Kandinsky and the Russian Soul
From "Nationality and spirituality in Russian 19th and 20th Century art
by Evgenia Petrova
There is no art without a nation (Ivan Turgenev)
We recognise the national substrata of and artwork by certain imperceptible details. "Oh, these are obviously Italian", "Yes, this is certainly an American artist", "I'd say that you can see the German style". Such judgements are quite common, and not just among experts. The fact that ordinary art lovers can see the particular traits between various national schools confirms their real existence. These traits, expressed through thematic preferences and in choices of colour and forms, reflect the poetic characteristics of each people.
From this point of view Russia is no different. But the art of this country, sadly, is still little known abroad. The long isolation of Russia (then the Soviet Union) in the 20th century limited the possibilities for showing, studying and, as a result, understanding its art. For the same reason there has grown up an idea of Russian art being derivative, an idea that began in the times of Peter the Great when Russia made its entrance into the 'European artistic union'.
In fact, until the end of the17th century Russian figurative art practically only consisted of icon painting which, together with religious architecture, represented almost the whole area of visual arts. In Russia the 18th century was in reality more European than Russian: this was the way of thinking Peter the Great who hoped to move Russia closer to Europe in every field. This was an view followed, with some differences, by Catherine II, the German princess Anhalt-Zerbst who became empress in 1762. Voltaire and Diderot determined in many respects the ethical and aesthetic ideas of cultured society of the age. Among architects and artists there were more foreigners than Russians. The younger generation of painters and sculptors who entered the school of fine arts, founded in 1764, studied at first with the French, Italians, and Germans who taught the various courses. The whole system of artistic education of the time was based on European principles. Until the end of the eighteenth century the themes employed by Russian artists rarely included national subjects. They knew mythological and biblical themes far better than their own history. Drawing from antique casts, kept in the school of fine art, or copying Italian or French prints bestowed a European style on the Russian artists of the period. Even though, of course, it was not possible to jump "in a single century from the Dornstroj of the Arch-priest Silvestr' to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot and D'Alembert" without there remaining some trace of centuries-old traditions [...].
The events of war at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Russian victory over Napoleon and, as a result, her new role in Europe, stimulated a new attention to Russian history. Many nobles of the time became fervent collectors of antiques and monuments to national culture. From the beginning of the century newspapers began to discuss actively the eventual creation of a national art gallery (then as now the Hermitage was orientated towards Western culture). At the beginning of the twenties Pavel Svin'in, diplomat, collector, and journalist, created the first private nucleus for a "Russian Museum" and for it he bought historical rarities, paintings, and sculptures that even today are still the pride of the collection of the Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg, of the Tret'yakov gallery in Moscow, and in other collections.
At the height of this interest in the national aspect, there appeared in Russian artistic life Aleksey Venetsianov, the author of unique works portraying, not only daily life, but also the spiritual character of the simple Russian. Differently from the students at the school of fine arts, Venetsianov portrayed, directly from life, communal life, the shacks, the atmosphere of a landowner's house, the peasant men and women of the surrounding countryside employed in their daily work. But he did not only paint from life. In his studio he always kept casts of antique sculptures. At the beginning of his career he copied, in the Hermitage, the most important works of the Italian masters. Venetsianov considered his main artistic activity to be the creation of a national ideal of beauty and spirituality. In his Reapers, a small canvas showing a vivid image of a Russian female peasant, the expression of an ideal recalling the masters of Renaissance Italy. Venetsianov taught his students to observe nature and to discover in it what they felt to correspond most to their soul, just as Vassily Kandinsky would have done almost a century later. Evidently it was for this reason that the so-called School of Venetsianov gathered together extremely different artists. Grigory Soroka was a lyricist and his landscapes are steeped in a, wholly Russian, quiet sadness of the soul. Nikifor Krylov, instead, is an optimist full of the joys of life, a lover of the chill Russian winters, of snow crunching under one's boots. Krylov could put a typical scene of Russian life, a group of peasants chatting by a well, into a wide-horizoned, snow-mantled landscape without injuring its wholeness (Russian Winter).
Venetsianov's canvases, like those of his followers, were seen in the shows held in Saint Petersburg between 1820 and 1840 and had a notable influence on a whole generation of Russian artists halfway through the nineteenth century. Among these were Pavel Fedotov who, like Venetsianov, attended evening classes at the school of fine arts in his free time from military service. Fedotov lived surrounded by the actual life of his fellow soldiers, his friends and acquaintances: in this environment he came across themes that merited being portrayed in current art more than the biblical and mythological themes fashionable among the artists of the academy circles. The Major's Marriage Request (1851 circa), The Widow (1851), and other themes were inspired by real life, even though they always have a moralising aspect coherent with the social problems of the times. In this sense Fedotov was similar to Hogarth, whom he loved and studied. But his canvases were inspired by typically Russian subjects and were full of Russian characters and atmosphere. From these works, as from the literature of this period (Nikolay Gogol, early Dostoevsky), there emerges a exact and acute view of the conditions of the life and the destiny of the common man, with all his joys and miseries.