| 160 years since the birth of the painter Ilya Repin Repin's reputation as an artist who combined the best features of Russian realism in his work developed during his lifetime. None other than A.N. Benoit wrote: “At traveling exhibitions we learned about life, and in these lessons the most precious, most desirable and bright word always seemed to us to be Repin’s last creation.”
Repin “could do everything.” At the same time he was able to work on completely different things and in different manners. He was reproached for artistic illegibility: “Today he writes from the Gospel, tomorrow a folk scene based on a fashionable idea, then a fantastic picture from epics, a genre of foreign life, an ethnographic picture, finally, tendentious newspaper correspondence, then a psychological sketch, then a liberal melodrama, suddenly from Russian history, bloody scene, etc. There is no sequence, no specific purpose for the activity; everything is accidental and, of course, superficial...” - this is how Repin himself recounted the essence of these claims, which are not uncommon in relation to his art, and answered with magnificent indifference: “What to do, maybe the judges are right, but you can’t get away from yourself. I love variety."
This diversity, of course, was in no way the result of promiscuity. Repin is rather like the magical golden cockerel from Pushkin’s fairy tale - he always “turns to the other side” where the most important problems of modern reality and contemporary art are concentrated, and at the time of heyday, he always arrives on time.
In Repin's literary heritage, very little is said about painting itself - about painterly skill, colors, coloring, and in general about paintings as such. Repin writes much more willingly about what he sees as the meaning and tasks of art. For example, he objects to Kramskoy: “You say that we need to move towards the light, towards the colors. No. And here our task is content. The face, the soul of a person, the drama of life, the impressions of nature, its life and meaning, the spirit of history - these are our themes.” Painting skill for Repin is something obligatory and necessary, but at the same time something that “goes without saying” must be achieved “against one’s will”: “Beauty is a matter of taste; for me it is all true.”
P.M. Tretyakov asked Repin in the painting “Religious Procession in the Kursk Province” to paint instead of one of the women holding the empty case of the miraculous icon, a beautiful girl, to which the artist categorically replied: “For me, truth is above all, look at the crowd, anywhere, Will you meet many beautiful faces, and they will certainly come to the fore for your pleasure?”
Where we are talking about specific details, nuances, everyday details, characters and habits of characters, Repin is truly inimitable. Pages of Repin's memoirs about famous contemporaries - V.V. Stasov, V.A. Serov, V.M. Garshine, V.S. Solovyov, L.N. Tolstoy is the memoirs of an artist, a painter, who was engaged not so much in studying personality and character, but in observing their external manifestations: gaze, posture, facial expressions, gesture, plasticity, manners, clothing, furnishings, types of reactions to external impressions - the whole complex observations, which made Repin famous as an outstanding portrait painter.
In 1881, Repin wrote to Stasov: “I will give up all these historical resurrections of the dead, all these folk ethnographic scenes... and I will begin long-planned paintings from the most pressing reality that surrounds us, understandable to us and exciting us more than all past events.” “Vibrant reality,” however, always occupied Repin. All contemporary criticism of Repin, including Stasov, recognized that the role of a “historian” and paintings on historical themes was not his calling. Meanwhile, Repin was extremely concerned about the historical accuracy of his paintings. But at the same time, in Repin’s historical paintings there is absolutely no time distance - despite the carefully recreated surroundings, what is happening is shown as happening in the present, and not in the past. Even in a historical plot there is a desire to present everything as it could “really” be. This desire forces Repin to open up the space of his historical paintings, making the viewer an eyewitness of what is depicted. We can freely enter the interior of Princess Sophia’s cell: the empty space in front of the window seems to be specially left for the viewer, like an open door. The rolling staff in “Ivan the Terrible” is ready to fall outside the picture frame in the next minute. The naked head of the Cossack in “Cossacks” seems to break through the plane of the canvas, ending up in the space of the viewer.
The main feature of Repin's historical compositions is precisely this effectiveness, when the historical plot is reduced to one person, one moment, one affect. Tsarevich Ivan, the son of the Terrible, died only a week after being hit with a staff, and the amount of blood shown in the picture could not have happened with such a wound. But Repin needed to sharpen the very moment of the murder, which happened “in an instant.”
Many of Repin's works have a double date - the interval between the beginning and completion of the work sometimes exceeds ten years. This happened because the artist rewrote the paintings several times. About other works, he remarked in one of his letters: “I would rewrite them all again.” Constantly rewriting his paintings, Repin, apparently, did not so much strive to improve them as to endow them with the property of variability that was inherent in himself, to make these paintings live, to change, just as, for example, cinematic frames change.
Repin's element was current, changeable modernity. Remaining immersed in this element, he created his best works. In the early 1870s, after the creation of Burlakov, he was far ahead of his colleagues. In the late 1870s he was with them. Having created “Princess Sophia,” he, at least in the field of plot, was one step ahead of Vasily Surikov - “The Morning of the Streltsy Execution” was completed two years later. But Surikov’s next picture “Menshikov in Berezovo” - a story as a family drama, an interior scene - was written before the thematically similar “They Didn’t Expect”. And by the mid-1890s, Valentin Serov had become a much more significant portrait painter than his teacher Ilya Repin. From this moment on, Repin begins to lag uncontrollably. The artistic situation is rapidly changing, and Repin's famous realism - after impressionism, Vrubel, "The World of Art" - turns out to be of little interest to anyone. The artist had to live for many more years. He survived both his fame and his talent.
In the last years of his life, Repin paid a lot of attention to his memoirs and articles included in the book “Distant Close”. Among other arguments, one can find the following: “We distinguish two types of geniuses in the arts of every era. The first genius is an innovator... The second genius is a completer... a multi-embracing nature, capable of expressing its time in the possible completeness of its art; a great deal of preparation accumulates to evaluate it - it is clear. He ends the era until it is completely impossible to continue working in the same way after him.” Repin was prone to exaggeration: he endowed the epithet “genius” with Bryullov, a bright “completer,” in his opinion, and Kuindzhi, an “innovator.” But, forgetting about this exaggeration, we can consider that Repin gave an exhaustive definition of his own creativity. The artist was only partly mistaken in the impossibility of continuing “in the same way” after him: he truly both expressed and completed his era. But realism had a long way to go in Russian art of the twentieth century. In the fateful year of 1937, a two-volume monograph by I.E. Grabar about Repin. After the adoption of the formula of socialist realism and the grandiose ideological campaign carried out on the isofront under the slogan of the fight against formalism, realism was sanctioned as the sole method of Soviet art. At the same time, it was approved and glorified as the main, purely domestic property, capable of resisting all spreaders of the formalistic infection coming from the pernicious West. Under these conditions, the work and the figure of Repin himself - an exponent of realistic religion - acquired a kind of apostolic powers. Ekaterina ALLENOVA |
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