of the maturity of Russian art, achieved in the second half of the 18th century, is the diversity of creative individuals, which is reflected, for example, in the difference in the artistic style of the two largest masters of pictorial portraiture - F. S. Rokotov and D. G. Levitsky. Levitsky's painting is full of brilliance, intoxication with the visible beauty of the material world, captivates with the fullness of life, the amazing variety of recreated human types, the richness of emotional intonations - solemnity, grace, slyness, pride, coquetry, etc. Rokotov in the best portraits of the 1770s. appears as a master of intimate characteristics, manifested in the nuances and shades of facial expressions, mysteriously flickering from the dusk of picturesque backgrounds. The work of V. L. Borovikovsky, which completed the brilliant flowering of portrait art in the 18th century, was marked by the influence of the ideas and moods of sentimentalism.
F. S. Rokotov. Portrait of A. P. Struiskaya (detail). 1772. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
With the onset of the 19th century significant changes are taking place in Russian art. The beginning of the century was marked by the birth of a new artistic trend - romanticism, the first spokesman of which was O. A. Kiprensky. Russian painting owes the discovery of plein-air writing in the landscape to S. F. Shchedrin. A. G. Venetsianov becomes the founder of the Russian everyday genre. For the first time turning to the image of peasant life, he showed it as a world full of harmony, grandeur and beauty. Contrary to the opposition between “simple nature” and “elegant nature” that existed in academic aesthetics, the elegant was discovered in a field of activity that was previously considered unworthy of art. In the painting of Venetsianov, for the first time, the heartfelt lyrics of Russian rural nature sounded. An excellent teacher, he brings up a galaxy of artists, such as A. V. Tyranov, G. V. Soroka and others. One of the leading genres in their work, along with landscape and portrait, is the interior. The genre composition of Russian art is enriched. Depicting life in its simple, non-ceremonial guise, in the peaceful course of everyday life, in pictures of their native nature, they made beauty in art commensurate with the feelings of ordinary people who perceive beauty and poetry as moments of rest and silence, won from everyday worries and labors. At the same time, a pictorial system emerges that is opposed to the academic school, a system based not on traditional patterns of the past, but on the search for harmonic patterns and poetry in everyday, everyday reality. Reality imperiously invades art and leads to the 40s. to the flourishing of everyday and satirical graphics (V. F. Timm, A. A. Agin), which is an analogy to the “natural school” in literature. This line of art culminates in the work of P. A. Fedotov, who introduces a conflict into the everyday picture, a developed dramatic action with a satirical social background, forcing the external environment to serve the goals of the social, moral, and later psychological characteristics of the characters. Rethinking the traditional forms of the academic school gives rise to such monumental creations in historical painting as "The Last Day of Pompeii" by K. P. Bryullov, on the one hand, and "The Appearance of Christ to the People" by A. A. Ivanov, on the other. Ivanov enriched painting with an in-depth psychological development, the discovery of a new, etude method of working on a large canvas. The wise assimilation of the classical heritage, the verification of its precepts by one’s own experience of painting in the open air, the scale of creative concepts, the attitude to the creative gift as a great responsibility for educating the people and improving their spiritual culture - all this made Ivanov’s work not only a school of skill, but also a great lesson in humanism in art.
O. A. Kiprensky. Portrait of a boy A. A. Chelishchev. OK. 1809. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
First third of the 19th century - the highest stage in the development of classicism in Russian architecture, usually referred to as Empire. The architectural creativity of this period is not so much the perfect design of individual buildings as the art of architectural organization of large spaces of streets and squares. Such are the urban planning ensembles of St. Petersburg - the Admiralty (architect A. D. Zakharov), the Exchange on the spit of Vasilyevsky Island (architect J. Thomas de Thomon), the Kazan Cathedral (architect A. N. Voronikhin). The ensembles of K. I. Rossi, the author of the General Staff Building, which completed the composition of Palace Square, and the complex of buildings, streets and squares around the Alexandria Theater in St. Petersburg, designed by him, are marked by a grandiose scope of urban planning.
V. A. Tropinin. Portrait of the son of Arseny Tropinin. 1818. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
Since the beginning of the 1860s, since the abolition of serfdom, Russian art receives a sharp critical focus and thus speaks of the need for fundamental social transformations. Art declared this, portraying the evil of social injustice, exposing the vices and ulcers of society (most of the works of V. G. Perov of the 1860s). It contrasted the stagnation of modern life with the transforming power of critical historical epochs (paintings by V.I. Surikov of the 1880s).
S. F. Shchedrin. Moonlit night in Naples. 1828-1829. Canvas, oil. State Russian Museum.
The combination of the truth of characters and circumstances with a truthful depiction of life in the forms in which it is perceived in ordinary, everyday experience, is a feature of critical, or democratic, realism, in line with which advanced Russian art has been developing since the early 1860s. The nutrient medium and the main audience of this new art was the raznochintsy intelligentsia. The heyday of democratic realism in the second half of the XIX century. associated with the activities of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions founded in 1870 (see Wanderers). The ideological leader and organizer of the Wanderers was I. N. Kramskoy, one of the most profound artists, a talented theorist, critic and teacher. Under his guiding influence, the TPES contributed to the consolidation of advanced artistic forces, the expansion and democratization of the audience thanks to the availability of artistic language, the comprehensive coverage of the phenomena of folk life, the ability to make art socially sensitive, capable of putting forward topics and issues that concern society at a given historical moment.
A. I. Kuindzhi. Evening in Ukraine. 1878. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum. Leningrad.
In the 1860s genre painting dominated, in the 70s the role of the portrait (V. G. Perov, I. N. Kramskoy, N. A. Yaroshenko) and landscape (A. K. Savrasov, I. I. Levitan, I (I. Shishkin, A. I. Kuindzhi, V. D. Polenov). A major role in promoting the art of the Wanderers belonged to the outstanding art critic and art historian V. V. Stasov. At the same time, the collecting activity of P. M. Tretyakov was developing. His gallery (see the Tretyakov Gallery) becomes the stronghold of the new, realistic school, the profile of his collection is determined by the works of the Wanderers.
The next period of Russian art is the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century. The 1980s were a transitional decade, when Wandering realism reached its peak in the work of I. E. Repin and V. I. Surikov. During these years, such masterpieces of Russian painting were created as “Morning of the Streltsy Execution”, “Boyar Morozova” by V. I. Surikov, “Religious Procession in the Kursk Governorate”, “Arrest of the Propaganda”, “They Did Not Wait” by I. E. Repin. Next to them are artists of a new generation with a different creative program - V. A. Serov, M. A. Vrubel, K. A. Korovin. The contradictions of late-bourgeois capitalist development exert their influence on the spiritual life of society. In the minds of artists, the real world is marked by the stigma of bourgeois greed and pettiness of interests. They begin to look for harmony and beauty outside the seeming prosaic reality - in the realm of artistic fantasy. On this basis, interest in fairy tale, allegorical and mythological plots revives (V. M. Vasnetsov, M. V. Nesterov, M. A. Vrubel), which leads to the search for such an artistic form that is capable of transferring the viewer's imagination into the sphere of folklore representations, memories of the past or vague premonitions of the future. The predominance of images and forms that indirectly express the content of modernity over the forms of its direct reflection is one of the distinguishing features of the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The complexity of the artistic language characterizes the work of representatives of the "World of Art" - an artistic group that took shape at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries.
V. M. Vasnetsov. Alyonushka. 1881. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
The Art Nouveau style becomes decisive in this period. Along with painting, architecture is actively developing, in which the Art Nouveau style, arts and crafts, book graphics, sculpture, and theatrical and decorative art dominate. The areas of application of artistic creativity are expanding enormously, but the interaction and mutual influence of all these areas is more significant. Under these conditions, a type of universal artist is being formed, able to "do everything" - to paint a picture and a decorative panel, to perform a vignette for a book and a monumental painting, to fashion a sculpture and create a sketch of a theatrical costume. To varying degrees, the features of such universalism are marked, for example, by the work of M. A. Vrubel and the leading architect of the Art Nouveau style in Russia, F. O. Shekhtel, as well as the artists of the World of Art.
The most important milestones in the evolution of Russian painting at the turn of the century were marked by the works of V. A. Serov, whose work is imbued with the desire, using new stylistic forms, to avoid formalistic extremes, to achieve classical clarity and simplicity, while remaining faithful to the precepts of the realistic school, its humanism, in which sober - a critical view of the world is combined with an idea of the high purpose of man.
A. K. Savrasov. The Rooks Have Arrived. 1871. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
Artistic life at the beginning of the 20th century. is of unprecedented intensity. Revolutionary events of 1905-1907 stimulated the development of socially active art. The works of N. A. Kasatkin, S. V. Ivanov and others embodied the most important social and social events of these years, the image of the worker as the main force of the revolution. Many masters work in the field of satirical political graphics and magazine cartoons.
The range of artistic traditions to which the art of the 20th century refers is unusually wide. Along with the wandering movement that continues its life, there is a variant of impressionistic painting among the masters of the Union of Russian Artists, symbolism, represented by the work of V. E. Borisov-Musatov and the artists of the Blue Rose association.
K. A. Korovin. In winter. 1894. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
The desire to update the artistic language by referring to the style of urban handicraft and folk art, toys, popular prints, signs, children's drawings, while taking into account the experience of the latest French painting, characterizes the activities of the artists of the "Jack of Diamonds" - a society organized in 1910. In the work of the masters of this directions - P. P. Konchalovsky, I. I. Mashkov, A. V. Lentulov - the role of still life increases significantly. The traditions of ancient Russian painting receive a new refraction in the art of K. S. Petrov-Vodkin.
F. A. Vasiliev. Before the rain 1869. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
Reaches a significant rise at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. sculpture. P. P. Trubetskoy introduces impressionistic features into it. His portrait compositions are distinguished by the acuteness of the captured moment of life, the richness of subtle shades. Working in soft materials, Trubetskoy returned to sculpture the lost sense of the material, the understanding of its expressive properties. The monument to Alexander III, created by Trubetskoy in 1909, is a unique example of the grotesque solution of the image in the history of monuments. The monument to N.V. Gogol, created by N.A. Andreev (1909), belongs to the remarkable achievements of monumental sculpture.
In the sculpture of 1912 "Seated Man" by A. S. Golubkina, an image appears that synthesizes ideas about the fate of the modern proletarian - this is a symbol of temporarily shackled, but full of rebellious spirit of strength. The creativity of S. T. Konenkov is distinguished by a variety of genre and stylistic forms. The real impressions of the revolutionary battles are embodied by the sculptor in the portrait "Worker-militant of 1905 Ivan Churkin". Not only facial features, but also the solidity of the stone block, emphasized by the stinginess of processing, give rise to an image of indestructible will, tempered in the fire of class battles. The traditions of classical sculpture are being revived in the work of A. T. Matveev.
S. A. Korovin. On the world. 1893. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow.
The desire to rethink and resurrect to a new life almost all the images and forms invented by mankind over the centuries of history, and at the same time formal experiments, sometimes reaching the denial of all traditions - these are the extreme manifestations of the artistic situation in Russian art of the early 20th century. However, these extremes themselves were an indicator of the deep internal conflict in Russian life on the eve of the revolution and in their own way reflected the complexity of the time, which, according to A. Blok, brought "unheard of changes, unprecedented revolts." Under these conditions, that sensitivity to the phenomena of the time was brought up, which, together with a high culture of craftsmanship, the best artists of the pre-revolutionary period brought to Soviet art (see.
Two periods are clearly distinguished in the development of Russian artistic culture of the 20th century: from the beginning of the century to the 1930s. and 30–80s. first two decades of the 20th century. - the heyday of Russian art, especially painting and architecture. The search for new images led to a deeper study of national roots and traditions. Primitive artists included the complex and paradoxical world of urban folklore into the sphere of "high" art, turned to folk and everyday culture. It was in the first decades of the 20th century that the ancient Russian heritage was rediscovered, especially iconography. The pictorial language of Russian icons largely influenced the attitude to color, space and rhythmic organization of the canvas.
The revolution in October 1917, which brought the communists to power, changed the direction of development of Russian art. In the first half of the 20s. artists still continued experiments and searches, created new groups and associations. However, in the second half of the decade, artistic life began to experience ever-increasing ideological and administrative pressure from the state. Many masters were forced to go abroad, and those who remained were persecuted in the press, lost the opportunity to exhibit, and some were arrested. The main blow was taken by those who gravitated towards abstract forms of fine art.
The state ideology put forward the so-called socialist realism - another version of academic art, designed to educate people in the spirit of communist morality. In 1932, all independent art associations were banned by a special government decree and a state system of creative unions was created - the Union of Artists of the USSR, the Union of Architects of the USSR, etc. The era of totalitarianism began, when any forms of culture that did not fit into the norms of social realism could only exist in illegal conditions (the wave of the "underground avant-garde" was especially powerful in the 60s and 70s). The situation began to gradually change only in the second half of the 1980s.
Architecture. As a result of the nationalization of land and large real estate in cities, the only customer for construction work in Soviet Russia the state became, that is, the ruling communist party. But in the first post-revolutionary decade, its ideological diktat had not yet affected the art of architects. Open competitions, discussions, original projects and teaching systems in art universities made up a picture of an unprecedented creative upsurge in the late 10s and 20s. 20th century Then in architecture they saw a symbol of the transformation of society, the construction of a "new world". The range of directions was very wide: from continuing the tradition of neoclassicism of the 10s. to the most daring innovation. Traditionalist architects tried to create a "revolutionary" style based on the architectural forms of the past, generalizing them, giving them greater expressiveness. The legacy of the architecture of the Ancient East was very popular. His simple and capacious language, his motifs, speaking of eternity and immortality, were actively used in memorial ensembles.
Architectural life of the 20s. largely determined by the activities of creative groups. In 1923, the Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) arose, the most prominent representatives of which were N. A. Ladovsky, K. S. Melnikov. In 1925, the Association of Modern Architects (OSA) was created, which included the brothers L. A., V. A. and A. A. Vesnin, M. Ya. Ginzburg, I. I. Leonidov, I. A. Golosov and others (they were called constructivists). The associations sharply argued with each other, but their common ideal was a building that was strictly thought out, easy to use, built with minimal labor and materials.
In the early 30s. in the development of Soviet architecture there was a sharp turning point. In 1932, all associations were merged into the Union of Architects of the USSR, in 1933 the Academy of Architecture of the USSR was established. From now on, the use of the legacy of the past, mainly the building art of antiquity and the Renaissance, has become the dominant creative principle of Soviet architecture. Model projects of residential buildings, schools, and public institutions were developed. The development of the construction industry was aimed primarily at reducing the cost and speeding up work: cinder blocks began to be used in 1927, and the first panel houses were built in 1940.
The main content of the architecture of the second half of the 50s and 60s. there was mass housing construction. A new type of dwelling was formed in the experimental development of the Moscow outskirts. Instead of the traditional line layout, the principle of a green microdistrict with groups of residential buildings around public and cultural institutions was introduced. The decoration of five-story houses is extremely modest, the footage of apartments is reduced to a minimum. This corresponded to the overriding task of the designers to make housing really accessible to the average consumer.
In contrast to the "decoration" of the previous period in the architecture of official buildings of the 60-70s. straightness and asceticism began to be considered the standard, and the dominant form was a concrete parallelepiped with continuous ribbons of windows.
In the 70s–80s. On the outskirts of large cities, housing complexes of the original layout appeared, in which local features of the relief and the natural environment are played up. In the plastic design of buildings, the former dryness is increasingly being replaced by free asymmetry and decorative expressiveness of forms, reminiscent of the postmodern architecture of the West.
In the early 90s. construction boom began in Moscow. Several thousand new buildings were built in the historic center of the city. To replace the same type and laconic block architecture of the 70–80s. came a variety of shapes, styles and materials. High technologies began to be used, houses with glass walls, load-bearing structures and titanium parts appeared. This direction in architecture is called high tech. Historical styles, which correspond to the traditional character of the metropolitan landscape, have become especially popular. The motifs of old Moscow architecture, such as the Kremlin towers, are noticeable even in buildings made of glass and iron, which are also crowned with turrets. This direction was called "Moscow style".
Alexey Viktorovich Shchusev(1873-1949) - Russian architect, who mastered the most diverse, both traditional and avant-garde styles. He served as chief architect of the All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft and Industrial Exhibition (1922–1923) and the 2nd Design Workshop of the Moscow City Council (1932–1937). He was the director of the Tretyakov Gallery (1926–1929), and since 1946, the organizer and director of the Museum of Architecture, which now bears his name.
Made a name for himself as a master of church architecture in the "Russian style ”: the church-monument on the Kulikovo field, the Trinity Cathedral in the Pochaev Lavra, the Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow, all - 1908–1912; pilgrimage hotel in Bari (Italy; 1910-1913), Orthodox church of St. Nicholas the Pleasant and etc.
Shchusev brilliantly mastered the avant-garde principles of constructivism - Research Institute of Balneology and Physiotherapy in Sochi (1927–1931); Narkomzem building in Moscow (1928–1933). He organically combined constructivism with reminiscences of antiquity in his most famous work - Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin on Red Square (1929–1930). In Shchusev's subsequent works, the avant-garde consistently gives way to national-historical stylization, which impressively expresses the monumental pathos of "Stalinist classicism" - hotel "Moscow" (1932-1938); Moskvoretsky Bridge (1936–1938); Bolshoi Theater of Opera and Ballet named after A. Navoi in Tashkent (1940–1947); NKVD building on Lubyanka Square (1946). In 1941 it was completed Kazansky railway station complex(started in 1913).
An important place in his later work was occupied by projects for the restoration of war-torn cities: Istra (1942-1943), Novgorod (1943-1945) and Chisinau (1947).
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov(1890–1974) graduated in 1917 from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1916–1918 Melnikov participated in the design and construction automobile plant AMO in Moscow. Melnikov worked in architectural workshops and taught. His numerous projects - public buildings, residential buildings, garages, monuments - are a bright page in Soviet architecture.
In the 20s. world fame was brought to Melnikov by the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1925. The "living monument" of Moscow was built by Melnikov own house in Krivoarbatsky lane, in which everything is unusual: layout, space, constructions. The round building of two vertical cylinders cut into each other was modeled by organizing the original interior space. Melnikov's innovative projects, most of which remained on paper, nevertheless, put him among the pioneers of modern architecture of the 20th century.
Vladimir Grigorievich Shukhov(1853–1939) was one of the first to use double curvature steel mesh structures - Radio tower (1922).
In 1933–1939 a team of architects (B. M. Iofan, V. G. Gelfreikh, V. A. Schuko) developed a project Palace of Soviets on the banks of the Moscow River.
In 1949–1953 Was built building of the Moscow state university on Sparrow Hills, designed by L. Rudnev, S. Chernyshev, P. Abrosimov, V. Nasonov.
Architects M. Posokhin and A. Mndoyants and others built Kremlin Palace of Congresses (1959–1961), designed Kalinin Avenue (New Arbat, 1962–1969).
In 1974–1981 built building of the Drama and Comedy Theater on Taganka, its architects: A. V. Anisimov, Yu. P. Gnedovsky, B. I. Tarantsev and others.
In 1967, N.V. Nikitin built the famous Ostankino television tower.
In 1997, according to the project of Z. K. Tsereteli, a shopping mall near Manezhnaya Square.
Sculpture. After 1917, the art of sculpture in Russia acquired a special social and political significance. Soviet propaganda sought to create an image of modernity as a heroic era, a fairy tale that becomes a reality before our eyes. Monuments played a key role in Soviet sculpture.
For some time, Soviet sculpture still retained echoes of impressionism, modernity and avant-garde of the early 20th century, but by the end of the 20s. the main reference point for most sculptors was the classics. This was eloquently evidenced by the exhibition of 1928, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the revolution. Here, for the first time, a tensely dramatic composition was shown. Ivan Dmitrievich Shadr (1887–1941) "Cobblestone is the weapon of the proletariat" (1927); majestic, inspired by the images of the Russian Empire group Alexander Terentievich Matveev "October. Worker, peasant and Red Army soldier" (1927).
At the beginning of the 30s. came a new wave of monumentalism. Matvei Genrikhovich Manizer(1891–1966) in monument to V. I. Chapaev in Kuibyshev (1932) tried to overcome the traditional "loneliness" of the figure on the pedestal, to emphasize the connection of his heroes with the people.
Decorative sculpture also flourished. For example, in 1937 the territory of the Moscow Northern River Station was decorated with fountains decorated by animal sculptors A. N. Kardashov and I. S. Efimov. The proximity of figures of polar bears and frolicking dolphins illustrated the well-known slogan "Moscow is the port of five seas."
During the Great Patriotic War and in the post-war years in sculpture, as in all Soviet art, two trends are noticeable: official, parade-heroic, and the other - more humane and sensitive to the harsh truth of war. It is easy to verify this by comparing, in particular, two works such as Monument "Warrior-Liberator" in the memorial park in Berlin (1946-1949), made Evgeny Viktorovich Vuchetich (1908–1974).
In the sculpture of the first post-war decade, "decoration" triumphed. The craving for superficial lifelikeness, for minor details and lush, merchant-style ornaments sometimes destroyed the tectonic logic of building a form - monument to Yuri Dolgoruky (1954), erected in Moscow according to the project Sergei Mikhailovich Orlov (1911–1971).
In the second half of the 50s. more and more realized the need for a clear and weighty sculptural image, where the idea would be expressed directly through the form - Moscow monument to V. V. Mayakovsky (1958) work Alexander Pavlovich Kibalnikov(1912–1987). Original memorials appeared, in which the actual sculpture gave way to the leading role of the landscape or architectural composition that preserves the historical memory ( monument in honor of space exploration in Moscow, 1964, authors A. P. Faydysh-Krandievsky, M. O. Barsh, A. N. Kolchin).
The atmosphere of the political "thaw" of 1956–1964 contributed to the emergence in Soviet culture of various directions, including those far from socialist realism. Works Ernst Iosifovich Neizvestny "Atomic Explosion" (1957), "Daphne" (1963), "Heart of Christ" (1973-1975) talk about the struggle of the eternal principles - good and evil.
Along with the appeal to abstract forms, dating back to the avant-garde, the traditions of monumentalism were preserved in sculpture.
Vera Ignatievna Mukhina(1889–1953) - the most famous Soviet sculptor. Her sculpture group "Worker and Collective Farm Woman", which in 1937 crowned the building of the domestic pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris, and is now visible in the Moscow landscape. The monumental victoriousness of this group, meeting the specific task of ideological glorification, at the same time expresses the general tendencies of the artist's work - pathos of scale and strength, attraction to power and strong-willed dynamics of forms, love for the grandiose. Being consonant with the spirit of the era, these qualities allowed Mukhina to become a prominent figure in the official Soviet art.
The metaphor of a swift impulse and overcoming, generated by the experience of the revolution, will echo in many of Mukhina's works - "Wind" (1926–1927), "Female Torso" (1927), "Boreas" (1938). Meanwhile, the hyperbolized sensation of the bodily mass characteristic of her, most clearly and strongly expressed in "Peasant Woman" ("Baba", 1927). Mukhina's sculptures showed an ideal balance of statics and strong-willed effort for state officialdom, a combination of earthly heaviness with major enthusiasm.
The artist simultaneously works in chamber genres. In the 1940s she is actively engaged in art glass: along with vases and goblets, she performs portraits in glass (“Portrait of V. I. Kachalov”, 1947).
Interest in the portrait does not leave her throughout her life. Mukhina's portraits are often images of people close to her, but they are devoid of direct lyricism. Mukhina gravitates towards generalized solutions, to the restrained monumentality of plastics. In portraits of war heroes - B. A Yusupova (1942)- her manner becomes more detailed-documentary, but the sense of a coherent form allows her to avoid excessive narrative.
Painting. pre-revolutionary period. Russian art of the 1910s passed through the influence of formalist currents: cubism, futurism, even non-objective art. Much of this is now only the property of history.
The Russian artistic environment managed to combine the innovative tendencies of cubism and futurism, to achieve a synthesis that turned out to be unattainable in Paris. Russian synthesis was primarily conceptual. It was the result of the creativity of numerous groupings of artists united in the St. Petersburg association "Union of Youth". The leading artists of the beginning of the century faithfully depicted the existing reality, their art was directed against the oppression of man, and it was also permeated with love of freedom.
Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev(1878–1927) - Russian painter. In 1903 for the diploma painting "Bazaar in the Village" received a gold medal and the right to travel abroad.
He worked a lot in the portrait genre - "Portrait of F. I. Chaliapin", which have turned into generalized socio-psychological types. At the same time, he enthusiastically worked on paintings depicting old Russian life, mostly provincial. He drew material for them from childhood memories and impressions from his frequent stay in the Trans-Volga region.
He built fascinating plots full of entertaining details in multi-figured compositions and recreated characteristic Russian female types in paintings colored with admiration and mild authorial irony. His painting became more and more colorful, approaching folk art. He varied the themes of Shrovetide and folk festivals in different ways.
Kustodiev's works: "Shrovetide" (1919), "Merchant for tea" (1918) and etc.
Kustodiev made many graphic and pictorial portraits, made sketches of the festive decoration of Petrograd, drawings, caricatures and covers for books and magazines of various contents, made wall pictures and calendar "walls", designed 11 theatrical performances.
Nicholas Roerich(1874–1947) - Russian painter. He worked in the historical genre, painted landscapes. At the same time, Roerich was engaged in scientific activities. He carried out excavations, lectured at the St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute.
In 1899, the artist conceived the cycle “The Beginning of Russia. Slavs". It included paintings "Overseas guests", "Sinister" (1901), "The city is being built" (1902) and etc.
In 1903–1904 the artist made a number of trips to the cities of Russia in order to study ancient Russian and folk art. Their result was a series of expressive landscape studies: "Rostov the Great" (1903), "Pskov churchyard" (1904) and others. But not only Russian antiquity attracted Roerich. Since the second half of the 1900s. he turned in his works to the Stone Age, and to the images of the Scandinavian epic, and to the legends of the East.
Mystery and mysticism distinguish the artist's landscapes; anticipation of world cataclysms - "Heavenly Battle" (1912), "Doomed City" (1914), etc. In the same years, the painting technique of the master also changed. From oil painting, he moved to tempera, began to use colored grounds.
Roerich's many-sided activity included not only painting. As a theater designer, he participated in the famous Diaghilev's "Russian Seasons" in Paris. Roerich's scenery for "Polovtsian Dances" from the opera by A.P. Borodin "Prince Igor" (1909) amazed the Parisian public. In total, in the pre-revolutionary years, the artist designed more than 10 performances.
Since 1928, Roerich and his family settled in India. Roerich paid much attention to the knowledge of Buddhism and other world religions. His religious and philosophical views were reflected in the painting cycle "Teachers of the East" (1930s).
Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov(1870-1905) sought to present the real world as a reminder of the other, unreal and beautiful world of the past. He was prone to decorativeism, turning the picture into a kind of panel, he loved the blue-green color. The characters in most of his paintings were young women in old dresses against the backdrop of a manor; but these were not historical pictures.
The artist needed the most general, approximate signs of antiquity in order to use them to convey his elegiac feeling, nourished by reflections on the irrevocably gone past - "Tapestry" (1901) and "By the Pond" (1902), "Emerald Necklace" (1903–1904).
Back in 1899, the painting "Pond", shown at one of the exhibitions, was a huge success and brought popularity to its author, previously valued only in a narrow circle of colleagues and experts.
In 1904, Borisov-Musatov received an order for four paintings for a rich mansion. He interpreted the proposed theme “The Four Seasons” in a very peculiar way, continuing what had been started in previous works, using motifs and details he liked, but subordinating them to a completely new compositional solution. The watercolor sketches made by him promised an outstanding work, but the paintings were not carried out for unknown reasons.
Soon the artist moved to Tarusa, where he spent the last months of his life. He worked as intensely as before: he created several excellent landscape studies that became milestones in Russian landscape painting, and almost finished the painting "Requiem". In 1905 he died.
Mark Zakharovich Chagall(1887-1985) - one of the most amazing figures in the art of the XX century. He was called a dreamer, a science fiction writer, a myth-maker, a sorcerer, they saw him as an archaist and innovator, brought him closer to primitivism, expressionism, surrealism and other currents of modern art, but any definition remains powerless before the mystery of Chagall's creativity.
Already the early compositions of Chagall ("Kermessa", 1908; "The Dead", 1908; "Birth", 1910) reveal a rare originality of worldview, although in the works of the St. Petersburg period one can find traces of the influences experienced by the young artist. He paid tribute to the classical tradition and modern symbolism; his tendency further development fits into the neo-primitivism movement.
Easily assimilating the techniques of the latest trends, Chagall acts according to the principle “I take what is mine where I find it” and does not compromise in the slightest with what constitutes the innermost basis of his worldview. In an insatiable thirst for creativity, he reaches that extreme degree of sharpening of spiritual reactions, that poetic-ecstatic tension, when all boundaries between the visible and the imaginary, the external and the internal are erased, and the artist truly sees what he dreams about, what he loves, what he believes in. Hence the stunning expression of form and color, the fantastic metamorphoses of the objective world in Chagall's canvases - "I and the village", 1911; "Russia, donkeys and others", 1911-1912; "Violinist", 1912-1913; "Motherhood. Pregnant woman, 1913.
Participating in exhibitions in Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chagall gained fame.
Having written poetry all his life, Chagall transferred purely poetic techniques to painting, of which the implementation of metaphor should be emphasized. His characters take walks in the sky as naturally as if they were walking on earth - "The Walk" (1917), "Over the City" (1914–1918). Things in the paintings and drawings of Chagall have, as it were, human habits, characteristic faces - "Interior with flowers" (1918), and sometimes grow to space-time symbols of a cosmic scale - "Hours" (1914).
Chagall lived a very long life and worked tirelessly. He created hundreds of paintings and graphic sheets, extensive cycles of illustrations in various techniques (for the Bible, the tales of "A Thousand and One Nights", "Dead Souls" by N.V. Gogol, etc.). He was engaged in scenery and costumes for the theater, performed monumental paintings (the ceiling of the Paris Grand Opera, paintings of the Metropolitan Opera in New York), stained-glass windows, mosaics and tapestries; to this must be added ceramics and sculpture.
Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin(1885-1953) - one of the most striking figures of the new art of the 1910s-20s, the founder of constructivism; in general, a unique person of the Russian avant-garde. His life was the life of a fanatic and ascetic, creativity filled it entirely.
At first, Tatlin painted in a manner that combined Larionov's influence with elements of cubism, then he moved on to "pictorial reliefs" (they are also "counter-reliefs", or "material selections"). These volumetric-spatial abstractions made of iron and wood, using glass, plaster, wallpaper, fragments of finished things and partly processed by pictorial means, were first shown by him at an exhibition in his own studio (1914), then at the exhibitions "Tram B", "1915", "Shop". They started the constructivist line in the Russian avant-garde, the line of materials science.
Tatlin made sketches of dishes, clothes and even stoves, but his models are usually utopian, they are projects of ideas, not things. Such "Monument to the III International" ("Tatlin's Tower", 1919-1920)- a symbolic embodiment of the revolutionary era.
In the 1920s Tatlin actively works in the People's Commissariat of Education and Inkhuk, teaches at the Kiev Art Institute and Vkhutein. public duties are not something external to him, they are, as it were, part of the arts. An artist of a total and existential warehouse, Tatlin does not divide art into types and genres - he is engaged in the construction of new forms in everything at once, from architecture to book business and from design to scenography.
His later theatrical works (“We Will Not Surrender”, Chamber Theatre, 1935, etc.), yielding to the early ones (“Tsar Maximilian”, Moscow Literary and Artistic Circle, 1911, etc.) in the scope of stage ideas, retain a high level of skill and artistic thinking. This level is preserved by his late painting - chamber, thin; still lifes performed "for oneself" are alien to any kind of violence against nature.
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova(1881–1962) trained as a sculptor, later took up painting. Her early impressionist works were successfully shown at the World of Art exhibitions.
While still at the school, Goncharova met M.F. Larionov, connected her personal and creative destiny with him. The artist was interested in cubism and futurism, and in 1906 she became interested in the primitive.
Goncharova's neo-primitivism is her great contribution to the art of the early 20th century. The artist drew inspiration from the Russian icon, folk popular prints, pagan idols, "stone women" - "The Bread Harvest" (1908), "Fishing" (1909), "Idols" (1908–1909).
A feature of her painting was the use of flat color spots, outlined by a clear outline. In 1911–1912 Goncharova begins to profess the principles of Rayonism developed by Larionov. Among her most famous works of this time is "Cyclist".
Goncharova's work did not always meet with understanding. In 1911, the police demanded to remove the painting from the Jack of Diamonds exhibition "God of fertility". In 1912, the church opposed the four-part cycle "Evangelists".
A separate page of Goncharova's creative biography is her work on futuristic publications. In 1912, lithographed postcards with drawings by Goncharova appeared. In 1913 she illustrated editions of the poets V.V. Khlebnikova, A.E. Kruchenykh, K.A. Bolshakova, S.P. Bobrova, at the same time was almost the only one of the futurists who was not afraid of the narrative of their works.
1913 was the most eventful in her work. At the lubok exhibition organized by Larionov, 6 watercolor works by Goncharova were shown, which were an experience of reviving the traditions of folk painting.
In 1915, Goncharova and Larionov left Russia, accepting Diaghilev's offer to work together. In the Diaghilev entreprise, the artist worked on the design of performances "Russian Tales", "Columbine Scarf" and others. Her best creations were the scenery and costumes for "Wedding" (1923) and "Firebird" (1926). Goncharova often collaborated with theaters in Europe and America; She did not leave her studies in painting and graphics, she participated in exhibitions.
Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov(1881–1964) - Russian artist, husband of N.S. Goncharova.
The years of study account for the early, impressionistic period of Larionov's work. In the manner inherited from French artists, he created entire series of paintings. The tension of color, the richness of pictorial textures distinguish such paintings as "Rose Bush", "Fish at Sunset". His works were successful at the exhibitions of the Society of Russian watercolorists, the World of Art, at the Russian exposition of the Autumn Salon of 1906 in Paris.
In 1907, Larionov discovered folk primitive art - Russian popular print, handicraft sign, etc. The stage of primitivism in the artist's work is the most fruitful. Larionov is fond of the so-called street culture - series "Dandies" and "Hairdressers". At the exhibition "Jack of Diamonds" in 1910, he demonstrates the canvas "Bread", reminiscent of a bakery sign. At the exhibition "Donkey's Tail" in 1912, organized by Larionov himself, paintings from the "soldier's series" were exhibited - "Resting Soldier" (1910).
Larionov's primitivism found inspiration even in fence drawings and inscriptions. In the 1910s Larionov proved himself to be a brilliant organizer: he led a group of young Moscow artists, in 1913 he prepared an exhibition of popular prints, which included Eastern and European folk pictures, signs, printed gingerbread, etc., in the same year he held an exhibition of icon-painting originals and popular prints .
At the Target exhibition (1913), Larionov presented works from an unfinished cycle of Venus and four canvases "The Seasons" (1912), which were seen as a challenge by critics. They use the language of children's drawings and archaic symbols, complemented by unpretentious text.
"Target" has become highest point development of Larionov's artistic ideas. In 1913, Larionov published the brochure Luchism, in which he formulated the theory of a new trend: “The style of radiant painting has in mind the spatial forms arising from the intersection of reflected rays various items. The beam is conventionally depicted on the plane with a colored line. Radiant paintings - "Rooster and Hen" (1912), "Luchism» (1912) and etc.
Rayonism Larionov laid the foundations of abstract art. From 1912, Larionov was engaged in graphics a lot: he made a series of lithographed postcards that repeated his paintings.
In 1915, at the invitation of S. P. Diaghilev, together with N. S. Goncharova, he joined the troupe of the Russian Ballet, worked on sketches of costumes and scenery. Since 1919, Larionov and Goncharova settled in Paris. The artist continued to engage in easel painting and graphics, participated in exhibitions, and became seriously interested in collecting.
Niko (Nikolai Aslanovich) Pirosmanashvili(1862–1918) - Georgian primitive painter Being a self-taught master, he created his works on the basis of folklore traditions. The main themes of his paintings are genre scenes, among which colorful Georgian feasts, one-figure compositions, numerous images, and still lifes are in the first place. At first glance, all of his compositions seem childishly naive: static figures painted in an extremely schematic way, frozen faces, conditional placement of figures in space. But the strict and restrained coloring gives the funny scenes and characters a sense of wise calmness. Often, dark tones predominate in the coloring of Pirosmanashvili. "Woman with a mug of beer."
Zinaida Evgenievna Serebryakova(1884–1967) grew up in an artistic environment. She did not receive a systematic art education and owed her enviable professionalism primarily to the influence of the environment, and even more - to her own efforts and the most severe demands on herself. She continuously worked in nature, wrote sketches, landscapes and portraits - "Behind the toilet. Self-portrait" (1909).
In 1914 Serebryakova spent several months in Italy, where she closely studied the art of the Renaissance. In the same year, she created a charming painting "Children", group portrait of their children. But the main forces of the artist were given to plots from peasant life. Two pictures "Bath" (1912, 1913) represented a spectacle filled with the harmony of the mental and physical, the charm of unfeigned cheerfulness.
Paintings followed. "Peasants"(1914; fragment of a large composition destroyed by the artist herself), The Harvest (1915), The Whitening of the Canvas (1917) and The Sleeping Peasant Woman (1917). These works are now perceived as a requiem for the best that distinguished the Russian pre-revolutionary village.
In 1924 Serebryakova left for Paris. She worked a lot, but what came out from under her brush was noticeably inferior to what was performed in the pre-revolutionary years.
Pavel Nikolaevich Filimonov(1883-1941) - one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde. His creative obsession delighted some and repulsed others; his asceticism became a legend.
The first works foreshadowing the Filonovian analytical method date back to 1910 - drawing "Peasant family", painting "Heads". If in the drawing the tendency to scrupulous elaboration of form still does not violate the usual clarity of the relationship between figures and background, then the picture is already a combination of images of different scales, not connected by a unity of point of view, and is perceived as a fruit of free fantasy.
Creative activity of Filonov in the early 1910s. is closely associated with the St. Petersburg art association "Union of Youth". By this time, such significant things of his as "West and East", "East and West", (both 1912–1913) and famous "The Feast of Kings" (1913). Symbolist in spirit, these works at the same time demonstrate Filonov's inclination towards neo-primitivism and expressionism.
A complex alloy of stylistic orientations, the combination of the real and the fantastic, the "anatomization" of the object form, the "crystal" technique - these properties are related to Filonov Vrubel. Developing the principles of analytical art, Filimonov deliberately opposed it to cubism. According to him, through geometrization, cubism imposes its will on the world and thus canonizes the language of art, and the analytical artist seeks to imitate nature in the very manner of action.
Filonov's activity was not limited to the sphere of painting. In 1913, he completed two huge scenery depicting the city. He also collaborated with Futurist poets in publishing lithographed collections.
Among the best Filonov works are paintings "Peasant Family (Holy Family)" (1914), "Flowers of the World Bloom" (1915), watercolors "Winner of the City" (1914–1915), "Workers" (1915–1916).
Hard work in the workshop, exhibitions, disputes, participation in the organization of the Petrograd Inkhuk, theoretical treatises, pedagogical practice, leadership of the association "Masters of Analytical Art" (MAI) - such is Filonov's most active activity in the 1920s. At this time, he created dozens of drawings and paintings - The Formula of Imperialism (1925), The Living Head (1923), The Formula of Spring (1928–1929), Narva Gates (1929) and etc.
The obvious incompatibility of Filonov's work with the ideology of socialist realism led to the fact that in the 1930s. the artist found himself in isolation and was virtually deprived of his livelihood.
El (Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky(1890-1941) was one of the first Russian avant-garde artists. He was not a discoverer and preacher of the system, but rather a popularizer of the language; this saved the artist from scholasticism and fanaticism, but provided his work with an extraordinary breadth of application. Lissitzky's name is most associated with the spread of the new aesthetics as the "style of the time"; Like no one else, he contributed to its international recognition by actively participating in international projects.
During the period of teaching architecture and printing at the People's Art School in Vitebsk (1919–1920), Lissitzky came to non-objective creativity. Lissitzky became a member of the Unovis society founded by Malevich (“Affirmatives of the New Art”); the form-building principles of Suprematism were not only adapted by him in mass genres (poster "Beat the whites with a red wedge", 1920), but also developed in their own way in "prouns" (“projects for the approval of the new”, 1919–1924). Being spatial models of utopian architecture, the "prouns" made it possible to transfer Suprematist geometry from a plane to a volume, to the scale of a real urban environment - they also served as the basis for Lissitzky's unrealized architectural plans (horizontal skyscraper, communal house, yacht club).
Another form of development of Suprematist laws was "figurines" (scenographic sketches) for the unrealized production of the opera "Victory over the Sun" (1920-1921), conceived by the artist as an "electromechanical show". Machinery and inventive practice were of great interest to Lissitzky (one of his best inventions was the project of a mobile orator's rostrum, 1924).
Promoting the Soviet avant-garde in the stylistic unity of its constituent concepts (Suprematism, Constructivism, Rationalism), Lissitzky built it into a Western context. Together with I. G. Ehrenburg, he founded the journal "Thing" (1922), with M. Shtam and G. Schmidt - the journal "ABC" (1925). He participated in competitions and exhibitions. At the same time, he continued to work a lot in advertising and book graphics, in photography and posters.
Painting after the revolution of 1917 The revolution of 1917, the civil war, famine and devastation, the complete destruction of the old way of life, the intensification of the repressive policy of the Bolsheviks plunged people into fear and confusion. The new government understood that it was possible to return people to creation after severe upheavals only if they believed (sincerely or formally) in the correctness of the chosen path. Education, science and art were considered by Bolshevik theorists as an agitational and educational tool that made it possible to propagate the ideas of communism and control the ideology of society.
Konstantin Fedorovich Yuon(1875–1958). Fate favored him in every possible way. Success came to him very early and always accompanied him. The public noticed his paintings at student exhibitions and bought them so willingly. He acted as an art critic with works on the work of Russian artists, on the technique of painting, on artistic education. Soon after graduating from college, Yuon began teaching and did it all his life, earning great appreciation from his students.
Yuon left many works of different levels. He was a painter, graphic artist and theater designer. He tried himself in thematic painting, painted portraits of his contemporaries, but landscape painting turned out to be his true vocation. He learned some of the principles of the French Impressionists, without breaking with the traditions of Russian realism of the second half of the 19th century, that is, without "dissolving" the form of objects in the environment.
He loved joy and beauty in nature and life; most willingly depicted the sun, snow, bright folk clothes, monuments of ancient Russian architecture - "Trinity Lavra in Winter" (1910), "Spring Sunny Day" (1910); "March Sun" (1915). His painting is famous “Domes and swallows. Assumption Cathedral of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra "(1921). This is a panoramic landscape, painted from the bell tower of the cathedral on a clear summer evening, at sunset. Under the gentle sky, the earth prospers, and in the foreground, sunlit domes with golden patterned crosses shine. The motif itself is not only very beautiful, but also bold for the era of the merciless struggle of the new government with the church.
To historical themes - the revolution and the Patriotic War - Yuon also approaches through the landscape - "Parade on Red Square in Moscow on November 7, 1941" (1942).
Among the later works of Yuon, those written in a village near Moscow stand out - “End of winter. Noon" (1929); “An open window. Ligachevo" (1947), and those that are written according to the memoirs of youth and are associated with the life of old Moscow, which raised the artist - "Feeding pigeons on Red Square in 1890-1900" (1946).
Painting of the 20–30s In the fine arts of the 20s. artistic searches of the beginning of the century continue. Evidence of this is the existence of various groupings and trends that solve creative problems in different ways. The largest of them are the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AHRR), the Society of Easel Artists (OST), the association "4 Arts", the Society of Moscow Artists (OMH). All these associations were officially liquidated in the 30s.
Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia(1922–1932) was the most numerous. The AHRR relied on the realistic traditions of the pioneers, fought against leftist trends in art, with the slogan "art for art's sake" and called on artists and called on artists to create genre paintings on modern and historical-revolutionary themes. Among the artists of this direction are Brodsky, Ryazhsky, Grekov, Ioganson, Gerasimov and others.
Boris Vladimirovich Ioganson(1893–1973). His paintings in Soviet art were considered exemplary, ideally consistent with the principles of socialist realism.
In the early painting of Ioganson, the story dominates, much attention is paid to the details of the plot. He writes panoramas of construction sites: "To fight against devastation" (1922), "Construction of the Zemo-Avchalskaya hydroelectric power station" (1925). He tells, clearly denoting his likes and dislikes, about new relationships and orders: "Soviet Court" (1928). Looking for a new social type: "Rabfak goes (University students)" (1928). The picture is full of many almost independent episodes. "The junction railway station in 1919" (1928).
In the 1930s, without abandoning the concreteness of life situations and naturalness of painting, the artist strives to create a kind of Soviet epic. He is looking for images of "heroes" and "villains" of the new political myth and confronts them in dramatic situations - "Interrogation of Communists" (1933), "At the old Ural factory" (1937).
The artist also painted portraits - "Portrait of director V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko (1948). And in 1950, under his leadership, a whole group of artists created a huge canvas "Speech by V. I. Lenin at the III Congress of the Komsomol"- a characteristic example of the impersonal collective creativity that was then encouraged.
In the 1940s–1960s Ioganson devoted a lot of time to teaching. Since 1962 he was the president of the Academy of Arts.
Society of easel painters(1925-1932) brought together young graduates of VKHUTEMAS - the first Soviet art university. The OST included Shterenberg, Daineka, Williams, Annenkov, Tyshker, Pimenov, and others. Unlike the Ahrrevtsy, they found their aesthetic ideal not in the past, but in contemporary searches for European art. The themes of Ostov's works are industrialization, urban landscape, images of the new century. The works of OST artists are the dynamics of the composition, the clarity of the drawing and the laconicism of the form.
Alexander Alexandrovich Deineka(1899-1969). His paintings seem to embody the pathos of Soviet history in the 1920s-1930s, its visual slogans and appeals. The joy of the triumph of industrialization and the progress of technology, faith in a healthy mind in a healthy body - this feeling of the world was reflected in the artist's painting and graphics with absolute completeness and authenticity.
Becoming a member of the OST (1925), Deineka found himself among the defenders of the easel painting and, consequently, the opponent of the avant-garde program of "production art". First of all, Deineka was not bound by the painting tradition as such. He introduced a purely graphic understanding of form into his painting. His paintings are not colorful - the dynamic expressiveness of the compositions is based on a precisely adjusted linear rhythm, which in the best works acquires a sign-poster and at the same time monumental conciseness (“Defense of Petrograd”, 1928; “Skiers”, “Running”, both 1934).
Dynamic rhythm, accentuated objectivity and love for sharp angles become a kind of “calling card” of the artist - these signs are unmistakably recognizable: his book graphics (“Mess” by N. Aseev, 1930), posters of different years, monumental works (mosaics of Moscow metro stations "Mayakovskaya", 1939; "Novokuznetskaya", 1943). Later painting seems already far from the laws of Ostovo aesthetics - "Outskirts of Moscow" (1941); "Defense of Sevastopol" (1942); "By the Sea" (1956–1957).
Deineka's work fully embodied the ideas and artistic principles of the OST masters - "technists", inspired by new life, primarily with its industrial and sporting aspects, and stylistically gravitating towards German expressionism.
In parallel, developing, becoming more and more significant over the years, another area of \u200b\u200bhis work - chamber portraits, natural landscapes. In these "small" genres, no longer bound by the task of giving a capacious image of time, Deineka acquires lyricism, they reveal the talent of a subtle painter.
Yuri (George) Ivanovich Pimenov(1903-1977) wanted to be an artist of the present, to embody today's feeling of life, corresponding to the spirit and appearance of every passing day. Therefore, he turned out to be a very Soviet artist. But not only the themes, but the whole structure of their art, the Ostovtsy wanted to make sharply modern. This seemed to be German expressionism, with its sharp, sometimes grotesque pictorial language. Pimenov writes "Disabled War", with eyeless masks instead of faces (1926), ascetic skeletal athletes ("Running", 1928) and almost equally emaciated workers against the backdrop of rigidly drawn steam locomotives and steel trusses in a picture that is poster-like in title and intent "Give heavy industry!" (1927).
By the 1930s feigned severity disappears from Pimenov's work. With a light, mobile brushstroke, with light colors, he paints female portraits. (“Portrait of L. A. Eremina”, 1935), nature near Moscow, iridescent diversity of things and fabrics in the dressing room of the actress ("Actress", 1935). The iridescent surface of life captivates him: the newly rebuilt bulks of Okhotny Ryad, the girl’s shorn head, her hands on the steering wheel of an open car, carnations by the windshield - all in pink and blue tints of impressionistic-delicate color ("New Moscow", 1937).
The genre of lyrical reportage, sentimental admiration of the festive bustle of urban life will remain Pimenov's elements until the end of his life. Since the late 1950s the main object of observation for him is the new quarters surrounding Moscow. He admires their very incompleteness and uninhabitedness, their temporary, yet unsettled way of life.
Pimenov is known for his theatrical works: he designed the play "For those who are at sea!" B. A. Lavreneva (1946), “The Wide Steppe” by N. G. Vinnikov (1949).
Representatives association "4 arts"(1924-1931) studied the specifics of the interaction of painting, sculpture, architecture and graphics. The association included artists Petrov-Vodkin, Bruni, Saryan, Favorsky, Kuznetsov. They strived for high professionalism, for the emotional richness of their works.
Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin(1878–1939). The creative fate of Petrov-Vodkin developed happily. The transformation of the son of a shoemaker into a famous painter, his rapid movement from the Volga outback to the centers of European culture, his proximity to the largest figures of Russian art in refined metropolitan circles - all this seems fantastic.
Already in the early period, the work of Petrov-Vodkin was marked by a symbolist orientation. ("Elegy", 1906; "Shore", 1908; "Dream", 1910). The public resonance of the first performances of the artist was controversial. The painting "Dream" caused a heated controversy and brought the young painter wide fame.
Further evolution shows that the symbolism of the artistic language was rooted in the very nature of the painter, as well as in the icon painting tradition, a new discovery of which took place at that time. "Playing Boys" (1911) and especially "Bathing the Red Horse" (1912) mark a fundamentally important milestone in the work of Petrov-Vodkin. Although the plastic elaboration of volumes enters into a certain contradiction with the conventionality of color and the flattening of space, here one can clearly read the desire for a synthesis of Eastern and Western painting traditions, which turned out to be so fruitful.
Throughout the 1910s. the amplitude of Petrov-Vodkin's searches remains very wide. The most organic seem to be works related to the theme of motherhood, which runs through all the work of Petrov-Vodkin ("Mother", 1913; "Morning. Bathers", 1917).
At the same time, the ideas that led Petrov-Vodkin to create a unique artistic system were maturing. The problem of space is brought to the fore, which is resolved in a "spherical perspective". The variety of spatial positions in the picture is connected with the law of gravity: the inclined axes of the bodies form, as it were, a fan, opened from the inside of the picture - "Noon. Summer (1917), First Steps (1925), Spring (1935) and others. The understanding of space as “one of the main storytellers of the picture”, together with a specific interpretation of the role of color (based on the primary triad: red, yellow, blue), determined the mature painting style of Petrov-Vodkin.
In the first post-revolutionary years, Petrov-Vodkin especially often turned to still life, finding rich experimental possibilities in this genre - "Morning Still Life" (1918).
The last significant work of Petrov-Vodkin - “1919. Anxiety" (1934). Although the name of the picture refers to specific historical events, it combines contrasting meanings and grows into a symbol of an entire era.
Orientation towards eternal values, inherent in the work of Petrov-Vodkin, could not be accepted by the Soviet ideology of Stalin's time. After the death of the artist, his name was half-forgotten. Only in the mid-1960s. there was a new discovery of Petrov-Vodkin, thanks to which the true scale of his talent and the value of his creative heritage are now clear.
Painting of the war years. An important place in the fine arts of the war years belongs to the poster. One of the first propaganda posters of the beginning of the war "Motherland is calling!" I. M. Toidze. During the war years, the Kukryniksy (Kupriyanov, Krylov, Sokolov) actively worked, creating satirical, grotesque posters for the TASS Windows. Sorrow for the dead, hatred for the enemy, the joy of victories and the bitterness of defeat - all these feelings resonated in the works of wartime artists.
Kukryniksy: Mikhail Vasilievich Kupriyanov (1903–1991), Porfiry Nikitich Krylov (1902–1990), Nikolai Aleksandrovich Sokolov (born 1903). All three studied at the Moscow Vkhutemas - Vkhutein (1921-1929), in the wall newspaper of which their creative community was formed, which was entrenched for the rest of their lives. Separately, they were engaged in painting and showed at exhibitions mainly small lyrical studies, mainly landscapes. Together, under a common pseudonym (compiled according to the initial syllables of surnames), they acted mainly as graphic artists, cartoonists and illustrators.
In the late 1920s - early 1930s. released several albums with cartoons of writers, drew cartoons on everyday topics. Since 1933, they have been permanent cartoonists of the Pravda newspaper, which made them the main conductors and propagandists (in a satirical form) of the official political line in the country.
During the Great Patriotic War, along with cartoons, a number of posters were released (among them - the very first after the German attack poster "We will mercilessly defeat and destroy the enemy!", 1941 - with a caricature of Hitler) and the satirical "TASS Windows". And in book graphics, artists begin with ironic and grotesque images. Illustrated "12 chairs" by Ilf and Petrov (1933 and 1967), "The Life of Klim Samgin" by M. Gorky (1934); works by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, N. V. Gogol, stories by A. P. Chekhov, etc.
In easel painting, the Kukryniksy jointly sought to apply their experience of political and predominantly satirical graphics to a large canvas. Already in 1933, they showed the series "The Face of the Enemy" - a series of picturesque caricatures of the White Guard generals. The Patriotic War gave themes for the new large paintings of the Kukryniksy: "Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya" (1942-1947), "The Flight of the Nazis from Novgorod" (1944-1946), "The End. The Last Hours at Hitler's Headquarters (1947-1948).
Here, attempts were made to combine a reliable depiction of events with caricatured, grotesquely interpreted images. The working method of the Kukryniks is unique in itself: the artists achieved a single, “Kukryniks” style, combining personal talents in a joint creative process.
Arkady Alexandrovich Plastov(1893-1972) during his lifetime he was recognized as a classic of Soviet art. His work even made it into school textbooks. However, his best paintings have become classics not of Soviet, but of Russian art of the 20th century. Plastov is a great artist of peasant Russia. She looks at us from his paintings and portraits.
Only in the second half of the 1920s. he was able to work hard artistic work. In 1931, Plastov's house burned down, almost everything created by that time perished. He was almost in the position of a beginner. But forty years of tireless work - and the number of his works approached 10,000. Some portraits - several hundred. Mostly these are portraits of fellow villagers.
Plastov is a natural realist. Modernist pride, the search for something completely new and unprecedented were completely alien to him. He lived in the world and admired its beauty. Like many Russian realist artists, Plastov is convinced that the main thing for an artist is to see this beauty and be extremely sincere. No need to write beautifully, you need to write the truth, and it will be more beautiful than any fantasy. Every shade, every line in his paintings, the artist repeatedly checked in his work from nature.
The artist worked a lot and fruitfully in the 1930s, but he created his first masterpieces during the war years. War as a national tragedy, as an encroachment on the natural and sacred laws of being - "Fascist flew by" (1942). And the inviolability of these laws, the inviolability of the foundations of people's life - classically restrained and beautiful "Harvest" (1945).
And subsequently, in his best works, Plastov kept the achieved level: "Spring" (1952), "Youth" (1953-1954), "Spring" (1954), "Summer" (1959-1960), "Tractor Drivers' Dinner" (1951). It is no coincidence that the names of many of them have something generalizing. Plastov was given a rare ability to turn real life events, often the most mundane ones, into perfect image how to discover their hidden, true meaning and significance in the general system of the universe. Therefore, he, a modern Russian realist, so naturally continued the classical artistic tradition.
Painting of the post-war years. The work of artists of the post-war years is developing under the influence of changed social ideas and new spiritual factors. After the disasters experienced by the people, the prospect of a peaceful, unclouded existence seemed especially rosy and tempting. The pathos of the life surrounding the artist was already different, its appearance was affected by the experience of people who went through a terrible war, re-experienced the measure of good and evil, who looked at the world with different eyes.
In the art of the 40s - early 1950s. the imprint of the cult of personality is noticeable. Often fake pomposity crowds out the harsh truth of the past war and the difficult stage of restoring the destroyed economy. And yet, at this time, many interesting works are being created. Actively, “on the second wind”, joyfully experiencing the nationwide upsurge, enthusiasm, born of the long-awaited victory, the masters of the older generations work. It is noteworthy that paintings of historical content are also often solved during this period in everyday terms. This is how the desire of artists to find features in the past that correspond to the feelings of people of today was expressed.
This trend is especially noticeable in the work of Serov - "Walkers at V. I. Lenin."
The decisions of the 20th Congress were perceived as refreshing and hopeful changes - they were called the "thaw". Socialist realism was dying, and the new art became too formalistic to excite at least the broad strata of the intelligentsia.
Painting of the era of developed socialism. Brezhnev's bureaucracy in art in the late 1950s. Soviet society is entering the so-called stage of "developed socialism", which is reflected in art. Its direction was directly determined by the decisions of the Communist Party. A characteristic feature of art 60-70 years. - an emerging harmonious combination of different types and branches of artistic creativity - from decorative and applied art to those that address large-scale ideological problems in pictorial form. The new face of art in the 60s–70s. appears more clearly in painting. At the very beginning of the 60s. there is a desire to show the life of Soviet people, the romance of labor exploits, the development of new lands as brightly and truthfully as possible. In the present period, one can observe the true flowering of the graphic arts. In every republic, in all art centers, there are interesting masters. But graphics extend beyond the breadth. Its possibilities are being realized more and more deeply in terms of covering new topics, expressive means and techniques are becoming more diverse. Along with such masters as N. A. Ponomarev (b. 1918), V. N. Minaev (b. 1912), E. K. Okas (b. 1915), D. A. Dubinsky (1920–1960), advanced in the past period, in the 60s-70s. artists work successfully, looking at the world freshly and in their own way. These are G. F. Zakharov, I. V. Golitsin, D. S. Bisti, E. M. Sidorkin.
With the crisis of the populist movement in the 1990s, the "analytical method of nineteenth-century realism," as it is called in Russian science, is becoming obsolete. Many of the Wanderers experienced a creative decline, went into the “small-scale” of an entertaining genre picture. Perov's traditions were preserved most of all in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture thanks to the teaching activities of such artists as S.V. Ivanov, K.A. Korovin, V.A. Serov and others.
Complex life processes determined the variety of forms of artistic life of these years. All types of art - painting, theatre, music, architecture - stood for the renewal of the artistic language, for high professionalism.
For painters of the turn of the century, other ways of expression are characteristic than those of the Wanderers, other forms of artistic creativity - in images that are contradictory, complicated and reflect modernity without illustrativeness and narrative. Artists painfully seek harmony and beauty in a world that is fundamentally alien to both harmony and beauty. That is why many saw their mission in cultivating a sense of beauty. This time of "eves", the expectation of changes in public life, gave rise to many trends, associations, groupings, a clash of different worldviews and tastes. But it also gave rise to the universalism of a whole generation of artists who came forward after the "classical" Wanderers. It is enough to name only the names of V.A. Serov and M.A. Vrubel.
An important role in the popularization of Russian art, especially of the 18th century, as well as Western European art, in attracting Western European masters to exhibitions, was played by the artists of the World of Art association. "Miriskusniki", who gathered the best artistic forces in St. Petersburg, published their own magazine, by their very existence contributed to the consolidation of artistic forces in Moscow, the creation of the "Union of Russian Artists".
The impressionistic lessons of plein air painting, the composition of "random framing", the wide free pictorial manner - all this is the result of the evolution in the development of pictorial means in all genres of the turn of the century. In search of "beauty and harmony", the artists try themselves in a variety of techniques and art forms - from monumental painting and theatrical scenery to book design and arts and crafts.
At the turn of the century, a style developed that affected all the plastic arts, starting primarily with architecture (in which eclecticism dominated for a long time) and ending with graphics, which was called the Art Nouveau style. This phenomenon is not unambiguous, in modernity there is also decadent pretentiousness, pretentiousness, designed mainly for bourgeois tastes, but there is also a desire for unity of style that is significant in itself. Art Nouveau is a new stage in the synthesis of architecture, painting, and decorative arts.
In the visual arts, Art Nouveau has manifested itself: in sculpture - by the fluidity of forms, the special expressiveness of the silhouette, the dynamism of the compositions; in painting - the symbolism of images, addiction to allegories.
The emergence of Art Nouveau did not mean that the ideas of wandering died by the end of the century. Genre painting developed in the 1990s, but it developed somewhat differently than in the “classical” Wandering movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, the peasant theme is revealed in a new way. The split in the rural community is emphasized accusatoryly portrayed by Sergei Alekseevich Korovin (1858–1908) in the painting “On the World” (1893, State Tretyakov Gallery). Abram Efimovich Arkhipov (1862–1930) was able to show the vitality of existence in hard, exhausting work in the painting “Washerwomen” (1901, State Tretyakov Gallery). He achieved this to a large extent thanks to new pictorial discoveries, to a new understanding of the possibilities of color and light.
Reticence, “subtext”, a well-found expressive detail make even more tragic the painting by Sergei Vasilyevich Ivanov (1864-1910) “On the road. Death of a Settler" (1889, State Tretyakov Gallery). Shafts sticking out, as if raised in a cry, dramatize the action much more than the dead man depicted in the foreground or the woman howling over him. Ivanov owns one of the works dedicated to the revolution of 1905 - "Execution". The impressionistic technique of “partial composition”, as if by chance snatched a frame, is preserved here: only a line of houses, a line of soldiers, a group of demonstrators are outlined, and in the foreground, in a square illuminated by the sun, the figure of a dog killed and running from shots. Ivanov is characterized by sharp light and shade contrasts, an expressive contour of objects, and a well-known flatness of the image. His tongue is lapidary.
In the 90s of the XIX century. an artist enters art, who makes the worker the protagonist of his works. In 1894, a painting by N.A. Kasatkina (1859-1930) "Miner" (TG), in 1895 - "Coal miners. Change".
At the turn of the century, a slightly different path of development than that of Surikov is outlined in the historical theme. So, for example, Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin (1861–1904) works more in the historical genre than in the purely historical genre. “Russian Women of the 17th Century in the Church” (1899, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Wedding Train in Moscow. XVII century” (1901, State Tretyakov Gallery), “They are coming. (The people of Moscow during the entry of a foreign embassy into Moscow at the end of the 17th century)" (1901, Russian Museum), "Moskovskaya Street of the 17th century on a holiday" (1895, Russian Museum), etc. - these are everyday scenes from the life of Moscow in the 17th century. Ryabushkin was especially attracted to this century, with its gingerbread elegance, polychrome, patterned. The artist aesthetically admires the bygone world of the 17th century, which leads to a subtle stylization, far from the monumentalism of Surikov and his assessments. historical events. Ryabushkin's stylization is reflected in the flatness of the image, in a special system of plastic and linear rhythm, in the color scheme built on bright major colors, in the general decorative solution. Ryabushkin boldly introduces local colors into the plein-air landscape, for example, in The Wedding Train... - the red color of the wagon, large spots of festive clothes against the background of dark buildings and snow, given, however, in the finest color nuances. The landscape always poetically conveys the beauty of Russian nature. True, sometimes Ryabushkin is also characterized by an ironic attitude in the depiction of certain aspects of everyday life, as, for example, in the painting “Tea Drinking” (cardboard, gouache, tempera, 1903, Russian Museum). In the frontally seated static figures with saucers in their hands, measuredness, boredom, drowsiness are read, we also feel the oppressive power of petty-bourgeois life, the limitations of these people.
Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1856–1933) pays even more attention to the landscape in his historical compositions. His favorite subject is also the 17th century, but not everyday scenes, but the architecture of Moscow. (“Street in Kitay-gorod. Beginning of the 17th century”, 1900, Russian Museum). Painting “Moscow at the end of the 17th century. At Dawn at the Resurrection Gates (1900, State Tretyakov Gallery) may have been inspired by the introduction to Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina, for which Vasnetsov had sketched the scenery shortly before.
A.M. Vasnetsov taught in the landscape class of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1901–1918). As a theoretician, he outlined his views in the book Art. The experience of analyzing the concepts that define the art of painting ”(Moscow, 1908), in which he advocated realistic traditions in art. Vasnetsov was also the founder of the Union of Russian Artists.
A new type of painting, in which folklore artistic traditions were mastered in a completely special way and translated into the language of modern art, was created by Philip Andreevich Malyavin (1869–1940), who in his youth was engaged in icon painting in the Athos Monastery, and then studied at the Academy of Arts under Repin. His images of "women" and "girls" have a certain symbolic meaning - healthy soil Russia. His paintings are always expressive, and although these are, as a rule, easel works, they receive a monumental and decorative interpretation under the artist's brush. “Laughter” (1899, Museum of Modern Art, Venice), “Whirlwind” (1906, State Tretyakov Gallery) is a realistic depiction of peasant girls laughing contagiously loudly or rushing uncontrollably in a round dance, but this realism is different than in the second half of the century. The painting is sweeping, sketchy, with a textured stroke, the forms are generalized, there is no spatial depth, the figures, as a rule, are located in the foreground and fill the entire canvas.
Malyavin combined in his painting expressive decorativeism with realistic fidelity to nature.
Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov (1862–1942) addresses the theme of Ancient Russia, like a number of masters before him, but the image of Russia appears in the artist’s paintings as a kind of ideal, almost enchanted world, in harmony with nature, but disappeared forever like the legendary city of Kitezh . This keen sense of nature, delight in the world, in front of every tree and blade of grass is especially pronounced in one of Nesterov's most famous works of the pre-revolutionary period - "The Vision of the Young Bartholomew" (1889-1890, State Tretyakov Gallery). In the disclosure of the plot of the picture, there are the same stylistic features as those of Ryabushkin, but a deeply lyrical sense of the beauty of nature is invariably expressed, through which the high spirituality of the characters, their enlightenment, their alienation from worldly fuss are transmitted.
Before turning to the image of Sergius of Radonezh, Nesterov had already expressed interest in the theme of Ancient Russia with such works as “The Bride of Christ” (1887, location unknown), “The Hermit” (1888, Russian Museum; 1888–1889, State Tretyakov Gallery), creating images of high spirituality and quiet contemplation. He dedicated several more works to Sergius of Radonezh himself (Youth of St. Sergius, 1892-1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; triptych "Works of St. Sergius", 1896-1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; "Sergius of Radonezh", 1891-1899, State Russian Museum).
M.V. Nesterov did a lot of religious monumental painting: together with V.M. Vasnetsov painted the Kyiv Vladimir Cathedral, independently - the monastery in Abastuman (Georgia) and the Marfo-Mariinsky monastery in Moscow. The murals are always dedicated to the ancient Russian theme (for example, in Georgia - to Alexander Nevsky). In the wall paintings of Nesterov, there are many observed real signs, especially in the landscape, portrait features - in the image of saints. In the artist's striving for a flat interpretation of the composition of elegance, ornamentality, refined sophistication of plastic rhythms, an undoubted influence of Art Nouveau manifested itself.
Stylization, in general, so characteristic of this time, to a large extent touched Nesterov's easel works. This can be seen in one of the best paintings dedicated to women's fate - "The Great Tongue" (1898, Russian Museum): the deliberately flat figures of nuns, "chernitsa" and "belitsa", generalized silhouettes, as if a slow ritual rhythm of light and dark spots - figures and landscape with its light birches and almost black firs. And as always with Nesterov, the landscape plays one of the main roles. “I love the Russian landscape,” the artist wrote, “against its background, somehow it’s better, you feel more clearly both the meaning of Russian life and the Russian soul.”
The landscape genre itself develops at the end of the 19th century also in a new way. Levitan, in fact, completed the search for the Wanderers in the landscape. A new word at the turn of the century was to be said by K.A. Korovin, V.A. Serov and M.A. Vrubel.
Already in the early landscapes of Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin (1861-1939) purely pictorial problems are solved - to write gray on white, black on white, gray on gray. A "conceptual" landscape (the term of M.M. Allenov), such as Savrasovsky or Levitanovsky, does not interest him.
For the brilliant colorist Korovin, the world appears as a "riot of colors." Generously gifted by nature, Korovin was engaged in both portraiture and still life, but it would not be a mistake to say that landscape remained his favorite genre. He brought into art the strong realistic traditions of his teachers from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - Savrasov and Polenov, but he has a different view of the world, he sets other tasks. He began to paint en plein air early, already in the portrait of a chorus girl in 1883, one can see his independent development of the principles of plein airism, embodied later in a number of portraits made in the estate of S. Mamontov in Abramtsevo (“In the Boat”, State Tretyakov Gallery; portrait of T. S. Lyubatovich, State Russian Museum, etc.), in the northern landscapes, executed during the expedition of S. Mamontov to the north (“Winter in Lapland”, State Tretyakov Gallery). His French landscapes, united by the title "Parisian Lights", is already a completely impressionistic painting, with its highest culture of etude. Sharp, instant impressions of big city life: quiet streets in different time days, objects dissolved in a light-air environment, molded by a dynamic, “trembling”, vibrating stroke, a stream of such strokes that create the illusion of a veil of rain or city air saturated with thousands of different vapors - features reminiscent of the landscapes of Manet, Pissarro, Monet. Korovin is temperamental, emotional, impulsive, theatrical, hence the bright colors and romantic elation of his landscapes (“Paris. Capuchin Boulevard”, 1906, State Tretyakov Gallery; “Paris at night. Italian Boulevard.” 1908, State Tretyakov Gallery). Korovin retains the same features of impressionistic etude, painterly maestro, striking artistry in all other genres, primarily in portraiture and still life, but also in decorative panels, in applied art, in theatrical scenery, which he was engaged in all his life (Portrait of Chaliapin, 1911, Russian Museum; "Fish, wine and fruits" 1916, State Tretyakov Gallery).
Korovin's generous gift for painting brilliantly manifested itself in theatrical and decorative painting. As a theater painter, he worked for the Abramtsevo Theater (and Mamontov was perhaps the first to appreciate him as a theater artist), for the Moscow Art Theater, for the Moscow Private Russian Opera, where his lifelong friendship with Chaliapin began, for the Diaghilev entreprise. Korovin raised theatrical scenery and the significance of the artist in the theater to a new level, he made a whole revolution in understanding the role of the artist in the theater and had a great influence on his contemporaries with his colorful, "spectacular" scenery, revealing the very essence of a musical performance.
One of the greatest artists, an innovator of Russian painting at the turn of the century, was Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov (1865–1911). His “Girl with Peaches” (portrait of Verusha Mamontova, 1887, State Tretyakov Gallery) and “Girl Illuminated by the Sun” (portrait of Masha Simanovich, 1888, State Tretyakov Gallery) represent a whole stage in Russian painting. Serov was brought up among prominent figures of Russian musical culture (his father is a famous composer, his mother is a pianist), studied with Repin and Chistyakov, studied the best museum collections in Europe and, upon returning from abroad, entered the Abramtsevo circle. In Abramtsevo, the two portraits mentioned above were painted, from which the glory of Serov, who entered art with his own, bright and poetic view of the world, began. Vera Mamontova sits in a calm pose at the table, peaches are scattered on a white tablecloth in front of her. She herself and all the objects are presented in the most complex light and air environment. Sun glare falls on the tablecloth, on clothes, a wall plate, a knife. The depicted girl sitting at the table is in organic unity with all this material world, in harmony with it, full of vital trembling, inner movement. To an even greater extent, the principles of plein air painting were reflected in the portrait of the artist's cousin Masha Simanovich, painted right in the open air. The colors here are given in a complex interaction with each other, they perfectly convey the atmosphere of a summer day, color reflections that create the illusion of sun rays sliding through the foliage. Serov departs from the critical realism of his teacher Repin to "poetic realism" (D.V. Sarabyanov's term). The images of Vera Mamontova and Masha Simanovich are imbued with a sense of the joy of life, a bright feeling of being, a bright victorious youth. This was achieved by “light” impressionistic painting, for which the “principle of chance” is so characteristic, a sculpted form with a dynamic, free brushstroke that creates the impression of a complex light-air environment. But unlike the Impressionists, Serov never dissolves an object in this environment so that it dematerializes, his composition never loses stability, the masses are always in balance. And most importantly, it does not lose the integral generalized characteristics of the model.
Serov often paints representatives of the artistic intelligentsia: writers, artists, artists (portraits of K. Korovin, 1891, State Tretyakov Gallery; Levitan, 1893, State Tretyakov Gallery; Yermolova, 1905, State Tretyakov Gallery). All of them are different, he interprets all of them deeply individually, but the light of intellectual exclusivity and inspired creative life shines on all of them. The figure of Yermolova resembles an ancient column, or rather, a classical statue, which is further enhanced by the vertical format of the canvas. But the main thing remains the face - beautiful, proud, detached from everything petty and vain. The coloring is decided only on a combination of two colors: black and gray, but in a variety of shades. This truth of the image, created not by narrative, but by purely pictorial means, corresponded to the very personality of Yermolova, who, with her restrained, but deeply penetrating play, shook the youth in the turbulent years of the early 20th century.
Yermolova front door portrait. But Serov is such a great master that, choosing a different model, in the same genre of formal portrait, in fact, with the same expressive means, he was able to create an image of a completely different character. Thus, in the portrait of Princess Orlova (1910–1911, Russian Museum), some details are exaggerated (a huge hat, a too long back, a sharp knee angle), an accentuated attention to the luxury of the interior, transmitted only fragmentarily, like a snatched frame (part of a chair, paintings, table corner ), allow the master to create an almost grotesque image of an arrogant aristocrat. But the same grotesqueness in his famous “Peter I” (1907, Tretyakov Gallery) (Peter in the picture is simply gigantic), which allows Serov to depict the impetuous movement of the tsar and the courtiers absurdly rushing after him, leads to an image that is not ironic, as in the portrait of Orlova, but symbolic, conveying the meaning of an entire era. The artist admires the originality of his hero.
Portrait, landscape, still life, domestic, historical painting; oil, gouache, tempera, charcoal - it is difficult to find both pictorial and graphic genres in which Serov would not work, and materials that he would not use.
A special theme in the work of Serov is the peasant. In his peasant genre there is no itinerant social sharpness, but there is a sense of the beauty and harmony of peasant life, admiration for the healthy beauty of the Russian people (“In the village. A woman with a horse”, on the map, pastel, 1898, State Tretyakov Gallery). Winter landscapes are especially exquisite with their silver-pearl range of colors.
Serov interpreted the historical theme in his own way: the “royal hunts” with pleasure walks of Elizabeth and Catherine II were conveyed by the artist of the new time, ironic, but also invariably admiring the beauty of life in the 18th century. Serov's interest in the 18th century arose under the influence of The World of Art and in connection with the work on the publication of The History of the Grand Duke, Tsar and Imperial Hunting in Russia.
Serov was a deeply thinking artist, constantly looking for new forms of artistic realization of reality. Inspired by Art Nouveau ideas about flatness and increased decorativeness were reflected not only in historical compositions, but also in his portrait of the dancer Ida Rubinstein, in his sketches for The Abduction of Europa and The Odyssey and Navzikai (both 1910, State Tretyakov Gallery, cardboard, tempera). It is significant that Serov at the end of his life turns to the ancient world. In the poetic legend, interpreted by him freely, outside the classical canons, he wants to find harmony, the search for which the artist devoted all his work.
It is hard to believe at once that the portrait of Verusha Mamontova and The Abduction of Europe were painted by the same master, Serov is so versatile in his evolution from the impressionistic authenticity of portraits and landscapes of the 80s and 90s to Art Nouveau in historical motifs and compositions from ancient mythology.
The creative path of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910) was more direct, although at the same time unusually complex. Before the Academy of Arts (1880), Vrubel graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. In 1884, he went to Kyiv to supervise the restoration of frescoes in St. Cyril's Church and created several monumental compositions himself. He makes watercolor sketches of the murals of the Vladimir Cathedral. The sketches were not transferred to the walls, as the customer was frightened by their non-canonical and expressiveness.
In the 90s, when the artist settled in Moscow, Vrubel's style of writing, full of mystery and almost demonic power, was formed, which cannot be confused with any other. He sculpts the shape like a mosaic, from sharp "faceted" pieces of different colors, as if glowing from the inside ("Girl against the backdrop of a Persian carpet", 1886, KMRI; "Fortuneteller", 1895, State Tretyakov Gallery). Color combinations do not reflect the reality of the color relationship, but have a symbolic meaning. Nature has no power over Vrubel. He knows her, owns her perfectly, but creates his own fantasy world, little like reality. In this sense, Vrubel is antithetical to the Impressionists (about whom it is not accidentally said that they are the same as naturalists in literature), because he does not in any way strive to fix a direct impression of reality. He gravitates toward literary subjects, which he interprets abstractly, trying to create eternal images of great spiritual power. So, having taken up illustrations for The Demon, he soon departs from the principle of direct illustration (“Dance of Tamara”, “Do not cry, child, do not cry in vain”, “Tamara in the coffin”, etc.) and already in the same 1890 creates his "Seated Demon" - a work, in fact, plotless, but the image is eternal, like the images of Mephistopheles, Faust, Don Juan. The image of the Demon is the central image of Vrubel's entire work, its main theme. In 1899 he wrote "The Flying Demon", in 1902 - "The Downtrodden Demon". Vrubel's demon is, first of all, a suffering creature. Suffering prevails over evil in it, and this is the peculiarity of the national Russian interpretation of the image. Contemporaries, as rightly noted, saw in his "Demons" a symbol of the fate of an intellectual - a romantic, trying to rebelliously escape from a reality devoid of harmony into an unreal world of dreams, but plunged into the rough reality of the earth. This tragedy of the artistic worldview also determines the portrait characteristics of Vrubel: spiritual discord, breakdown in his self-portraits, alertness, almost fright, but also majestic strength, monumentality - in the portrait of S. Mamontov (1897, State Tretyakov Gallery), confusion, anxiety - in the fabulous image of "Princess -Swan" (1900, State Tretyakov Gallery), even in his decorative panels "Spain" (1894, State Tretyakov Gallery) and "Venice" (1893, Russian Museum) executed for the mansion of E.D. Dunker, there is no peace and serenity. Vrubel himself formulated his task - "to awaken the soul with majestic images from the little things of everyday life."
The already mentioned industrialist and philanthropist Savva Mamontov played a very important role in Vrubel's life. Abramtsevo connected Vrubel with Rimsky-Korsakov, under the influence of whose work the artist writes his Swan Princess, performs the sculptures Volkhova, Mizgir, etc. In Abramtsevo, he did a lot of monumental and easel painting, he turns to folklore: to a fairy tale, to an epic, the result of which were the panels “Mikula Selyaninovich”, “Heroes”. Vrubel tries his hand at ceramics, making sculptures in majolica. He is interested in pagan Russia and Greece, the Middle East and India - all the cultures of mankind, the artistic techniques of which he seeks to comprehend. And each time the impressions he gleaned, he turned into deeply symbolic images, reflecting all the originality of his worldview.
Vrubel created his most mature paintings and graphic works at the turn of the century - in the genre of landscape, portrait, book illustration. In the organization and decorative-planar interpretation of the canvas or sheet, in the combination of the real and the fantastic, in the commitment to ornamental, rhythmically complex solutions in his works of this period, the features of modernity are increasingly asserting themselves.
Like K. Korovin, Vrubel worked a lot in the theater. His best scenery was performed for Rimsky-Korsakov's operas The Snow Maiden, Sadko, The Tale of Tsar Saltan and others on the stage of the Moscow Private Opera, that is, for those works that gave him the opportunity to "communicate" with Russian folklore, fairy tale, legend.
The universalism of talent, boundless imagination, extraordinary passion in the affirmation of noble ideals distinguish Vrubel from many of his contemporaries.
Vrubel's work brighter than others reflected the contradictions and painful throwings of the milestone era. On the day of Vrubel's funeral, Benois said: “Vrubel's life, as it will now go down in history, is a wondrous pathetic symphony, that is, the fullest form of artistic existence. Future generations... will look back on the last decades of the 19th century as on the "era of Vrubel"... It was in him that our time was expressed in the most beautiful and saddest thing that it was capable of.
With Vrubel, we are entering a new century, the era of the “Silver Age”, the last period of the culture of St. Petersburg Russia, which is out of touch both with the “ideology of revolutionism” (P. Sapronov) and “with autocracy and the state that have long ceased to be a cultural force.” The rise of Russian philosophical and religious thought, the highest level of poetry is associated with the beginning of the century (suffice it to name Blok, Bely, Annensky, Gumilyov, Georgy Ivanov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Sologub); drama and musical theater, ballet; the “discovery” of Russian art of the 18th century (Rokotov, Levitsky, Borovikovsky), Old Russian icon painting; the finest professionalism of painting and graphics from the very beginning of the century. But the "Silver Age" was powerless in the face of the impending tragic events in Russia, which was heading towards a revolutionary catastrophe, continuing to stay in the "ivory tower" and in the poetics of symbolism.
If Vrubel's work can be correlated with the general direction of symbolism in art and literature, although, like any great artist, he destroyed the boundaries of the direction, then Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov (1870–1905) is a direct exponent of pictorial symbolism and one of the first retrospectivists in fine art. art of frontier Russia. Critics of the time even called him "the dreamer of retrospectivism." Having died on the eve of the first Russian revolution, Borisov-Musatov turned out to be completely deaf to the new moods that were rapidly breaking into life. His works are an elegiac sadness for the old empty “noble nests” and dying “cherry orchards”, for beautiful women, spiritualized, almost unearthly, dressed in some kind of timeless costumes that do not carry external signs of place and time.
His easel works most of all resemble not even decorative panels, but tapestries. The space is solved in an extremely conditional, planar way, the figures are almost ethereal, like, for example, the girls by the pond in the painting "Pond" (1902, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery), immersed in dreamy meditation, in deep contemplation. Faded, pale gray shades of color enhance the overall impression of fragile, unearthly beauty and anemic, ghostly, which extends not only to human images, but also to the nature depicted by him. It is no coincidence that Borisov-Musatov called one of his works "Ghosts" (1903, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery): silent and inactive female figures, marble statues by the stairs, a half-naked tree - a faded range of blue, gray, purple tones enhances the ghostliness of the depicted.
This longing for bygone times made Borisov-Musatov related to the artists of the World of Art, an organization that arose in St. Petersburg in 1898 and united the masters of the highest artistic culture, the artistic elite of Russia of those years. (“The World of Arts”, by the way, did not understand the art of Borisov-Musatov and recognized it only at the end of the artist’s life.) The World of Art was started by evenings in the house of A. Benois devoted to art, literature and music. The people who gathered there were united by their love for beauty and the belief that it can only be found in art, since reality is ugly. Having also arisen as a reaction to the pettiness of the late Wanderers, its edifying and illustrative nature, the World of Art soon turned into one of the major phenomena of Russian artistic culture. Almost all famous artists participated in this association - Benois, Somov, Bakst, E.E. Lansere, Golovin, Dobuzhinsky, Vrubel, Serov, K. Korovin, Levitan, Nesterov, Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Bilibin, Sapunov, Sudeikin, Ryabushkin, Roerich, Kustodiev, Petrov-Vodkin, Malyavin, even Larionov and Goncharova. Of great importance for the formation of this association was the personality of Diaghilev, a patron and organizer of exhibitions, and later - the impresario of Russian ballet and opera tours abroad (Russian Seasons, which introduced Europe to the work of Chaliapin, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokine, Nijinsky and others and revealed to the world an example of the highest culture of the form of various arts: music, dance, painting, scenography). At the initial stage of the formation of the "World of Art", Diaghilev arranged an exhibition of English and German watercolors in St. Petersburg in 1897, then an exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists in 1898. Under his editorship from 1899 to 1904, a magazine was published under the same name, consisting of two departments: artistic and literary (the latter is of a religious and philosophical plan, D. Filosofov, D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius collaborated in it until the opening of his journal New Way in 1902. Then the religious and philosophical direction in the journal Mir Art" gave way to the theory of aesthetics, and the magazine in this part became a platform for other symbolists, headed by A. Bely and V. Bryusov).
In the editorial articles of the first issues of the journal, the main provisions of the "World of Art" about the autonomy of art, that the problems of modern culture are exclusively problems of artistic form, and that the main task of art is to educate the aesthetic tastes of Russian society, primarily through acquaintance with the works world art. We must give them their due: thanks to the World of Art, English and German art was really appreciated in a new way, and most importantly, Russian painting of the 18th century and the architecture of St. Petersburg classicism became a discovery for many. "World of Art" fought for "criticism as an art", proclaiming the ideal of a critic-artist with a high professional culture and erudition. The type of such a critic was embodied by one of the creators of The World of Art, A.N. Benoit. "Miriskusniki" organized exhibitions. The first was also the only international one that brought together, in addition to Russians, artists from France, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Finland, etc. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow painters and graphic artists took part in it. But the crack between these two schools - St. Petersburg and Moscow - was outlined almost from the first day. In March 1903, the last, fifth exhibition of the World of Art closed, in December 1904 the last issue of the magazine World of Art was published. Most of the artists moved to the “Union of Russian Artists” organized on the basis of the Moscow exhibition “36”, writers - to the New Way magazine opened by Merezhkovsky’s group, Moscow symbolists united around the magazine “Vesy”, musicians organized “Evenings of Contemporary Music”, Diaghilev went entirely into ballet and theater. His last significant work in the visual arts was a grandiose historical exhibition of Russian painting from iconography to the present in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1906, then exhibited in Berlin and Venice (1906-1907). In the section of modern painting, the main place was occupied by "World of Art". This was the first act of pan-European recognition of the "World of Art", as well as the discovery of Russian painting of the 18th - early 20th centuries. in general for Western criticism and a real triumph of Russian art.
In 1910, an attempt was made to breathe life back into the "World of Art" (led by Roerich). In the environment of painters at this time there is a demarcation. Benois and his supporters break with the Union of Russian Artists, Muscovites, and leave this organization, but they understand that the secondary association called the World of Art has nothing to do with the first. Benois sadly states that "not reconciliation under the banner of beauty has now become a slogan in all spheres of life, but a fierce struggle." Glory came to the "World of Art" artists, but the "World of Arts", in fact, no longer existed, although formally the association existed until the beginning of the 1920s (1924) - with a complete lack of integrity, on unlimited tolerance and flexibility of positions, reconciling artists from Rylov to Tatlin, from Grabar to Chagall. How can one not remember the Impressionists here? The community that was once born in Gleyre's workshop, in the "Salon of the Rejected", at the tables of the Guerbois cafe and which was to have a huge impact on all European painting, also fell apart on the threshold of its recognition. The second generation of "World of Art" is less busy with the problems of easel painting, their interests lie in graphics, mainly books, and theatrical and decorative arts, in both areas they made a real artistic reform. In the second generation of "World of Art" there were also major individuals (Kustodiev, Sudeikin, Serebryakova, Chekhonin, Grigoriev, Yakovlev, Shukhaev, Mitrokhin, etc.), but there were no innovative artists at all, because since the 1910s, the "World of Art" has overwhelmed epigonism wave. Therefore, when characterizing the World of Art, we will mainly talk about the first stage of the existence of this association and its core - Benois, Somov, Bakst.
The leading artist of the "World of Art" was Konstantin Andreevich Somov (1869-1939). The son of the chief curator of the Hermitage, who graduated from the Academy of Arts and traveled around Europe, Somov received an excellent education. Creative maturity came to him early, but, as the researcher (V.N. Petrov) rightly noted, he always had some duality - the struggle between a powerful realistic instinct and a painfully emotional worldview.
Somov, as we know him, appeared in the portrait of the artist Martynova (“Lady in Blue”, 1897–1900, State Tretyakov Gallery), in the portrait painting “Echoes of the Past Time” (1903, b. on the map, aqua., gouache, State Tretyakov Gallery ), where he creates a poetic characterization of the fragile, anemic female beauty of the decadent model, refusing to convey the real everyday signs of modernity. He dresses the models in ancient costumes, gives their appearance the features of secret suffering, sadness and dreaminess, painful brokenness.
Somov owns a series of graphic portraits of his contemporaries - the intellectual elite (V. Ivanov, Blok, Kuzmin, Sollogub, Lansere, Dobuzhinsky, etc.), in which he uses one general technique: on a white background - in a certain timeless sphere - he draws a face, a resemblance in which it is achieved not through naturalization, but by bold generalizations and apt selection of characteristic details. This lack of signs of time creates the impression of static, stiffness, coldness, almost tragic loneliness.
Before anyone else in The World of Art, Somov turned to the themes of the past, to the interpretation of the 18th century. ("Letter", 1896; "Confidentialities", 1897), being the forerunner of Benois' Versailles landscapes. He is the first to create an surreal world, woven from the motifs of the nobility, estate and court culture and his own purely subjective artistic sensations, permeated with irony. The historicism of the "World of Art" was an escape from reality. Not the past, but its staging, longing for its irretrievability - this is their main motive. Not true fun, but a game of fun with kisses in the alleys - such is Somov.
Other works by Somov are pastoral and gallant festivities (“The Ridiculous Kiss”, 1908, Russian Museum; “Marquise's Walk”, 1909, Russian Museum), full of caustic irony, spiritual emptiness, even hopelessness. Love scenes from the 18th – early 19th centuries. are always given with a touch of eroticism. The latter was especially manifested in his porcelain figurines, dedicated to one theme - the illusory pursuit of pleasure.
Somov worked a lot as a graphic artist, he designed S. Diaghilev's monograph on D. Levitsky, A. Benois's essay on Tsarskoe Selo. The book, as a single organism with its rhythmic and stylistic unity, was raised by him to an extraordinary height. Somov is not an illustrator, he “illustrates not a text, but an era, using a literary device as a springboard,” wrote A.A. Sidorov, and this is very true.
The ideological leader of the "World of Art" was Alexander Nikolaevich Benois (1870-1960) - an unusually versatile talent. A painter, easel graphic artist and illustrator, theater artist, director, author of ballet librettos, art theorist and historian, musical figure, he was, in the words of A. Bely, the main politician and diplomat of the "World of Art". Coming from the highest stratum of the St. Petersburg artistic intelligentsia (composers and conductors, architects and painters), he first studied at the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. As an artist, he is related to Somov by stylistic tendencies and addiction to the past (“I am intoxicated with Versailles, this is some kind of illness, love, criminal passion ... I completely moved into the past ...”). In the landscapes of Versailles, Benois merged the historical reconstruction of the 17th century. and contemporary impressions of the artist, his perception of French classicism, French engraving. Hence the clear composition, clear spatiality, the grandeur and cold severity of rhythms, the opposition between the grandiosity of monuments of art and the smallness of human figures, which are only staffage among them (the 1st Versailles series of 1896-1898 under the title "The Last Walks of Louis XIV"). In the second Versailles series (1905–1906), the irony, which is also characteristic of the first sheets, is colored with almost tragic notes (“The King’s Walk”, c., gouache, aqua, gold, silver, pen, 1906, State Tretyakov Gallery). The thinking of Benois is the thinking of a theatrical artist par excellence, who knew and felt the theater very well.
Nature is perceived by Benois in an associative connection with history (views of Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo, executed by him in watercolor technique).
In a series of paintings from the Russian past, commissioned by the Moscow publishing house Knebel (illustrations for the "Royal Hunts"), in scenes of the noble, landowner life of the 18th century. Benois created an intimate image of this era, although somewhat theatrical (Parade under Paul I, 1907, State Russian Museum).
Benois the illustrator (Pushkin, Hoffman) is a whole page in the history of the book. Unlike Somov, Benois creates a narrative illustration. The plane of the page is not an end in itself for him. The illustrations for The Queen of Spades were rather complete independent works, not so much the “art of the book”, as A.A. Sidorov, how much "art is in the book." A masterpiece of book illustration was the graphic design of The Bronze Horseman (1903,1905,1916,1921–1922, ink and watercolor imitating colored woodcuts). In a series of illustrations for the great poem, the main character is the architectural landscape of St. Petersburg, now solemnly pathetic, now peaceful, now sinister, against which the figure of Eugene seems even more insignificant. This is how Benois expresses the tragic conflict between the fate of Russian statehood and the personal fate of a little man (“And all night long the poor madman, / Wherever he turned his feet, / The Bronze Horseman was everywhere with him / With a heavy stomp galloped”).
As a theater artist, Benois designed the performances of the Russian Seasons, of which the most famous was the ballet Petrushka to music by Stravinsky, he worked a lot at the Moscow Art Theater, and later on almost all major European stages.
The activity of Benois, an art critic and art historian who, together with Grabar, updated the methods, techniques and themes of Russian art history, is a whole stage in the history of art criticism (see "History of Painting of the 19th Century" by R. Muther - volume "Russian Painting", 1901- 1902; "Russian School of Painting", edition of 1904; "Tsarskoe Selo in the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna", 1910; articles in the magazines "World of Art" and "Old Years", "Artistic Treasures of Russia", etc.).
The third in the core of the "World of Art" was Lev Samuilovich Bakst (1866-1924), who became famous as a theater artist and was the first among the "World of Art" to gain fame in Europe. He came to the "World of Art" from the Academy of Arts, then professed the Art Nouveau style, joined the leftist trends in European painting. At the first exhibitions of the World of Art, he exhibited a number of pictorial and graphic portraits (Benoit, Bely, Somov, Rozanov, Gippius, Diaghilev), where nature, coming in a stream of living states, was transformed into a kind of ideal representation of a contemporary person. Bakst created the brand of the magazine "World of Art", which became the emblem of Diaghilev's "Russian Seasons" in Paris. Bakst's graphics lack 18th-century motifs. and estate themes. He gravitates towards antiquity, moreover, to the Greek archaic, interpreted symbolically. Particularly successful with the Symbolists was his painting "Ancient Horror" - "Terror antiquus" (tempera, 1908, Russian Museum). A terrible stormy sky, lightning illuminating the abyss of the sea and an ancient city - and over all this universal catastrophe the archaic bark with a mysterious frozen smile dominates. Soon Bakst completely devoted himself to theatrical and scenery work, and his scenery and costumes for the ballets of the Diaghilev entreprise, performed with extraordinary brilliance, virtuoso, artistically, brought him worldwide fame. In its design there were performances with Anna Pavlova, ballets by Fokine. The artist made sets and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Stravinsky's The Firebird (both 1910), Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, and The Afternoon of a Faun to music by Debussy (both 1912).
From the first generation of “World of Art” the youngest was Evgeniy Evgenievich Lansere (1875–1946), who in his work touched upon all the main problems of book graphics of the early 20th century. (See his illustrations for the book "Legends of the ancient castles of Brittany", for Lermontov, the cover for "Nevsky Prospekt" by Bozheryanov, etc.). Lansere created a number of watercolors and lithographs of St. Petersburg (Kalinkin Bridge, Nikolsky Market, etc.). Architecture occupies a huge place in his historical compositions (“Empress Elizaveta Petrovna in Tsarskoye Selo”, 1905, State Tretyakov Gallery). We can say that in the work of Serov, Benois, Lansere a new type of historical painting was created - it is devoid of a plot, but at the same time it perfectly recreates the appearance of the era, evokes many historical, literary and aesthetic associations. One of Lansere's best creations - 70 drawings and watercolors for L.N. Tolstoy's "Hadji Murad" (1912-1915), which Benois considered "an independent song that fits perfectly into Tolstoy's powerful music." During the Soviet era, Lansere became a prominent muralist.
The graphics of Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky (1875–1957) represent not so much Petersburg of the Pushkin era or the 18th century, but a modern city, which he was able to convey with almost tragic expressiveness (“The Old House”, 1905, watercolor, State Tretyakov Gallery), as well as a person - inhabitant of such cities (“The Man with Glasses”, 1905–1906, pastel, State Tretyakov Gallery: a lonely, against the backdrop of dull houses, a sad man, whose head resembles a skull). The urbanism of the future inspired Dobuzhinsky with panic fear. He also worked extensively in illustration, where his series of ink drawings for Dostoevsky's White Nights (1922) can be considered the most remarkable. Dobuzhinsky also worked in the theater, designed for Nemirovich-Danchenko "Nikolai Stavrogin" (staged "Demons" by Dostoevsky), Turgenev's plays "A Month in the Country" and "The Freeloader".
Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) occupies a special place in the World of Art. A connoisseur of philosophy and ethnography of the East, an archaeologist-scientist, Roerich received an excellent education, first at home, then at the law and historical-philological faculties of St. Petersburg University, then at the Academy of Arts, in the workshop of Kuindzhi, and in Paris in the studio of F. Cormon. Early he gained the authority of a scientist. He was related to the "World of Art" by the same love for retrospection, only not of the 17th-18th centuries, but of pagan Slavic and Scandinavian antiquity, to Ancient Russia; stylistic tendencies, theatrical decorativeness (“Messenger”, 1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; “The Elders Converge”, 1898, Russian Museum; “Sinister”, 1901, Russian Museum). Roerich was most closely associated with the philosophy and aesthetics of Russian symbolism, but his art did not fit into the framework of existing trends, because, in accordance with the artist’s worldview, it turned, as it were, to all of humanity with an appeal for a friendly union of all peoples. Hence the special epic nature of his paintings.
After 1905, the mood of pantheistic mysticism grew in Roerich's work. Historical themes give way to religious legends (The Heavenly Battle, 1912, Russian Museum). The Russian icon had a huge influence on Roerich: his decorative panel “The Battle of Kerzhents” (1911) was exhibited during the performance of a fragment of the same title from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia” in the Parisian “Russian Seasons”.
In the second generation of the "World of Art" one of the most gifted artists was Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev (1878-1927), a student of Repin, who helped him in his work on the "State Council". Kustodiev is also characterized by stylization, but this is a stylization of popular popular print. Hence the bright festive “Fairs”, “Shrovetide”, “Balagany”, hence his paintings from the petty-bourgeois and merchant life, conveyed with slight irony, but not without admiring these red-cheeked, half-asleep beauties behind a samovar and with saucers in plump fingers (“Merchant”, 1915, Russian Museum; "The Merchant for Tea", 1918, Russian Museum).
A.Ya. Golovin is one of the greatest theater artists of the first quarter of the 20th century; I. Ya. Bilibin, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva and others.
The "World of Art" was a major aesthetic movement at the turn of the century, which reassessed the entire modern artistic culture, approved new tastes and problems, returned to art - at the highest professional level - the lost forms of book graphics and theatrical and decorative painting, which gained all-European recognition through their efforts, created new art criticism, which promoted Russian art abroad, in fact, even opened some of its stages, like the Russian 18th century. The "World of Art" created a new type of historical painting, portrait, landscape with its own stylistic features (distinct stylistic tendencies, the predominance of graphic techniques over pictorial ones, a purely decorative understanding of color, etc.). This determines their significance for Russian art.
The weaknesses of the "World of Art" were primarily reflected in the variegation and inconsistency of the program, proclaiming the model "either Böcklin, then Manet"; in idealistic views on art, in an affected indifference to the civic tasks of art, in programmatic apathy, in the loss of the social significance of the picture. The intimacy of the "World of Art", its pure aestheticism determined the short historical period of his life in the era of formidable tragic portents of the impending revolution. These were only the first steps on the path of creative searches, and very soon the young ones overtook the World of Art students.
For some "World of Art", however, the first Russian revolution was a real revolution in their worldview. The mobility and accessibility of graphics caused her special activity in these years of revolutionary turmoil. A huge number of satirical magazines arose (380 titles were counted from 1905 to 1917). The Sting magazine stood out for its revolutionary-democratic orientation, but the largest artistic forces were grouped around the Bogey and its Infernal Mail supplement. The rejection of autocracy united liberal-minded artists of various trends. In one of the issues of the "Bogey" Bilibin places a caricature "Donkey in 1 / 20 natural size": in a frame with attributes of power and glory, where the image of the king was usually placed, a donkey is drawn. Lansere in 1906 prints the cartoon "Feast": the tsarist generals in a gloomy feast listen not to singing, but to screaming soldiers standing at attention. Dobuzhinsky in the picture “October Idyll” remains true to the theme of the modern city, only ominous signs of events burst into this city: a window broken by a bullet, a lying doll, glasses and a blood stain on the wall and on the pavement. Kustodiev made a number of caricatures of the tsar and his generals and portraits of the tsarist ministers, Witte, Ignatiev, Dubasov, and others, exceptional in their sharpness and malicious irony, whom he studied so well while helping Repin in his work on the State Council. Suffice it to say that Witte under his hand appears as a staggering clown with a red banner in one hand and the royal flag in the other.
But the most expressive in the revolutionary graphics of those years should be recognized as the drawings of V.A. Serov. His position was quite definite during the revolution of 1905. The revolution brought to life a whole series of Serov's caricatures: “1905. After the Pacification” (Nicholas II, with a racket under his arm, distributes St. George's crosses to the suppressors); "Harvest" (rifles are laid in sheaves on the field). The most famous composition in this series is “Soldiers, brave kids! Where is your glory? (1905, Russian Museum). Serov's civic position, his skill, observation and wise laconism as a draftsman were fully manifested here. Serov depicts the beginning of the Cossacks' attack on the demonstrators on January 9, 1905. In the background, the demonstrators are given in a general mass; in front, at the very edge of the sheet, there are large individual figures of Cossacks, and between the first and the background, in the center, an officer calling them to attack on horseback, with a saber drawn. The name, as it were, contains all the bitter irony of the situation: the Russian soldiers took up arms against their people. So it was, and so this tragic event was seen not only by Serov from the window of his workshop, but also (let us say figuratively) from the depths of the liberal consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. Russian artists who sympathized with the revolution of 1905 did not know what cataclysms of national history they were on the verge of. Taking the side of the revolution, they preferred, relatively speaking, a terrorist bomber (from the heirs of nihilists-raznochintsy, "with their skills in political struggle and ideological indoctrination of broad sections of society, ”according to the correct definition of one historian) policeman, standing in the protection of order. They did not know that the "red wheel" of the revolution would sweep away not only the autocracy they hated, but the whole way of Russian life, the whole Russian culture, which they served and which was dear to them.
In 1903, as already mentioned, one of the largest exhibition associations of the beginning of the century, the Union of Russian Artists, arose. At first, almost all the prominent figures of the "World of Art" entered it - Benois, Bakst, Somov, Dobuzhinsky, Serov, Vrubel, Borisov-Musatov were participants in the first exhibitions. The initiators of the creation of the association were Moscow artists associated with the "World of Art", but weighed down by the programmatic aesthetics of Petersburgers. The face of the "Union" was determined mainly by Moscow painters of the Itinerant direction, students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the heirs of Savrasov, students of Serov and K. Korovin. Many exhibited at the same time in traveling exhibitions. The exhibitors of the "Union" were artists of different worldviews: S. Ivanov, M. Nesterov, A. Arkhipov, the Korovin brothers, L. Pasternak. Organizational affairs were in charge of A.M. Vasnetsov, S.A. Vinogradov, V.V. Binders. Pillars of wandering V.M. Vasnetsov, Surikov, Polenov were its members. K. Korovin was considered the leader of the "Union".
The national landscape, lovingly painted pictures of peasant Russia, is one of the main genres of the artists of the Union, in which “Russian impressionism” expressed itself in a peculiar way, with its predominantly rural rather than urban motifs. So the landscapes of I.E. Grabar (1871–1960) with their lyrical mood, with the finest pictorial nuances reflecting instantaneous changes in true nature, is a kind of parallel on Russian soil to the French impressionistic landscape (“September Snow”, 1903, State Tretyakov Gallery). In his automonography, Grabar recalls this plein-air landscape: “The spectacle of snow with bright yellow foliage was so unexpected and at the same time so beautiful that I immediately settled down on the terrace and painted ... a picture in three days.” Grabar's interest in the decomposition of visible color into spectral, pure colors of the palette also makes him related to neo-impressionism, to J. Seurat and P. Signac ("March Snow", 1904, State Tretyakov Gallery). The play of colors in nature, complex coloristic effects become the subject of close study of the "Allies", who create on the canvas a pictorial and plastic figurative world, devoid of narrative and illustrativeness.
With all the interest in the transmission of light and air in the painting of the masters of the "Union", the dissolution of the object in the light-air medium is never observed. The color becomes decorative.
The "Allies", unlike the Petersburgers - the graphic artists of the "World of Art" - are mostly painters with a heightened decorative sense of color. An excellent example of this is the paintings of F.A. Malyavin.
Among the participants of the "Union" there were artists who were close to the "World of Art" by the very theme of creativity. So, K.F. Yuon (1875-1958) was attracted by the appearance of ancient Russian cities, the panorama of old Moscow. But Yuon is far from aesthetically admiring the motives of the past, the ghostly architectural landscape. These are not Versailles parks and Tsarskoye Selo baroque, but the architecture of old Moscow in its spring or winter guise. Pictures of nature are full of life, they feel a natural impression, from which the artist was primarily repelled (March Sun, 1915, State Tretyakov Gallery; Trinity Lavra in Winter, 1910, Russian Museum). Subtle changeable states of nature are depicted in the landscapes of another member of the "Union" and at the same time a member of the Association of Traveling Exhibitions - S.Yu. Zhukovsky (1873-1944): the bottomlessness of the sky, changing its color, the slow movement of water, the sparkling of snow under the moon ("Moonlight Night", 1899, State Tretyakov Gallery; "Dam", 1909, State Russian Museum). Often he also has the motif of an abandoned estate.
In the painting by the painter of the St. Petersburg school, a loyal member of the "Union of Russian Artists" A.A. Rylov (1870-1939), "Green Noise" (1904), the master managed to convey, as it were, the very breath of a fresh wind, under which trees sway and sails swell. There are some joyful and disturbing forebodings in it. The romantic traditions of his teacher Kuindzhi also affected here.
On the whole, The Allies gravitated not only towards plein-air studies, but also towards monumental pictorial forms. By 1910, the time of the split and the secondary formation of the "World of Art", at the exhibitions of the "Union" one could see an intimate landscape (Vinogradov, Petrovichev, Yuon, etc.), painting close to French divisionism (Grabar, early Larionov) or close symbolism (P. Kuznetsov, Sapunov, Sudeikin); they were also attended by the artists of Diaghilev's "World of Art" - Benois, Somov, Bakst, Lansere, Dobuzhinsky.
The "Union of Russian Artists", with its solid realistic foundations, which played a significant role in the domestic fine arts, had a certain impact on the formation of the Soviet school of painting, having existed until 1923.
The years between the two revolutions are characterized by the intensity of creative searches, sometimes directly excluding each other. In 1907, in Moscow, the Golden Fleece magazine organized the only exhibition of artists following Borisov-Musatov, called the Blue Rose. P. Kuznetsov became the leading artist of the Blue Rose. M. Saryan, N. Sapunov, S. Sudeikin, K. Petrov-Vodkin, A. Fonvizin, sculptor A. Matveev grouped around him during the years of study. The “Blue Bears” are closest to symbolism, which was expressed primarily in their “language”: unsteadiness of mood, vague, untranslatable musicality of associations, refinement of color relationships. In Russian art, symbolism was most likely formed in literature; in the very first years of the new century, such names as A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Ivanov, S. Solovyov already sounded. Separate elements of "pictorial symbolism" also appeared in the work of Vrubel, as already mentioned, Borisov-Musatov, Roerich, Chiurlionis. In the painting of Kuznetsov and his associates, there were many points of contact with the poetics of Balmont, Bryusov, Bely, only they were attached to symbolism through the operas of Wagner, the dramas of Ibsen, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck. The exhibition "Blue Rose" was a kind of synthesis: symbolist poets performed at it, modern music was performed. The aesthetic platform of the participants of the exhibition also had an effect in subsequent years, and the name of this exhibition became a household name for a whole trend in art in the second half of the 900s. The entire activity of the "Blue Rose" also bears the strongest imprint of the influence of the Art Nouveau style (plane-decorative stylization of forms, whimsical linear rhythms).
The works of Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov (1878–1968) reflect the basic principles of the Blue Bears. His work embodies the neo-romantic concept of "beautiful clarity" (an expression of the poet M. Kuzmin). Kuznetsov created a decorative panel-picture in which he sought to abstract from everyday concreteness, to show the unity of man and nature, the stability of the eternal cycle of life and nature, the birth of the human soul in this harmony. Hence the desire for monumental forms of painting, dreamy-contemplative, cleansed of everything instantaneous, universal, timeless notes, a constant desire to convey the spirituality of matter. A figure is only a sign expressing a concept; color serves to convey feelings; rhythm - in order to introduce into a certain world of sensations (as in icon painting - a symbol of love, tenderness, sorrow, etc.). Hence the reception of a uniform distribution of light over the entire surface of the canvas as one of the foundations of Kuznetsov's decorative effect. Serov said that P. Kuznetsov's nature "breathes". This is perfectly expressed in his Kyrgyz (Steppe) and Bukhara suites, in Central Asian landscapes. (“Sleeping in a sheepfold” of 1911, as A. Rusakova, a researcher of Kuznetsov’s work, writes, is an image of a dreamy steppe world, peace, harmony. The depicted woman is not a specific person, but a Kyrgyz woman in general, a sign of the Mongolian race.) High sky, boundless desert, gentle hills, tents, flocks of sheep create an image of a patriarchal idyll. The eternal, unattainable dream of harmony, of the fusion of man with nature, which at all times worried artists (Mirage in the Steppe, 1912, State Tretyakov Gallery). Kuznetsov studied the techniques of ancient Russian icon painting, the early Italian Renaissance. This appeal to the classical traditions of world art in search of its own great style, as correctly noted by researchers, was of fundamental importance in a period when any traditions were often denied altogether.
The exoticism of the East - Iran, Egypt, Turkey - is embodied in the landscapes of Martiros Sergeevich Saryan (1880-1972). The East was a natural theme for the Armenian artist. Saryan creates in his painting a world full of bright decorativeness, more passionate, more earthly than that of Kuznetsov, and the pictorial solution is always built on contrasting color relationships, without nuances, in sharp shadow comparison (“Date Palm, Egypt”, 1911, maps. , tempera, GTG). Note that the oriental works of Saryan with their color contrasts appear before the works of Matisse, created by him after traveling to Algeria and Morocco.
The images of Saryan are monumental due to the generalization of forms, large colorful planes, the general lapidarity of the language - this is, as a rule, a generalized image of Egypt, whether, Persia, native Armenia, while maintaining vital naturalness, as if written from life. Saryan's decorative canvases are always cheerful, they correspond to his idea of creativity: “... a work of art is the very result of happiness, that is, creative work. Consequently, it should ignite the flame of creative burning in the viewer, contribute to the identification of his natural desire for happiness and freedom.
Kuznetsov and Saryan created a poetic image of a colorful and rich world in different ways, one based on the traditions of ancient Russian icon art, the other on ancient Armenian miniatures. During the Blue Rose period, they were also united by an interest in Oriental motifs and symbolic tendencies. An impressionistic perception of reality was not characteristic of the Blue Rose artists.
The "Goluborozites" worked a lot and fruitfully in the theater, where they came into close contact with the dramaturgy of symbolism. N.N. Sapunov (1880–1912) and S.Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946) designed the dramas of M. Maeterlinck, one Sapunov - G. Ibsen and Blok's "Balaganchik". Sapunov also transferred this theatrical fantasy, the lubok stylization of the fair into his easel works, sharply decorative still lifes with paper flowers in exquisite porcelain vases (“Peonies”, 1908, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery), into grotesque genre scenes in which reality is mixed with phantasmagoria (“Masquerade”, 1907, State Tretyakov Gallery).
In 1910, a number of young artists - P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, R. Falk, A. Kuprin, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova and others - united in the Jack of Diamonds organization, which had its own charter, arranged exhibitions and published its own collections of articles. The “Jack of Diamonds” actually existed until 1917. As post-impressionism, primarily Cezanne, was a “reaction to impressionism”, so the “Jack of Diamonds” opposed the vagueness, untranslatability, the subtlest nuances of the symbolic language of the “Blue Rose” and the aesthetic stylism of the “World of Art” . The "Knave of Diamonds", carried away by the materiality, "materiality" of the world, professed a clear construction of the picture, emphasized objectivity of the form, intensity, fullness of color. It is no coincidence that the still life becomes a favorite genre of the “Valetovites”, just as the landscape becomes a favorite genre of the members of the Union of Russian Artists. Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov (1881-1944) in his still lifes ("Blue Plums", 1910, State Tretyakov Gallery; "Still Life with Camellia", 1913, State Tretyakov Gallery) fully expresses the program of this association, as Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky (1876-1956) - in portraits (portrait of G. Yakulov, 1910, Russian Museum; "Matador Manuel Hart", 1910, State Tretyakov Gallery). The subtlety in conveying the change of moods, the psychologism of the characteristics, the understatement of the states, the dematerialization of the painting of the Blue Bearers, their romantic poetry are rejected by the Valetovites. They are opposed by the almost spontaneous festivity of colors, the expression of the contour drawing, the juicy pasty broad manner of writing, which convey an optimistic vision of the world, creating an almost farcical, square mood. Konchalovsky and Mashkov in their portraits give a vivid, but one-dimensional characterization, sharpening one feature almost to the point of grotesque; in still lifes, they emphasize the plane of the canvas, the rhythm of color spots (“Agave”, 1916, State Tretyakov Gallery, - Konchalovsky; portrait of a lady with a pheasant, 1911, Russian Museum, - Mashkov). The "Knave of Diamonds" allow such simplifications in the interpretation of the form, which are akin to a popular popular print, a folk toy, painting tiles, a signboard. The craving for primitivism (from the Latin primitivus - primitive, initial) manifested itself in various artists who imitated the simplified forms of art of the so-called primitive eras - primitive tribes and nationalities - in search of gaining immediacy and integrity of artistic perception. The “Jack of Diamonds” drew its perceptions from Cezanne (hence sometimes the name “Russian Cezanneism”), or rather, from the decorative version of Cezanneism - Fauvism, even more - from Cubism, even from Futurism; from cubism “shift” of forms, from futurism - dynamics, various modifications of form, as in the painting “Ring. Belfry of Ivan the Great” (1915, State Tretyakov Gallery) by A.V. Lentulov (1884–1943). Lentulov created a very expressive image, built on the motif of old architecture, the harmony of which is broken by the nervous, sharp perception of modern man, due to industrial rhythms.
P.P. portraits Falk (1886-1958), who remained faithful to cubism in understanding and interpreting form (it is not for nothing that they speak of Falk's "lyrical cubism"), developed in subtle color-plastic harmonies that convey a certain state of the model.
In the still lifes and landscapes of A. V. Kuprin (1880–1960), sometimes an epic note appears, there is a tendency to generalization (“Still life with a pumpkin, a vase and tassels”, 1917, State Tretyakov Gallery, rightly called by researchers “a poem glorifying the painter’s tools”) . Kuprin's decorative beginning is combined with an analytical insight into nature.
The extreme simplification of the form, the direct connection with the art of signage is especially noticeable in M.F. Larionov (1881-1964), one of the founders of the "Jack of Diamonds", but already in 1911 broke with him and organized new exhibitions: "Donkey's Tail" and "Target". Larionov paints landscapes, portraits, still lifes, works as a theater artist of the Diaghilev entreprise, then turns to genre painting, his theme is the life of a provincial street, soldiers' barracks. The forms are flat, grotesque, as if deliberately stylized as a child's drawing, popular print or signboard. In 1913, Larionov published his book "Luchism" - in fact, the first of the manifestos of abstract art, the true creators of which in Russia were V. Kandinsky and K. Malevich.
Artist N.S. Goncharova (1881–1962), Larionov's wife, developed the same tendencies in her genre paintings, mostly on a peasant theme. In the years under review, in her work, more decorative and colorful than the art of Larionov, monumental in its inner strength and laconicism, a passion for primitivism is keenly felt. Describing the work of Goncharova and Larionov, the term "neo-primitivism" is often used. During these years, A. Shevchenko, V. Chekrygin, K. Malevich, V. Tatlin, M. Chagall are close to them in terms of artistic worldview, the search for an expressive language. Each of these artists (the only exception is Chekrygin, who died very early) soon found his own creative path.
M.Z. Chagall (1887–1985) created fantasies transformed from the boring impressions of small-town Vitebsk life and interpreted in a naive-poetic and grotesque-symbolic spirit. With surreal space, bright colorfulness, deliberate primitivization of form, Chagall turns out to be close to both Western expressionism and primitive folk art (“I and the Village”, 1911, Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; “Over Vitebsk”, 1914, coll. Zak. Toronto; "Wedding", 1918, State Tretyakov Gallery).
Many of the masters named above, close to the "Jack of Diamonds", were members of the St. Petersburg organization "Union of Youth", which took shape almost simultaneously with the "Jack of Diamonds" (1909). In addition to Chagall, P. Filonov, K. Malevich, V. Tatlin, Yu. Annenkov, N. Altman, D. Burliuk, A. Exter and others exhibited in the Soyuz. L. Zheverzheev played the leading role in it. Just like the "valetovtsy", members of the "Union of Youth" published theoretical collections. Until the collapse of the association in 1917. The "Union of Youth" did not have a specific program, professing symbolism, and cubism, and futurism, and "non-objectivity", but each of the artists had his own creative face.
The most difficult to characterize P.N. Filonov (1883–1941). D. Sarabyanov correctly defined Filonov's work as "lonely and unique." In this sense, he rightly puts the artist on a par with A. Ivanov, N. Ge, V. Surikov, M. Vrubel. Nevertheless, the figure of Filonov, his appearance in Russian artistic culture of the 10s of the XX century. natural. With his focus on “a kind of self-developing movement of forms” (D. Sarabyanov), Filonov is closest to futurism, but he is far from it with the problems of his work. Rather, it is closer not to the picturesque, but to the poetic futurism of Khlebnikov with his search for the original meaning of the word. “Often starting to paint a picture from any one edge, transferring his creative charge to the forms, Filonov gives them life, and then, as if not by the will of the artist, but by their own movement, they develop, change, renew, grow. This self-development of forms by Filonov is truly amazing” (D. Sarabyanov).
The art of the pre-revolutionary years in Russia is marked by the extraordinary complexity and inconsistency of artistic quests, hence the successive groupings with their own program settings and stylistic preferences. But along with the experimenters in the field of abstract forms in the Russian art of that time, the "World of Art" and "Goluborozites", "allies", "knaves of diamonds" continued to work at the same time, there was also a powerful stream of neoclassical currents, an example of which can be the work of an active member of the "Mir art” in his “second generation” Z.E. Serebryakova (1884–1967). In her poetic genre canvases with their laconic drawing, palpably sensual plastic modeling, and balance of composition, Serebryakova comes from the high national traditions of Russian art, primarily Venetsianov and even further from ancient Russian art (“Peasants”, 1914, Russian Museum; “Harvest”, 1915 , Odessa Art Museum; "Whitening of the canvas", 1917, State Tretyakov Gallery).
Finally, brilliant evidence of the vitality of national traditions, the great ancient Russian painting, is the work of Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), an artist-thinker who later became the most prominent master of art of the Soviet period. In the famous painting Bathing the Red Horse (1912, Fri), the artist resorted to a figurative metaphor. As it was correctly noted, the young man on a bright red horse evokes associations with the popular image of St. George the Victorious (“Saint Yegory”), and the generalized silhouette, rhythmic, compact composition, the saturation of contrasting color spots that sound in full force, and the flatness in the interpretation of forms lead in memory of an ancient Russian icon. A harmoniously enlightened image is created by Petrov-Vodkin in the monumental painting “Girls on the Volga” (1915, State Tretyakov Gallery), in which he also feels his orientation towards the traditions of Russian art, leading the master to a true nationality.
