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Russian cities and waters

As a serious artistic activity, Russian painting really dates only from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Block put it, "Russian culture is a combination of cultures, we are a new country". Block's new country was actually synthetic and coldly calculated - created at the beginning of the eighteenth century with Peter the Great's westernization of Old Russia. This had often been carried out with great brutality. And in some ways so too had Peter's introduction of western culture, art and architecture. Russian society was originally tribal and backward, its art either primitive and decorative or religious. Then it was suddenly faced with the highly sophisticated art and architecture of the West. Peter's new capital, Saint Petersburg, was shaped as a model of the ideal European city, a kind of Venice or Amsterdam of the North, built on what had been the swampy delta of a river flowing into the Baltic Sea. And it was built by a man whose first love was the sea. Apart from its symbolic and political function, the new city was to be effectively a living textbook of the new western architecture, art and culture, set like jewels on the lid of a box floating on the waters of the Neva.

Oceans

A brilliant student in the 1830s at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Art, Ivan Aivazovskiy (1817-1900) became the most renowned Russian painter of seascapes. With a stipend from the Academy to study and work in Europe, he absorbed the work of the old masters and, because he had determined to become a painter of the water, such sea painters as Ludolf Backhuysen. Despite - or perhaps because of - his relatively unusual favourite subject, he was soon very popular. "All agree", wrote one contemporary, "Only Aivazovskiy depicts light, air and water so truthfully and convincingly."

He returned to Russia in 1844 via Holland, where he was made a member of the Amsterdam Academy. On his arrival in Saint Petersburg, the Tsar made him an academician of its Academy of Art and Painter to the Chief Naval Staff, and commissioned him to paint views of major naval sites. The following year (1845) he went with the Black Sea fleet through the Greek islands to paint local coastal scenery and soon settled in his homeland Crimea, where he was based for the rest of his long life. He exhibited abroad and in Russia, and travelled not only in Russia but in the Mediterranean coastal region, Turkey, Italy, France (where in 1857 he was given the Legion of Honour following a successful exhibition) and even, late in life, to the United States, where he painted the great waterscape Niagara Falls.

He was immensely popular with the navy, not least because at the beginning of his career he painted an important series of naval battles from Russia's heroic past.

During his early European years, Aivazovskiy traveled throughout Europe, including Holland and England, where he met Turner.

He returned again and again to those magical Turneresque reds and oranges, in the 'Malaga Seascape' of 1854, the 'Shipwreck off Mount Athos' of 1856, and two pale orange limpid misty morning seascapes, 'Morning at Sea' of 1849 and 'Farewells at the Seashore' of 1851, where in both cases a becalmed ship in full sail waits or appears out of the orange mist observed by figures on the shore, the sun a faint yellow ball in the sky, the water at low ebb rippling gently like stretched gauze. The same contrast of mood, a though not using the same colour palette, is to be seen in his 'Storm in the Night' of 1849. Here the foreground water, highlighted by a full moon, has begun to ripple uneasily and beyond the rocky promontory of the middle ground a storm gathers in the sky as a schooner, its sails dangerously billowing and scuds for the protection of the headland.



Aivazovskiy's naval paintings are wonderful propaganda pieces, celebrations of the might of the Russian navy. Perhaps not surprisingly, for these are set pieces, they are organised as rather stiff formal compositions in which it seems the artist has felt obliged to delineate in precise detail every spar and piece of rigging, as in 'The Kronstadt Roadstead' of 1840 and 'A Russian Squadron off Sevastopol' of 1846. Here the composition is based on a major element, a warship sailing straight towards the viewer, occupying one third of the canvas and balanced by the visual mass and colour weight of the remainder. Their stilted composition contrasts with the wonderful life and complexity of his sea battles of the latter part of the 1840s, notably 'The Battle of Navarino, October 1827' of 1846 and his 'The Battle of Revel, May 1790' painted in the same year as 'Sevastopol', and further sea battles such as Chios and Chesme fought on succeeding days in 1770. Here the seas, with their wreckage and flotsam, are the disturbed setting for hideous mayhem.

Unlike later Russian painters, Aivazovskiy painted from memory in the studio rather than painting from nature. He wrote, "The movement of the elements cannot be directly captured by the brush - it is impossible to paint from Nature a flash of lightning, a gust of wind or the splash of a wave. For these the artist must retain the impressions they have left upon him." And some of his most memorable works could only have been created in his mind's eye. One is a big painting, 'The Ninth Wave', painted in 1850 and probably his most famous. The ninth wave, Russian seafaring tradition had it, was the wave shipwrecked sailors had to dread, for it was the killer wave. Low down in the foreground of this big canvas a small huddle of sailors cling to the remnants of a mast as a giant wave crested with spume is about to crash past, while another inexorably builds up in the sulphurous light of a winter sun that has just broken through the red and fearsome clouds. The viewer asks which is the ninth wave, for they all look equally threatening. Nothing can be certain. The ambiguity of the sailors' fate in the arms of this implacable mass of water, and the fear engendered by the colouring of the sky and the terrifying waves, at once translucent in their peaks and black in their depths, engenders what sixty years previously Edmund Burke had spoken, of as The Sublime, that state in which the emotions are stretched to their uttermost.

Twenty-six years later, in 1876, Aivazovskiy painted his most extraordinary 'Shipwreck'. Shipwrecks are of course the stock in trade of any marine painter from Ludolf Backhuysen, through Claude-Joseph Vernet to Jean Pillement and Theodore Gericault, and Aivazovskiy had himself painted many. But this painting captures so sublimely the wrenching poignancy of the remnants of a ship's crew in a foundering boat their arms stretched out to helpless watchers high on a great rock at whose base the boat will inevitably be dashed.

Like the island of the later painting 'Isle of the Dead' by Arnold Bocklin of 1880, the great rock is singled out for startling illumination by a mysteriously selective ray of sunlight, which also transforms the flying spray into a magical cloud around its base. In fact Aivazovskiy had deployed the same kind of lighting effect in his earlier 'Icebergs' of 1870, in which a great fractured edifice of mysteriously-lit ice towering above a slaw-moving three master is singled out for special illumination. Out of the dark shadow of the 'Shipwreck's' foreground a floating mast emerges from a wave, its jagged end streaming seawater (a favourite visual device of Aivazovskiy), while the port gunwale of the doomed boat is flooded by the wave which will soon lift and hurl it onto the great rocks.

This is water at its most fundamental, titanic in its scale - so titanic that it is impossible to imagine the mechanics, the forces that turn a colossal, implacably heaving force into the placid orange and yellow drenched first-light seas of his lyrical morning paintings such as 'Seaside Calm' of 1843 and 'Twenty-six Cannon Corvette at Anchor' of 1852.

In this one painter we have almost the whole gamut of emotions: bowel-churning fear; limpid, romantic regret; jingoistic national pride; intense awe; anguish at others' predicaments; tingling anticipation; delight; the pleasures of recognition and, above all, wonder. Are these uniquely Russian? The answer is not necessarily, and yes. Because Aivazovskiy , for all his early European influences, was his own man. Nobody painted the sea quite like him and, although the subject was popular outside Russia, he outlasted everybody else and made it his very own.

That is not to say that in his long life Aivazovskiy had explored all its possibilities. In his mid-twenties the younger Alexei Bogoliubov, then an officer in the Russian navy, enrolled at the Academy for four years and was made an official artist to the navy before spending four years abroad in Paris, Geneva and Dusseldorf under an Academy stipend.

He followed one tradition when in 1872 he went to live in Paris, visiting Russia each summer. Bogoliubov painted seascapes, but some of his most haunting water studies are of that transition zone between ocean and river - the harbour. In his 1878 'View of Nizhniy-Novgorod' and in the earlier 'Bicentenary of Peter the Great Reaching the Neva', we have a great topographical artist's work. Just as Canaletto a century-and-a-half before had transformed the accurate depiction of scenery into high art, so Bogoliubov turned meticulously accurate delineation of these two harbours into places of moment. The millpond-smooth water somehow heightens the tension of, in the one painting, waiting for the distant flotilla to dock at the floating pier and in the other watching triplets of steam boats, their pennants stiff in the breeze, progress slowly up the harbor roads.

At the same time academic painters were still producing their great theatrical set pieces, such as Genrikh Semiradsky's 'Frina at a Celebration of Poseidon', 'the King of the Sea at Eleusis' of 1889. Nominally about the great sea god, it is actually one of his popular bacchanals with lightly-clad celebrants and dozens of beautifully painted and languidly arranged models, with a token sea serving merely as part of the background. It could hardly be otherwise in this kind of painting in which narrative and classic painterly modes were obligatory.

Yet for Ilya Repin, the sea could serve a very important symbolic function. In his big 'What a Wide World!', the sea is used for quite a special purpose. The great swathe of white-flecked olive sea sweeps around, past and almost over the laughing young lovers obliviously half engulfed on the dangerous edge of a rocky ledge, over which the foaming sea boils. The dark, choppy waves a few yards away, spume blown from their crests, are menacing intimations of potential calamity to these carefree young people who have not yet noticed something that Aivazovskiy's sailors well know, that the world - the sea - is both pleasurable and potentially deadly. Here Repin deploys, not altogether successfully, impressionistic painterly techniques and colourings. WhereAivazovskiy's painting is always representational, Repin's foreground rush of seawater is almost a smear of grubby green paint, which must be intended to underline the ambiguity of the narrative. Who could really survive upright in such turmoil of water? Who but this idealised young couple could survive dry and untouched in such circumstances? Here we have the sea underlining an allegory of young love triumphing oblivious amid the tempest.

Ivan Shishkin

If Aivazovskiy was the Russian master of the sea and its moods, Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) was the master of the forests. One of his contemporaries wrote admiringly, "Shishkin is so faithful, has such deep affection for his native land that he has no rivals in portraying Russian nature and especially the Russian forest." As a student at the Moscow College of Painting and Sculpture from 1852, and later at St Petersburg, he encountered paintings by such Russian artists as Ivan Aivazovskiy, of expatriates such as Silvester Shchedrin, and such European masters as Ruisdael. Almost from the start of his course he began painting and sketching the local rural Moscow landscape. As his niece later recalled it, "Shishkin was drawing views and landscapes the like of which no-one had drawn before: a field, a forest, a river, just that - and they are as beautiful as views of, say, Switzerland." Shishkin spent his scholarship years not in Rome or Paris but in Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia. On his return he was made an Academician on the strength of his painting abroad, and began drawing and painting Russian landscape. His mastery of both impeccable Realist technique and in evoking mood is exemplified by his 'An Old House on the Edge of a Pond'. A sketch in sepia of an old semi-derelict stone farmhouse in an overgrown orchard with a pool that has somehow developed in a depression over the years, it is extraordinarily evocative of abandonment, decay and age. There have been no people here for years.

Shishkin's magnificent obsession was with the coniferous forests of Russia. For the last thirty years of his life he painted practically no other subject, after exhibiting his 'Pine Forest in Viatka Province' in the second Itinerants'exhibition of 1872. If Aivazovskiy, who started active work thirty years before him and died two years later, sometimes repeated himself, Shishkin contrived to bring a fresh eye to each painting. This was partly because he liked painting plein-air and, probably, because he saw the forest as a continually changing laboratory of information about the workings of nature.

In 'A Pine Forest', Shishkin uses a forest stream as the main foreground element leading the viewer's eye into the dark recesses of the forest past the clearing, which has been damaged by loggers searching for timber for masts. Bears play mournfully around a tree with a hive tied safely far up its trunk. In his 'Stream in a Forest', of two years before, it is as if the viewer has suddenly come upon the little scene, the still water disappearing into reeds to the right foreground, and in the background there is a hint of its source in a marshy sward, the middle ground following the old Claudian rule and reflecting the sky and surrounding foliage. Here the chromatic scale is deliberately kept narrow: browns and sepias, blacks and dark greens, and a series of rough surfaces contrasting with the hard reflecting surface of the water in the middle ground. From the outset Shishkin has realised the importance of including movement, however placidly it may be represented by a shallow stream moving slowly over pebbles and little rocks on its gradual way to feed some larger waterway. Water is always important for Shishkin's composition because it provides the necessary horizontal contrast to the vertical thrust of his trees. Shishkin returned to the same subject ten years later in 1880. The banks of this forest stream represent a cool haven from the hot summer sun streaming down the slopes in the background, beyond the grove which has grown up around the water.

The water moves slowly and has temporarily disappeared under rocks and moss by the time it reaches the foreground - the same device appears in the totally different painting of a decade before. In those ten years Shishkin'spalette has changed, the browns are redder, the greens more sun-drenched and the viewer is made somehow aware that the tall straight trees of the grove are there because of the stream's life-giving grace. The stream in the forest is a subject to which Shishkin returned again and again. In most cases these are not cascades, but gentle scarcely moving waters which, the viewer might well think, are there to provide a foil to the inevitable tall trees.

A study for a painting of 'Pond in an Old Park', one of Shishkin's last paintings, is interesting because of its relative impressionism - the sky is a strange yellow and the painting rapid rather than meticulous. Backed by dark green trees, the still water of the brook reflects blackly. These are certainly paintings of Russian forests and water because that is what Shishkin painted. But even without the clues painters usually provide in the shape of people, architecture, characteristic landscape or even place names, these are plainly Russian paintings. It is largely because of his quietly sombre palette of earth colors and the great silent pine trees gathering around the slow-moving streams that we know we can only be in the heartland of Russia.

 


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 920


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