By the end of the first half of the 19th Century, Russian intellectuals supported the need for reform in Russia. Russia had entered the age of capital development. Influenced by the liberal ideas of Chernyshevsky and Belinski, the Itinerant movement established the first Free Society of Artists in Russia. The founding of the Itinerant's movement was a measure calculated to express the need for rejection of the social order in Tsarist Russia. The objectives of the Itinerants were:
- the enlightenment of the people by affording them the opportunity to learn about the new Russian art;
- the aesthetic objective of forming a new artistic sense and taste;
- the economic objective of attracting new buyers in order to have a market for the new art.
Itinerants (Peredvizhniki) List: I.Shishkin, N.Ghe (Gay), V.Perov, I.Kramskoi, I.Repin, V.Surikov, G.Myasoedov, Kamenev, A.Savrasov, Amosov, Ammon, M.P.Klodt, M.K.Klodt, Pryanishnikov, A. Bogolyubov, Gun (Huns), V.Makovskiy, N.Makovskiy, K.Makovskiy, V.Maksimov, K.Bryullov, K.Savitskiy, A.Kuindji, Bronnikov, V.Vasnetsov, A.Vasnetsov, Litovchenko, Lemokh, V.Polenov, Volkov, Leman, Nevrev, Kharlamov, Kuznetsov, Bodarevskiy, N.Dubovskoy, Svetoslavskiy, N.Shil'der, Arkhipov, I.Levitan, I.Ostrouhov, Zagorskiy, Lebedev, Stepanov, Pozen, Kasatkin, Miloradovich, Shanks, V.Serov, Bogdanov-Bel'skiy, I.Bogdanov, A.Korin, Endogurov, Nesterov, Baksheev, Orlov, Kostandi.
With the onset of the itinerant movement, new terms to describe Russian art began to be heard. Phrases such as "enlightening," "aesthetic objective," "economic objective," "new," "fresh," "for the first time" were heard all over the country. This was the first time in the history of the Russian world of art that the subject matter was rich and expansive. The method used by these artists was to conduct traveling art exhibits in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other large cities throughout Russia. This set the Itinerants on a collision course with the forces of the Academy and set the stage for an entirely new type of art. Russian art has never looked back. Everyone in Russia became involved in the conflict. Critics, artists, academics, newspapers, politicians, and even the common people could not let the matter rest. Exhibition halls became battlegrounds between the new and the old. Today it is difficult to understand that the emotion of the times and the results of the movement clearly shook the forces of empire to their very depths.
The itinerant artists themselves were from all walks of life and age. Some were peasants, and some were of the nobility, but all were united in a single goal. That goal was to depict life in Russia as it really was. The difference between this path and Classicism and Romanticism was that for the first time painting was focused on present day reality. The artist's hand was freed from the restrictions of lofty ideals. Painting reflected events and the contradictions of Russian society. The lives of common Russian people including their struggles against oppression were revealed through art. The love of the Russian people for their country and its nature was deified, and for the first time, paintings were free of social prejudice. One must be aware that all the while Russia, unlike other Western European countries, was a land where the political freedom to express oneself was strictly prohibited. Free expression was prohibited almost to the point of non-understanding in this country. It was only in the field of the arts (painting, literature, music, theater, etc.) that there was any possibility self expression. This led the Itinerants to feel as if they were given a special responsibility to effect change. The artists willingly took on this mission as a sacred duty. The great Ilya Repin wrote that artists come from the people and that the people expect art that reflects a clear understanding of conditions and nature.
This generation of Itinerants tried to analyze and determine what art was and what role it played in social life. The great Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov defined this aspiration as follows: "The artists striving to unite to setup their own society were not doing it for the purpose of creating beautiful paintings and statues for the sole purpose of earning money. They were striving to create something for the minds and feelings of the people." This is why arguments that arose at the exhibition halls were concerned with far more than pure artistic arguments. The artists themselves were of varying talent, and different painting genres, but as members of the Society became "Universal Artists," who worked in different forms of art. For example, the most talented of the Itinerants (Repin, shishkin, and others) worked in both painting and drawing. As a result of their efforts, easel drawing stopped being merely preparatory work for future paintings and developed into an independent form of art.
Other examples of multi-talented artists include artists such as Vasiliy Polenov and Victor Vasnetsov. These two Itinerants worked, not only as easel painters, but each also devoted a great deal of time in reviving theater scenery painting thus laying the foundation for the tradition of Russian theater decor that reached its peak at the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries. This effort was done in conjunction with artists of another artistic society, the World of Art. Vasnetsov, among others, also created many mural paintings for churches. Being universal artists, many Itinerants worked successfully in other genres. Ivan Kramskoi, Nikolai Ghe, Ilya Repin, and Vasiliy Surikov were fine portraitists and history theme painters. Polenov was an historical painter as well as a landscapist. Nikolai Yaroshenko worked in portrait, landscape, and genre painting. In spite of multi-talented artists that worked in many genres, one must not forget, subjects and heroes, the images of Russian nature and human destiny always remained the main themes of their creativity. While working on these motifs each artist revealed his own understanding of the fundamental problems of human existence.
In order to comprehend the work of the Itinerants more fully, one must examine some of the new tendencies brought by the Itinerants to Russian art. Genre painting was the primary method of bringing realism to Russian art though it was not new for Russian art in the whole. The range of themes represented here was extremely wide, embracing studio works depicting everyday life in the city and peasant life in the country. In some instances huge paintings were created in order to accomplish these goals.
Before serfdom was abolished by the reform act of 1861, peasants had belonged to a landlord. The liberation of the serfs entailed many new problems in society. The serfs were freed but were not given the right to own land. Therefore, they had no means of support. Many serfs fled to the cities and into the arms of a miserable existence. They were no longer peasants but they did not find acceptance in the cities. They were no longer able to always maintain the ties that had previously bound them to their families. The villages they left behind had also changed. Customary ways of making a living were changed forever, and again family relations were affected. The peasantry became very heterogeneous and in some cases were able to engage in cottage industry that changed their relationship with the local nobility. A classic painting by Maximov, The Division of the Family Property is a sterling example of this change in Russian lifestyles.
Vladimir Makovskiy, a very prolific artist dedicated his creative works to a reflection of urban life. His paintings The Date and On the Boulevard are perhaps his two best works. By depicting ordinary life he managed to reflect the deepest tragedies of contemporary society. The poverty of the most vulnerable members of society children and their miserable existence, mothers being doomed to the worst, the estrangement of sons totally exhausted by backbreaking labor were clearly recognizable in these two paintings.The Date is particularly remarkable. When viewing the painting, you can sense the same strain and emotional disconnect that you find in On the Boulevard. At first glance nothing seems askance in either painting. You sense nothing amiss due to the lack of action or covert tension. You see two people sitting on a bench - one of them a young woman with a child, newly arrived from the village to visit her husband. Her husband sitting beside her has become a foreigner to his family and apparently has been so for sometime. The more you look the more you see of a tragedy slowly unfolding before your very eyes. The viewer becomes aware of the contrast between the interplay of the people and the surrounding beauty of an August day on an old Moscow street, oblivious to the tragedy between the husband and wife.
The oldest artist among the itinerants was Vasiliy Perov. His creativity played a special role in the establishment of Russian realism. In his painting Religious Procession on Easter that belongs to his early period, we can find a critical tendency, a typical feature of early realism. He criticizes priests that are to bring the faith to the people but actually do not deserve to be the Lord's pupils. Following a period of creativity, Perov tried to avoid a rude unmasking of people's sins and defects. He starts telling a sad story of contemporary reality. Seeing -off the Deceased is a story in art in which we can see the image of a peasant woman free from idealization. Her fate gains the sympathy and compassion of the viewer. The landscape in an artist's paintings starts playing a specific role in setting the mood of the whole painting. In the 1870s, Perov changed from sad and tragic subjects. He started depicting common people happy with their simple human joy and hobbies. He depicted fishermen, hunters on the holt, and bemused duck hunters.
The creative heritage of Ilya Repin plays a special role in genre painting and in Russian art as a whole. He is considered to be the most talented and famous Russian painter. His interests in painting were pointed mainly to contemporary subjects. He was interested in all aspects of Russian reality, but his talent was more fully revealed in genre and portrait painting. His works can be considered as an encyclopedia of Russian life with its heroes and events. His first famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, painted while he was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts, showed his talent and characteristic manner of work. Unlike the artists who had treated this subject before, Repin was much more interested in the participants of the scene. He wanted the viewers to see their fates and personalities more than the hard labor they were forced to perform. He was the first in the history of art who tried to peer into people's faces to understand who they were. For the first time a common Russian man was depicted as a hero of artistic work. He didn't idealize his heroes but tried to demonstrate their personality. For the first time people could see a group portrait of miserable and humiliated Russian people.
Such an artist's aspiration to concentrate attention on the psychology of the bargemen was always Repin's characteristic feature. Another illustration of this was his painting Religious Procession in Kursk Province. This painting is very typical of Repin and is remarkable for its characteristic details of that time. Being a talented artist he had a wonderfully keen feeling of the main idea that needed to be expressed. One of the features of art of the 1870-80s was the tendency to create big monumental works whereby a person viewing the one life depicted on the canvas could analyze present day reality and see the whole historical epoch of the Russian people. This technique illustrated that genre painting proved to be as powerful and as important as historical painting. Genre paintings illustrated the life of the Russian province, in both events and in human portraits. The action in Religious Procession in Kursk Province takes place in a province famous for its dense forests, but in the picture we can see only stumps left after the trees had been cut down. Modern man's activity resulted in the destruction of nature. We see crowds of people marching along the dusty road.
The composition was arranged in such a way that we almost feel the crowd moving forward, about to crush the spectator. Real religious faith can be read on the faces of heroes depicted on the left of the canvas and especially in the face of the hunchback on the foreground. Note that he is pushed aside by the policeman riding a horse because this poor cripple might disturb rich people proceeding along the road. (Didn't Christ say we are all equal before him?) The painting shows us two extremes: superficial, cold, hypocritical religious feelings on the right half and true believers in God in the left half of the painting. These people are rejected by this insincere society on the left part of the painting. By paying such attention to the individuality of a person, Repin displays the great variety of types and characters of his heroes. In the foreground we see a rich merchant woman avidly holding a icon. She is drawn into arrogance, clearly breaking a main tenet of Christianity. We can spend hours examining the painting whereby the motley crowd is represented as an integral part of the Russian people.
Painting present day reality, Repin managed to reveal a new social phenomena by using new participants. He was an artist forever seeking new subjects, themes, images and means of expression. Many times in his paintings he addressed new social and political moods and, of course, revolutionary events. The policy of terror carried out by several revolutionary organizations entailed cruel murders of some prominent politicians and the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881. This consequently resulted in extremely strict and bloody responses by the Government. As the country became more and more submerged in the blood of innocent victims, the attitude towards revolutionaries gradually changed in the society. Art in this matter absorbed and reflected all topical ideas. Initially revolutionary activity was often compared with the excruciating life and death of the saints of the Gospel who sacrificed their lives for faith. Repin was affected by these ideas, and he painted his Refusal to Confess which glorified fanatical ideas of the day.
Afterwards he conceived the idea of another work They did not expect him, a story about the return of an exiled convict. The interesting thing is that originally Repin planned for a woman to be the main actor in the painting, as women were fighting for these new ideas next to men. Later the artist gave up this idea having considered that it would add some sentimental aspect to the painting. Besides, he realized that the question of the main hero was not so relevant compared to the subject itself. Terrorists were ready to die for the sake of the idea and for the sake of their loved ones. Did these loved ones want such a sacrifice to be made? How did relatives meet these returning anarchists after being separated for decades? Repin's contemporaries usually associated this painting with the parable of the return of the prodigal son. None of the artists expressed an opinion, thus making the viewer decide the destiny of the hero.
Bloody events of reality had not always been reflected directly in genre painting. The background of Repin's Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan was an expression of the artist's feeling of the atmosphere and smell of spilled blood in the room where Ivan the Terrible is holding the head of his son. A son he had just struck in the head with a stave and murdered in a fit of temper. Another painting Nicholas from Mirl, calls for love and forgiveness and shows us how the main hero, Saint Nikolai, intervenes at an execution and saves the lives of people sentenced to death.
Continue in Part II
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