Читать книгу Russian Painting - Peter Leek - Страница 7

However, although the Academy boasted a diverse and fairly liberal collection of foreign masterpieces, not all of the students were content. In 1863 – the year that the first Salon des Refusés was held in Paris – fourteen high-profile art students (thirteen painters and one sculptor) resigned from the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in protest against its conservative attitudes and restrictive regulations. Their next move was to set up an artists’ cooperative, although it soon became apparent that a more broadly based and better organized association was needed, eventually leading to the formation of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions.

The Society was incorporated in November 1870, and the first of its forty-three exhibitions was held in November 1871 (the last one took place in 1923). The four artists who spearheaded the Society’s founding were Ivan Kramskoï, portrait, historical and genre painter, who taught at the Society for the Encouragement of Artists school of drawing in Saint Petersburg before being given the rank of academician in 1869; Vassily Perov, portrait, historical and genre painter who taught painting at the School of Painting and Architecture in Moscow from 1871 to 1883; Grigory Miasoyedov, portrait, historical and genre painter who lived in Germany, Italy, Spain and France after completing his studies at the Academy in Saint Petersburg and was one of the board members of the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions, and finally, Nikolaï Gay, religious and historical painter, portraitist and landscape artist, sculptor and engraver who also wrote articles on art. First a student at the university of physics and mathematics in Saint Petersburg, he entered the Academy of Arts as a teacher as of 1863.

One of their primary concerns, reflected in the name of the Society, was that art should reach out to a wider audience. To further that aim – perhaps inspired by the narodniki (the Populists then travelling around Russia preaching social and political reform) – they undertook to organize “circulating” exhibitions, which would move from one town to another.

And like the Impressionists in France (who also held their first exhibition in 1874), the peredvizhniki – variously translated as Itinerants, Travellers and Wanderers – embraced a broad spectrum of artists, with differing styles and a great variety of artistic preoccupations. But, initially at least, the Society was a more tightly knit organization, and ideologically its aims were more coherent. Living at the time when the writings of Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy were awakening social consciences, most of the Itinerants were actively concerned with the conditions in which the ordinary people of Russia lived, and strove to stimulate awareness of the appalling injustices and inequalities that existed in contemporary society. The artistic movement that focused on these concerns came to be known as Critical Realism.