The Rise of Russian Realism

...Of course, art history abounds with such scenes, but the character of this one was undeniable: "The incident, which in the West would have affected but a small circle and turned on theoretical arguments about art, assumed in Russia the proportions of an all-out battle on politics and the entire historical tradition...

...What makes the story different from its Western counterparts (in addition to the absence of esthetic disputes) is the way subsequent cultural administrations—before and after 1917—kept reviving the corpse of Peredvizhnichestvo to accommodate their respective policies...

...Among the purchasers was Pavel Tretiakov, founder of the Moscow museum that still bears his name...

...Gonchar-ov's rather moving Death of Marat of 1925...

...Existing between two cultural forces has had a peculiar effect on the Russian esthetic impulse, too...

...In challenging all this, the Pered-vizhniki were participating in the wave of liberalism—highlighted by the emancipation of the serfs in 1861—that swept Russia between the 1850s and the '70s...

...Petersburg...

...To account for social realism's decline into Socialist Realism, the author has investigated every inch of the country's social and cultural anatomy...

...Noting the slashing of Ilia Repin's Ivan the Terrible in 1913, the author points out that the identification of the vandal as a demented icon painter did not deter interested parties from politicizing the event...

...Acknowledging that "esthetic evaluation has not been central" to her concerns, Valkenier provides an arresting explanation: "A study of several score artists which covers more than a century cannot linger over interesting features or individual canvases...

...Because artists were for the most part drawn from the serf class, they required social grooming as well as a general education...

...The "smiling sales drive" launched by a Tokyo department store seemed quite a Japanese idea —tinged, perhaps, with opportunism Occidental-style...

...But the dominant mode of Russian painting is realism, and the 150-odd works in the show—inadequate a cross section as they may be—offer some clues about the course it has taken...

...They appear to have a cultural hunger so profound as to make the average Western artist, in the loneliness of his creative freedom, feel almost wistful...

...Theirs was a courageous stand, and it proved to be profitable as well...

...But it has "settled down into a coexistence of conservative and liberal trends [with] no affection lost between the two camps...

...That the ultimate icon inspired Russians to leave poems in front of it was consistent with their image, too...

...There is, too, a serious trend among the "creative intelligentsia" to set the record straight and "end the tyrannical misuse of tradition...

...A Salon des Independents of sorts, Peredvizhnichestvo was essentially a rebellion against the Academy's administration—specifically the practice of assigning compulsory themes to students...

...It is as if the "aperture" creativity flows through has been narrowed, increasing the intensity of the desire to express...

...On the whole, however, the school was much more sinned against than sinning...

...Male-vich's stylized Girl with Red Pole of 1932-3 (used for the show's poster) is an attractive example of the portraiture he turned to in later years...

...John the Baptist) stand out, as do occasional Russian-American affinities—such as a 1927 industrial scene by Y. I. Pimenov that recalls Ben Shahn, and the traces of Eak-ins and Sargent visible in, respectively, the portraits of Repin and V.A...

...they exhibit most of all an alien influence imperfectly assimilated...

...The show, which will travel to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco after it leaves New York, is not exactly what the Metropolitan expected—it has turned out to be short two major icons and an altar-piece and long on Socialist Realism...

...By bringing traveling shows to the provinces (Peredvizhniki has always been translated as "Wanderers"), they were able to reach the growing burgher class that replaced the Court as the major patron of art in Russia...

...As a result, despite the book's admirable treatment cf 19th-century society, the reader winds up groggy with names, trends and bureaucratic intrigue, unable to see the artistic wood for the political trees...

...Since Russian Realist Art is quite meagerly illustrated, it is fortunate that publication was timed to coincide with the Alcoa-sponsored exhibition, Russian and Soviet Painting (Metropolitan Museum, through June 26...

...True, the very nature of the subject encourages such an approach, yet Valke-nier, primarily a political historian, has emphasized the background at the expense of the product...

...In general, though, the quality of the works is poor...

...Russian Realist Art has a touch of the same failing...

...This condition, moreover, can hardly be attributed to Marxism alone...

...Valkenier's description of student training makes the average European Beaux Arts institution look like Black Mountain College in comparison...

...A genre that alternately spoke critically of social ills, comfortingly of the contemporary scene, and in-spiringly of historic events could hardly fail to please the new class of buyer...

...Russian and Soviet Painting left me more convinced than ever that government intrusion on culture has been only one of the Russian artist's problems...

...Inevitably, Western eyes will be attracted to the modernist canvases —including a Kandinsky Improvisation of 1910, Tallin's Cubist Fish Vendor of 1911 and a fine Male-vich abstraction of 1915...

...T .m...

...A very striking composition executed in quiet, thin color, it shows the victim being stabbed by Charlotte Corday and throwing up his arms in a strange little balletic gesture as some papers slide off the towel draped over his lap...

...he Peredvizhniki were not great artists, and few of them, if any, can be regarded as radicals...

...Consequently, the process began all over again: As the older men made their peace with the now reformed Academy, becoming teachers and members of the governing Assembly, the younger painters split off and formed new associations...

...Individual painting (like A.A...

...Russian realism has suffered, too, from the worldwide degeneration of representational painting that has greatly accelerated in the last 50 years...

...The story of Russian realism is in a way the story of Peredvizhni-chestvo, a movement founded in 1863 by 14 defectors from the Imperial Academy in St...

...For the visual arts this has been a mixed blessing, as is demonstrated by Elizabeth Valke-nier's Russian Realist Art (Ardis, 251 pp., $16.95 hardcover, $7.50 paperback...

...it dates back at least as far as Peter the Great's efforts to Westernize a country that has always uncomfortably straddled the line between Europe and Asia...

...A Moscow newspaper, meanwhile, was publishing "loyalist addresses to Repin, praising the venerable painter as the personification of Russian artistic achievement...

...its members' reputations were successively blackened and polished to justify endless ideological backing and filling...

...their deportment was almost as closely scrutinized as their work...

...After a six-year process at the Imperial Academy, graduates were issued diplomas that determined their ranks in the Civil Service, the teaching posts they could get, and the general shape of their professional lives...

...Given this curious view, it is probably best that she did not dwell on the paintings...

...Valkenier reports that the contemporary Soviet scene has not recaptured the peace of the first years after the Revolution, when art of all kinds, particularly avant-gardism, was allowed to flourish independently...

...Latter-day members of the group (it didn't disband until 1923) were themselves not above such politicking...

...Repin himself got the ball in play by blaming the modernists who, he said, "had no respect for old art...

...Although that may say more about the power of the myth than the art, one couldn't help noticing at the time how national characteristics reasserted themselves in honoring the painting...

...Among the important 19th-century omissions is Nikolai Ge, a Pered-vizhnik whose painting in reproduction looks more interesting than most for having a certain Goyaesque bite to it...

...Also memorable are the fine drawing in N. Altman's cubis-tic study of the poetess Anna Akha-matova (1914), and A.D...

...in their first post-Revolution exhibition, for instance, they produced their usual anecdotal works, merely adding proletarian muscle to the titles...

...Russians exhibit a seriousness toward art that verges on the literal-minded, and that even new-world countries cannot match...

...The vanguard, seeing a chance to advance its own cause, countered in a noisy meeting that the disfiguration was deserved and that now, furthermore, was the time to empty the museums of all such traditionalist "trash...

...Johnson, not that Russians have been often painted well, but that they painted at all...

...It proved so pleasing, in fact, that by 1890 its prosperous practitioners were almost indistinguishable from the establishement they had displaced...

...The politics and technology of the USSR aside, the nation still often gives the impression of being a collection of old-fashioned, bumbling uncles playing the chivalrous swain to the ladies...

...Ivanov's Head of St...

...The central bureaucracy established by Peter the Great was such that the wonder is, to borrow from Dr...

...Serov...

...Still, they did make an important and vigorous contribution, one that has been badly mauled by posterity...