This is not really the moment to be posting a history of Russian art. I started learning about it 2 years ago, finished writing about it recently and now really want to get to the 18th century in Europe. I’m just clearing the decks: no affront intended. Russian art is not well known in the West. There are reasons for that, which are mentioned in the summary of each chapter. WordPress has changed slightly – each chapter has a big download button (whereas for my art notes on other pages you click on the title of the chapter).
(26 pages, 45 pictures)
To begin with nascent Russia, centred on Kiev, was pagan. Grand Prince Vladimir felt he had to adopt a religion and, having reviewed the options, chose the Greek Orthodox Church. For ordinary folk, largely illiterate, the wonders and power of Christianity were best conveyed through pictures and imposing churches, so Vladimir started building. The same approach had long been adopted by the Roman Catholic Church and the Normans in England would soon follow suit. The art of early Russia is really church architecture, frescoes and icons. There was little artistic contact with the West: master builders and artists came from Constantinople to build and decorate the new stone cathedrals in Russia. Like all northern heavily-forested countries, most structures in Russia were made of wood. The majority of new Russian churches were wooden, built by native craftsmen. To begin with the designs for secular buildings were adapted, but wooden churches soon became more elaborate. They were, however, very different to stave churches in Norway and log churches in Finland (there’s a small project waiting there). Russian painting remained almost entirely religious into the 17th century. Artistic contact with Western Europe grew after Ivan III married Zoe, a ward of the Pope: Italian artists (along with other technical experts) were invited to serve in Moscow. The origin of portraiture in Russia came when Queen Elizabeth sent her portrait to Ivan the Great after a trade treaty had been agreed.
(68 pages, 105 pictures)
Portraits for Tsars and the nobility were commissioned from foreign artists. There were really no Russian artists. There was no middle/merchant class and therefore no guilds, just the nobility (who felt painting to be beneath them) and serfs (required by the nobles largely for productive work). Peter the Great brought Western European culture to Russia. His desire to set up an Academy of Arts was finally realised in 1764. Portraiture was the dominant form and remained so into the opening decades of the 19th century. As a comparison, the full range of artistic genres had been going on for three centuries in Western Europe. Innovation in Russian art came outside the Academy. Landscapes started to appear from the 1820s, peaking from 1870. Most significant was the development of art as social criticism from just before the middle of the 19th century. Initially, the norms of behaviour of the Russian nobility and the attitudes of the Orthodox Clergy came under fire. Then, and more powerfully, art made demands for social reform, portrayed the life of peasants and depicted the failure of revolutionaries. Almost none of this art appeared in the West. Of course, works of social criticism would have appealed in Europe – impoverished titled young men seeking a daughter from a rich merchant family was a phenomenon common in England, for example – but most paintings were too closely related to the Russian experience to have much resonance beyond her borders. Further, travelling to Russia was not easy and touring within the country was virtually impossible as roads were few and railways non-existent for much of the 19th century.
(66 pages, 130 pictures)
Having lagged behind Europe, and by some margin, the early part of the 20th century was astonishingly different. In the space of 20 years, Russian art not only ‘caught up’ with modern trends in the West but took on a leading role. The appearance of Ballet Russe in Paris and London with fantastic costumes and sets must have been a beautiful shock to the art world and its patrons. Then the art of the Russian avant-garde gripped Europe, notably the pioneers of abstract art Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. The latter, together with Marc Chagall, has a separate chapter.
(29 pages, 47 pictures)
Although their formative years were spent at home, most of their careers lay outside Russia. Each of them had their ideas for art education rejected by their Soviet peers in 1920 and 1921 and they emigrated. The story of Chagall’s art can be told through his biography. The works of Kandinsky have little to do with events in his life but reflect his developing theory of art.
Russian artists were generally whole-hearted supporters of the October 1917 Revolution. The works they produced to educate people about the vast changes in their country and to improve life wrought innovations in graphic design, photo-montage and material design which (mostly via El Lissitzky and the Bauhaus) also influenced the West. After this intensive period of extensive export of Russian art and artistic talent, the shutters came down.
(77 pages, 148 pictures)
Almost nothing came out of the USSR which was of interest to the West once Stalin came to power in the late 1920s. Officially sanctioned Socialist Realism works, whilst not without merit, had little appeal in a Western Europe whose art was expanding with all manner of new approaches after World War I. The works of Russian modern artists which would have been popular were banished to dusty store-rooms and museum basements, to emerge only in the late 1980s. The iron grip exerted on art by Stalin relaxed under Khrushchev and Socialist Realist art expanded into new styles. More importantly, Unofficial Art flourished, but not much was exported: some pieces did make it out of Russia and some artists were exiled (although usually their works were retained by Soviet authorities). During the Cold War, travel to the USSR and exports from the country were tightly controlled so only limited information about Soviet life and art was available: the USSR was not a place for cultural vacations. It can be said that Unofficial Art in the Soviet Union ‘caught up’ with the West from the 1960s to the 1980s.
There is much here that will be new. It is telling that in this introduction (compared to the others elsewhere in the blog) there are few named artists. That’s not because Russian artists were not talented, but I want to re-create the start of my journey: I didn’t know any Russia artists working before the early 20th century and none who worked during Stalin’s years. I discovered many who are now favourites. But these are personal choices and I don’t want to sway you by naming names. If nothing else (and as always), I hope some of the pictures will grab your attention and you will enjoy them. Who cares about the text??!
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