isaak levitan, lyrical landscape

Contents

Preface 6

Foreword 8

Introduction 12

1 Childhood 14

2 Serfdom and Nationhood 18

3 The Moscow School of Painting 24

4 Landscape Painting in Russia 34

5 Levitans River Volga 40

6 Anton Chekhov 50

7 Realism Levitan and the Wanderers 58

8 Travels in Europe, 1890-94 66

9 Major Works 72

10 The Cultural Scene, Moscow and St Petersburg 78

11 Levitan and Nature 86

12 Working Methods 94

13 Secession Munich 102

14 Secession Vienna 110

15 Cityscapes and Flower Paintings 118

16 Diaghilev and the World of Art 124

17 Portraits 130

18 Levitans Last Years, 1898-1900 136

19 Levitans Legacy 142

Notes 148

Chronology 152

Select Bibliography 154

Index 156

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businessman Chichikov trades in serfs whose names still appear on the

government census although they have long been dead.

For state or crown peasants, numerically approximately the

same as privately owned serfs, life had been a little less harsh. They

had usually received more land for their own cultivation, and were

much less subject to interference from their masters. From 1837, a

new Ministry of Agriculture, headed by Count C P Kiselev, had

made efforts to develop peasant agriculture. Fostering a more

paternalistic attitude among his officials, Kiselev tried to ensure a

fairer taxation system and instituted the provision of basic welfare

facilities, schools and medical services. Yet, as with serfs in private

ownership, housing was crowded and unsanitary, without chimneys

and with dirt floors and, in wintertime, livestock stabled on the

ground floors of village homes. Cockroaches invariably invaded the

table at mealtimes and were even regarded as a sign of plenty.

Several paintings of the clergy from about this time indicate their

lack of education and their fondness for vodka: for the unlettered there

was little moral support from the Russian Orthodox Church. The artist

Vasily Perovs Village Easter Procession features drunken priests leaving a

tavern as the procession begins, and Ilya Repin portrays an archdeacon

as a gross and hirsute figure whose roseate complexion and huge belly

betray his gluttony. Unsurprisingly, superstition was rife among the

peasantry. There were many instances of their fear of change in the

form of technical advances: they would refuse to answer newly

19

Serfdom and Nationhood

Self-portrait, 1880sIsaak LevitanIndian ink, brush and white onpaper, 38 x 28cmTretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Misa Moiseyev (study), 1882Ivan Kramskoi (1837-87)Oil on canvas, 57 x 45cmRussian Museum, St Petersburg

Chapters 1-3 pp.14-33 5/5/11 4:17 pm Page 19

citys painting school was more suitable and represented a wise choice.

The Moscow School was fortunate to have on its staff the well-

regarded teacher Vasily Perov (1832-82), for whom Levitan

developed a great respect. Perov had himself studied at the School

in the 1850s and had admired and made copies of the Dutch

masters at a formative stage of his artistic development. Living in

Paris from 1862-4, he was drawn to genre subjects and, working in

the city streets, represented the poorest among its inhabitants; when

he returned to Russia he felt impelled to convey the tedium and

sadness of peasant life. In paintings such as The Last Tavern by the

City Gates, which shows peasants leaving the warmth and comfort of

an inn to begin their bleak, wintry journey home by open sleigh,

Perov included a landscape element to indicate the expanses of

empty countryside and snow-filled horizons they have to traverse.

Perov was also an accomplished portraitist, whose study of the

writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, painted in 1872, remains the outstanding

commemoration of the great novelist. The fifty-year old Dostoevsky

is shown with considerable insight, his hands clasped over his knees

as he sits keep in thought, dressed in a drab brown overcoat.

Perov thus brought to the School, and to the studio where

Levitan worked with him, great feeling for his chosen subjects.

Several of his more outstanding students inherited his conviction

that their art should bear witness to the hardship and despair

prevailing among Russias poorer classes; and a number of Levitans

contemporaries from there were to produce works revealing the

humiliating poverty in which many Russian people still lived.

Levitan, though he later professed that his relatives had

encouraged him to paint more modern and therefore more

marketable subjects, such as views of Moscow or other urban

scenes, quite soon showed a preference for landscape painting.6 In

March 1876 he was able to join the studio of the landscape master

Aleksei Savrasov (1830-97). Savrasovs methods were among the

most advanced in the School, and he was an inspiring teacher. He

believed implicitly in working in the open air and in studying nature

25

The Moscow School of Painting


mountainsides form the backdrop to In the Mountains of the Crimea,

where a pair of oxen haul a cart up a rough mountain road. In other

paintings it was often large-skied, flat expanses of land that appealed

to him. From low-lying fields and meadowland he created tightly

controlled, subtly coloured compositions such as Wet Meadow (1872).

Here storm clouds move away to leave an area of young grass washed

by rain, and a pool of rainwater shining as it reflects the sky. Vasiliev

thus moved on from Venetsianovs quiet, sunny compositions, making

the viewer aware of the beauty to be found in seemingly

unprepossessing scenery seen in all weathers, and imparting a sense of

magnificence into the landscape. By the 1870s these two quite

dissimilar artists had, in their different ways, ennobled a countryside

which could otherwise have easily appeared featureless and tragic.

Alongside the creators of such imaginative and innovative

images of the Russian terrain, there thrived more conventional

artists who achieved success with representations in a more realistic

mode. Best-known from this more traditional school were the exact

contemporaries Mikhail Klodt and Ivan Shishkin, both born in

36

Landscape Painting in Russia

Wet MeadowFyodor Vasiliev (1850-73)Oil on canvas, 70 x 114cmBridgeman

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41

Levitans River Volga


48

Levitans River Volga


65

Realism Levitan and the Wanderers

The Laundresses, 1899Abram Arkhipov (1862-1930)Oil on canvas, 97 x 65.5cmNovosti


Major Works


Raised in a small, impoverished, rural settlement in Lithuania, and

later subsisting for the most part in the streets of Moscow, Levitan

nonetheless painted early studies of ponds, trees and other natural

phenomena that revealed an unusually developed sensibility towards

the natural world. His first experience of a very different landscape,

when he travelled to the Crimea in 1886, considerably enlarged and

refined this awareness. Levitan was awestruck on seeing the beauty

and majesty of the region, and deeply affected by these new

surroundings. A reverence for nature remained with him all his life,

and is surely the foundation stone on which his graceful and

persuasive landscape panoramas are built. His gifts enabled him to

appreciate and portray both grandeur and delicacy, the swelling

waters of the Volga or ferns growing by a forest path, each face of

nature represented with equal conviction.

Teaching at the Moscow School of Painting from 1898, Levitan

enjoined his students above all to feel and understand nature. Do

not remember pictures, he said, encouraging them to work outside

en plein air, to look anew at their surroundings, to develop their

visual memory for the natural scene and to liberate it from the

superfluous. Although he sometimes recorded small, intimate

corners of nature and also painted flowers, in general he believed

that it was the overall concept of a landscape and the harmony of its

colours that was significant, rather than isolated details.

There is, in many of Levitans landscapes, an indisputable vein of

melancholy, which has often been attributed to his own

disadvantaged upbringing and outlook on life. His friend Konstantin

Korovin once heard him say I would like to convey the sadness

spread everywhere in nature. That sadness for some reason is a

reproach to me. In actuality, however, Russias tragic history, the

many hardships of her people, and simply the vastness of her terrain

seem to have imbued her landscape with a certain melancholy, and

such sadness is, perhaps, equally in the eye of the beholder.

Likewise, the spiritual aspect often noted in Levitans paintings could

be said to reflect the unique and special spirituality with which Holy

Russia had long believed herself to be endowed, perceiving her own

Orthodox Church as heir to Rome and Byzantium.

The poor but intellectual environment of Levitans childhood

contrasted markedly with the life he experienced in Moscow and St

Petersburg. His Jewish family background, with teaching based on

the Talmud and maybe a bias towards the thinking of philosophers

such as Spinoza,39 in which man and nature are one, made him

distinct from other young Russians and at a distance, initially, from

the mainstream of Russian intellectual thought. Frequent

discrimination against Jews living in Moscow caused him profound

anxiety. In 1879, for instance, following an attempt on the life of

Tsar Aleksandr II, Jews were ordered to leave the city. Levitan, his

brother and sisters were forced to live for several months some

distance away in the village of Boldino, in Vladimir province, and

only the intervention of influential friends enabled them to return.

The single surviving letter from the artist to one of his sisters, dated

as late as December 1899, refers to his almost having had to move

away from Moscow again, despite being an artist of renown, in as

late as 1892, and of the ever-present difficulty for Jews of securing

legal residence in the city.

86

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Levitan and Nature

Last Snow (study), 1895Isaak LevitanOil on canvas, 25.5 x 33cmRussian Museum, StPetersburg
