1.Art of Russia at the end of the 20th century. The last decade of the 20th century in Russia was full of political and economic events that radically changed the situation in the country. The collapse of the Union in 1991 and a change in political course, a transition to market relations and a clear orientation towards the Western model of economic development, finally, the weakening, up to complete abolition, of ideological control - all this in the early 90s contributed to the fact that the cultural environment began to change rapidly. Liberalization and democratization of the country contributed to the development and formation of new trends and directions in the domestic art. The evolution of art in the 1990s in Russia occurs with the emergence of trends inherent in postmodernism, with the emergence of a new generation of young artists working in such areas as, conceptualism, computer graphics, neoclassicism associated with the development of computer technology in Russia. Having emerged from classical eclecticism, "New Russian Neoclassicism" became a "multifaceted diamond", combining various directions that did not belong to the "classics" before the era of modernism. Neoclassicism is a trend in art in which artists revive the classical traditions of painting, graphics, sculpture, but at the same time they actively use the latest technologies. British historian and art theorist Edward Lucy Smith called Russian neoclassicism "the first striking phenomenon of Russian culture that influenced the world artistic process after Kazimir Malevich." Neoclassicism demanded a different attitude to antiquity than that of the classicists. The historical view of Greek culture made antique works not an absolute, but a concrete historical ideal, therefore imitation of the Greeks acquired a different meaning: in the perception of ancient art, it was not its normativity that came to the fore, but freedom, the conditioning of the rules that would later become the canon, the real life of the people ... D.V. Sarabyanov finds neoclassicism a kind of "complication" of modernity. With equal probability, neoclassicism can be considered both late modernity and an independent trend. In the work of the "new artists" there is no pure modernity or separate neoclassicism, they always appear interconnected, the artists of the new academy combined several trends in the visual arts at once: avant-garde, postmodernism, classicism in "collage space". The works of the “new artists” are eclectic, combining computer graphics, etching, painting and photography. Artists digitized finished works, highlighted the necessary fragments and created collages, masterfully restoring the costumes and decor of antiquity. The combination of traditional methods with the capabilities of computer graphics programs has expanded the creative potential of artists. Collages were collected from the scanned material, artistic special effects were applied to them, deformed, creating illusory compositions. The most prominent representatives of Petersburg neoclassicism in the early 90s were O. Toberluts, E. Andreeva, A. Khlobystin, O. Turkina, A. Borovsky, I. Chechot, A. Nebolsin, E. Sheff. Neoclassicism Toberluts is one of the manifestations of romanticism. Her works embody the feelings of a person, dreams, nobility, something enthusiastic and addressed to an unrealizable ideal. . The artist herself becomes the heroine of her works. In terms of stylistics, O. Toberluts' work can be defined as neoclassicism, passed through the postmodern consciousness, as an eclectic world in which ancient temples, Renaissance interiors, Dutch mills and costumes from designer K. Goncharov are depicted as a touch of modernity. The endless possibilities of computer graphics make the works of O. Tobreluts fantastic and supernatural. With the help of computer technology E. Scheff returns to ancient Greece, then to ancient Rome, creating images of ancient mythology in his collages. In series "Myths of Ludwig" the artist used photographs of Greek sculptures, architectural structures, imposing the effects of antiquity on them. With the help of computer technology, the artist is restoring the primordial nature of the Colosseum, conducting fascinating excursions around it. Digital painting Shutova represents the emotional equivalent of his many hobbies. It contains both Greek classics and echoes of ethnographic research, as well as elements of youth subculture. Thus, it can be noted that the end of the 20th century was a turning point not only in the political and economic life of Russia, but also in art. In the 90s, a powerful trend in the visual arts, "new Russian neoclassicism", was laid. The development of computer technologies in Russia expanded the creative potential of artists, new artists, using new technologies, created classical works. The main thing is not technique and technology, but aesthetics. Contemporary art can also be classic. 2. Art of Russia at the beginning of the 21st century. A feature of the visual arts at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries is that it has become free from censorship, from the influence of the state, but not from the market economy. If in Soviet times professional artists were provided with a package of social guarantees, their paintings were bought in national exhibitions and galleries, now they can only rely on their own strength. But Russian painting has not died and has not turned into a semblance of Western European and American art, it continues to develop on the basis of Russian traditions. Contemporary art is exhibited by contemporary art galleries, private collectors, commercial corporations, government art organizations, contemporary art museums, art studios or by the artists themselves in the artist-run space. Contemporary artists receive financial support through grants, awards and prizes, and also receive funds from the sale of their work. Russian practice is somewhat different in this sense from Western practice. Museums, Biennials, festivals and fairs of contemporary art are gradually becoming tools for raising capital, investing in the tourism business, or part of government policy. Private collectors have a great influence on the entire system of contemporary art. In Russia, one of the largest collections of contemporary art is owned by the non-state museum of contemporary art Erarta in St. Petersburg. Directions in contemporary art: Non-Spectacular Art- a trend in contemporary art that rejects staginess and theatricality. An example of such art is the performance of the Polish artist Pavel Althamer "Script Outline", at the exhibition "Manifesta" in 2000. In Russia, he offered his own version of non-spectacular art Anatoly Osmolovsky, street art(eng. Street art- street art) - fine art, a distinctive feature of which is a pronounced urban style. The main part of street art is graffiti (aka spray art), but street art cannot be considered graffiti. Street art also includes posters (non-commercial), stencils, various sculptural installations, etc. In street art, every detail, little thing, shadow, color, line is important. The artist creates his own stylized logo - a "unique sign" and depicts it in the urban landscape. The most important thing in street art is not to assign territory, but to involve the viewer in dialogue and show a different plot program. The last decade has marked the variety of directions that street art has chosen. Admiring the older generation, young writers are aware of the importance of developing their own style. Thus, new branches are emerging, predicting a rich future for the movement. Various new forms of street art sometimes surpass in scope everything that was created before. Airbrushing - one of the painting techniques of the visual arts, using an airbrush as a tool to apply liquid or powder dye using compressed air to a surface. A spray paint can also be used. Due to the widespread use of airbrushing and the appearance of a large number of different paints and compositions, airbrushing received a new impetus for development. Now airbrushing is used to create paintings, retouching photographs, taxidermy, modeling, textile painting, wall painting, body art, nail painting, painting souvenirs and toys, painting dishes. It is often used for drawing pictures on cars, motorcycles, other equipment, in printing, in design, etc. Thanks to a thin layer of paint and the ability to smoothly spray it on the surface, it is possible to achieve excellent decorative effects such as smooth color transitions, three-dimensionality, photographic the realism of the resulting image, imitation of a rough texture with an ideal surface smoothness.

Topics and questions of seminars;

Topic 1. Basic concepts of art history and art history.

Questions:

1. The problem of classification of types of arts.

2. The concept of "work of art". The origin and purpose of a work of art. Work and art.

3. Essence, goals, objectives of art.

4. The functions and meaning of art.

5. The concept of "style". Artistic style and its time.

6.Classification of arts.

7. The history of the emergence and formation of art history.

Issues for discussion:

1. There are 5 known definitions of art. What is characteristic for each of them? Which of the definitions do you adhere to? Can you formulate your definition of art?

2. What is the purpose of art?

3. How can you define a work of art? How do “artwork” and “artwork” coexist? Explain the process of the emergence of a work of art (by I. Teng). What is the task of a work of art (according to P.P. Gnedich)?

4. List the 4 main functions of art (according to I.P. Nikitina) and four

possible understanding of the meaning of art.

5. Define the meaning of the concept "style". What styles do you know in European art? What is "art style", "art space"?

6. List and briefly describe the types of art: space, time, space-time and spectacular arts.

7. What is the subject of art history study?

8. What do you think is the role of museums, exhibitions, galleries, libraries for the study of works of art history?

9. Peculiarities of ancient thought about art: Preserved information about the first samples of literature about art ("Canon" by Polycletus, treatises by Duris, Xenocrates). "Topographic" direction in literature about art: "Description of Hellas" Pausanias. Description of works of art by Lucian. Pythagorean concept of "space" as a harmonious whole, subject to the laws of "harmony and number" and its significance for the beginnings of the theory of architecture. The idea of ​​order and proportion in architecture and urban planning. Images of an ideal city in the works of Plato (the sixth book of the Laws, the dialogue "Critias") and Aristotle (the seventh book of Politics). Understanding Art in Ancient Rome. "Natural History" by Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) as the main source of information on the history of ancient art. Vitruvius's Treatise: A Systematic Presentation of Classical Architectural Theory.

10. The fate of ancient traditions in the Middle Ages and the peculiarities of medieval ideas about art: Aesthetic views of the Middle Ages (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas), the leading aesthetic idea: God is the source of beauty (Augustine) and its significance for artistic theory and practice. The idea of ​​a "prototype". Features of medieval literature about art. Practical-technological, recipe manuals: "The Guide of Painters" from Mount Athaon by Dionysius Furnagrafiot, "On the Colors and Arts of the Romans" by Heraclius, "Schedula" by Theophilus. Description of architectural monuments in the chronicles and lives of the saints.

11. The Renaissance as a turning point in the history of the development of European art and art history. A new attitude towards antiquity (study of antiquity monuments). The development of a secular worldview and the emergence of experimental science. Formation of a trend towards historical and critical interpretation of art phenomena: "Commentaries" by Lorenzo Ghiberti Treatises on special issues - urban planning (Filarete), proportions in architecture (Francesco di Giorgio), perspective in painting (Piero de la Francesca). Theoretical comprehension of the Renaissance turning point in the development of art and the experience of the humanistic study of the ancient heritage in the treatises of Leon Batista Alberti ("On the Statue", 1435, "On Painting", 1435-36, "On Architecture"), Leonardo da Vinci ("Treatise on Painting" , published posthumously), Albrecht Durer ("Four books on human proportions", 1528). Criticism of Vitruvius's architectural theory in Ten Books on Architecture (1485) by Leon Batista Alberti. Vitruvian "Academy of Valor" and its activities in the study and translation of the work of Vitruvius. Treatise by Giacomo da Vignola "The Rule of Five Orders of Architecture" (1562). Four Books on Architecture (1570) by Andrea Palladio is a classic epilogue in the history of Renaissance architecture. The role of Palladio in the development of architectural ideas of the Baroque and Classicism. Palladian and Palladianism.

12. The main stages of the formation of historical art history in modern times: from Vasari to Winckelmann: "Biographies of the most prominent painters, sculptors and architects" by Giorgio Vasari (1550, 1568) as a landmark work in the history of the formation of art history. “The Book of Artists” by Karel Van Mander as a continuation of the life stories of Vasari based on the material of Dutch painting.

13. Thinkers of the 18th century on the problems of style education in art, on artistic methods, the place and role of the artist in society: Rationalism in art history. The classic theory of Nicolas Poussin. The theoretical program of classicism in the "Poetic Art" by Nicolas Boislo (1674) and "Conversations about the most famous painters, old and new" by A. Feliben (1666-1688).

14. Age of Enlightenment (18th century) and theoretical and methodological problems of art. Formation of national schools within the framework of the general theory of art. The development of art criticism in France. The role of the Salons in French, artistic life. Salon Reviews as Leading Forms of Critical Literature on the Visual Arts. Disputes about the tasks of art criticism (evaluation of creativity or public education). Features of German art history. Contribution to the theory of the visual arts by Gothold Ephraim Lessing. Treatise "Laocoon" (1766) and the problem of the boundaries of painting and poetry. Introduction of the concept of "fine arts" instead of "fine arts" (shifting the emphasis from beauty to truth and highlighting the visual-realistic function of art). The importance of the activities of Johann Joachim Winckelmann for the development of the historical science of art. Winckelmann's concept of ancient art and the periodization of its development.

15. The origins of Russian thought about art. Information about the artists and the artistic monuments in the Russian medieval chronicle and epistolary sources. Raising questions about art in the social and political life of the 16th century (The Stoglavy Cathedral of 1551 and other Cathedrals) as evidence of the awakening of critical thinking and the struggle of various ideological trends.

16. A radical change in Russian art of the 17th century: the formation of the rudiments of a secular worldview and the first acquaintance with European forms of artistic culture. Formation of artistic and theoretical thought. The chapter "On Iconic Writing" in the "Life" of Avvakum. "Essay on Art" by Joseph Vladimirov (1665-1666) and "Word to the Lovely Iconic Writing" by Simon Ushakov (1666-1667) are the first Russian works on art theory.

17. Active formation of new secular forms of culture in the 18th century. Notes

J. von Stehlin is the first attempt to create a history of Russian art.

18. New romantic understanding of art in the critical articles of K.N. Batyushkova, N.I. Gnedich, V. Küchelbecker, V.F. Odoevsky, D.V. Venevitinova, N.V. Gogol.

19. Art history of the late 19th - 20th centuries: Attempts to synthesize the achievements of the formal school with the concepts of its critics - "structural science" about artistic styles. Semiotic approach in art history. Features of the semiotic study of works of fine art in the works of Yu.M. Lotman, S.M. Daniel, B.A. Uspensky. The variety of methods for the study of art in modern domestic science. The principles of the analysis of a work of art and a problematic approach to the study of the history of art in the works of M. Alpatov ("Artistic problems of the art of Ancient Greece", "Artistic problems of the Italian Renaissance"). Synthesis of methodological approaches (formal-stylistic, iconographic, iconological, sociological) by V. Lazarev. Comparative-historical research method in the works of D. Sarabyanov ("Russian painting of the 19th century among European schools. Experience of comparative research"). A systematic approach to art and its features.

1.V. Alekseev What is art? About how a painter, graphic artist and sculptor depict the world. - M .: Art, 1991.

2. Valerie P. About art. Collection. - M .: Art, 1993.

3.Wipper B.R. An introduction to the historical study of art. - M .: Fine Arts, 1985.

4.Vlasov V.G. Styles in Art .- SPb .: 1998.

5.Zis A.Ya. Kinds of art. - M .: Knowledge, 1979.

6.Con Winer. History of the styles of the visual arts. - M .: Svarog and K, 1998.

7.Melik-Pashaev A.A. Modern dictionary-reference book on art. - M .: Olympus - AST, 2000.

8.Yanson H.W. Fundamentals of Art History. - M .: Art, 2001.

Topic 2. Art of the Ancient World. Art of the era of the primitive communal system and the Ancient East.

Questions:

1. Periodization of the art of primitive society. Characteristics of the primitive art of the era: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze.

2. The concept of syncretism in primitive art, its examples.

3. General laws and principles of the art of the Ancient East.

4. Art of Ancient Mesopotamia.

5. The art of the ancient Sumerians.

6. The art of ancient Babylonia and Assyria.

Issues for discussion:

1. Give a brief overview of the periodization of primitive art. What are the features of the art of each period?

2. Describe the main features of primitive art: syncretism, fetishism, animism, totemism.

3.Compare the canons in the depiction of a person in the artistic creation of the ancient East (Egypt and Mesopotamia).

4. What are the features of the fine arts of Ancient Mesopotamia?

5. Tell us about the architecture of Mesopotamia using the example of specific monuments:

the zigkurt of Etemenniguru in Ur; and the ziggurat of Etemenanki in New Babylon.

6. Tell us about the sculpture of Mesopotamia using the example of specific monuments: the walls along the Processional road, the Ishtar gate, reliefs from the Ashurnasirpal palace in

7. What is the theme of the sculptural relief images of Mesopotamia?

8. What were the names of the first Babylonian monuments? What was their

appointment?

9. What is the peculiarity of the cosmogony of the Sumerian - Akkadian culture?

10. List the achievements in the art of the Sumerian - Akkadian civilization.

1. Vinogradova N.A. Traditional art of the East. - M .: Art, 1997.

2.Dmitrieva N.A. A Brief History of Art. Issue 1: From the earliest times to the 16th century. Essays. - M .: Art, 1985.

3. Art of the Ancient East (World Art Monuments). - M .: Art, 1968.

4. Art of Ancient Egypt. Painting, sculpture, architecture, applied arts. - M .: Fine art, 1972.

5. Art of the Ancient World. - M .: 2001.

6. History of art. The first civilizations. - Barcelona-Moscow: OSEANO - Beta Service, 1998.

7. Monuments of world art. Issue III, first series. Art of the Ancient East. - M .: Art, 1970.

8.Pomerantseva N.A. Aesthetic foundations of the art of Ancient Egypt. - M .: Art, 1985.

9. Joiner A.D. The origin of the visual arts. - M .: Art, 1985.

"Pure" art, which proclaims values ​​that do not depend on social and historical problems and trends, is a wonderful, but unrealistic phenomenon.

It is impossible to create in isolation from everyday life, without paying attention to the ideas prevailing in society - formal and informal. The art of Russia in the 20th century was influenced by powerful changes in the social order, unknown to any other country.

The beginning of the century, the search for new ideas

The 100 years of the 20th century were an era of unprecedented upheavals for the entire civilization. By the end of the 20th century, scientific and technological progress had compressed time and space for the entire planet, social conflicts in a limited region grew into shocks on a planetary scale. The culture and art of Russia in the 20th century, like all social activities in Europe and America, has a temporary attachment to the most important events in modern history.

The magic of numbers denoting the beginning of a new century always gives rise to the expectation of changes, the hope for the onset of a new, happy time. The nineteenth century, which created the worldwide fame of Russian culture, went into the past, leaving traditions that could not disappear overnight.

"The World of Art" was the name of the association of artists that emerged in 1898 and existed intermittently until 1924, without which it is impossible to imagine fine art in the first quarter of the 20th century in Russia. The "world of art" did not have one, common developed style - painters, graphic artists, sculptors each went their own way, having an agreement in their views on the goals of art and its role in society. Many features of this view were expressed by the genius of Mikhail Vrubel. The formal core, the basis of the association were L. S. Bakst, M. V. Dobuzhinsky, E. E. Lancere, A. P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, K. A. Somov. At various times, Y. Bilibin, A. Ya. Golovin, I. E. Grabar, K. A. Korovin, B. M. Kustodiev, N. K. Roerich, V. A. Serov and other masters took part in it.

All of them recognized the primacy of professionalism in art, the huge role of the artist's creative freedom and independence from social dogmas, while not denying the value of art in human life, protesting against the inertia of academism on the one hand and the excessive politicization of painting among the Itinerants on the other. Criticized by the supporters of traditions, "World of Art" could not fit into the tumultuous process of the birth of "proletarian" painting, but had a huge impact on all the fine arts of the 20th century in Russia - both those who worked in the USSR and those who found themselves in emigration.

Modern

The last decades of the nineteenth century were the period of the birth of a new style, which left its mark on the work of masters of fine arts and architecture. It had its own characteristics in certain regions of Europe, where it was even called differently. In Belgium and France the name "Art Nouveau" was fixed, in Germany - "Jugendstil", in Austria - "Secession". Other names are known associated with the most famous artists of this style or firms that produced furniture, jewelry and other products in a similar direction: the mush style, the Guimard style - in France, the liberty in Italy, in the USA - the tiffany style, etc. Art of Russia 20th century architecture in particular, they know it as the Art Nouveau style.

After a long period of stylistic timelessness, the modern became one of the most expressive and visually shaped artistic trends. Its characteristic vegetative, flowing character of the lines of rich decor, combined with geometrically simple and expressive forms of large volumes, attracted artists and architects with freshness and novelty.

Fyodor Osipovich Shekhtel (1859-1926) - the star of Russian architectural modernity. His talent gave national features to the essentially cosmopolitan style, Shekhtel's masterpieces - the Yaroslavsky railway station, the Ryabushinsky mansion - are the creations of a Russian architect, and in general, and in detail.

Pre-revolutionary avant-garde

The process of searching for new forms of art, and more - its new essence - was relevant for the art of all of Europe and America. The art of Russia of the 20th century contains several truly revolutionary periods, when the work of several reformers indicated new directions for the development of artistic thought. One of the brightest and most impressive was the inter-revolutionary period from 1905 to 1917. The peculiarities of avant-garde art in Russia were caused by the crisis of Russian public life after the tragedies of the Russian-Japanese war and the 1905 revolution.

The numerous avant-garde movements and creative associations that emerged at that time had similar generative reasons and similar goals of artistic search. Having a powerful influence on the main forms of art of the 20th century in Russia, futurists and cubo-futurists, "Jack of Diamonds" and "Blue Rose", Kandinsky and Malevich's Suprematism searched for new worlds in different ways, expressed the crisis of old art that had lost touch with reality, preceded the onset of an era of global upheavals ...

Among the new ideas, born of the avant-garde, was the thought of Russia in the 20th century contains such pages as the famous performance - the manifesto of the new art "Victory over the Sun" (1913). It was the result of the common creativity of the futurist poets M. Matyushin and V. Khlebnikov, and the decoration was done by Kazimir Malevich.

The artists P. Konchalovsky, K. Petrov-Vodkin, I. Mashkov, N. Goncharova, Marc Chagall, who enriched their searches for the art of Russia of the 20th century, became the authors of paintings that received world recognition. And this recognition began in the tenth years of the XX century, in the era of the birth of avant-garde painting of modern history.

After the October Revolution, Russia got the opportunity to open new horizons to the whole world in public life, including in art. And at first, conditions were created when the value of each gifted person increased immeasurably, generators of new creative ideas came to the fore.

How does art history interpret that time? 20th century, Russia, turbulent twenties - this is an unprecedentedly active artistic life of numerous creative associations, among which stand out:

UNOVIS - “Hardeners of the New Art” (Malevich, Chagall, Lissitzky, Leporskaya, Sterligov). Founded on the basis of the art school of Vitebsk, this association was an apologist for the artistic avant-garde, suggested looking for new themes and forms for art.

- "Four Arts" - flowing in line with the "World of Art" The main goal is to show the enormous expressive possibilities of architecture, sculpture, graphics and painting. The need for high professionalism and creative freedom was declared. Prominent representatives: architect A.V.Shchusev, graphic artist V.A.Favorsky, sculptor V.I.Mukhina, painters K.S.Petrov-Vodkin, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, and others.

- "OST", "Society of Easel Painters". He considered the main thing to show the signs of the onset of a new peaceful life, the construction of a modern young country by means of an advanced expressive, but simple and clear style. Leaders: D. Sternberg, A. Deineka, Y. Pimenov, P. Williams.

- "Circle of Artists" (Leningrad). Following the official course, developing the “style of the era”. Active members of the group: A. Samokhvalov, A. Pakhomov, V. Pakulin.

AHRR - "Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia" - an association that became the basis of the later created Union of Artists of the USSR, an active conductor of directions of ideological leadership of the artistic process, an instrument of party propaganda, heirs of the Itinerants. At the head were I.I.Brodsky, A.M. Gerasimov, M. B. Grekov, B. V. Ioganson.

Constructivism

In the programs of the most prestigious educational institutions that train architects, the study of the topic "Russian constructivism - the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s" is invariably present. It is of great importance for understanding the art of building; ideas proclaimed by the leaders of that direction are very relevant for any time. The surviving buildings of Konstantin Melnikov (the architect's dwelling house in Krivoarbatsky lane, Rusakov's club on Stromynka, a garage on Novoryazanskaya street, etc.), the Vesnin brothers, Moisei Ginzburg (Narkomfin House on Novinsky Boulevard) and other stars of Russian architecture are the golden fund of Russian architecture.

Functionalism, the rejection of unnecessary decoration, the aesthetics of the building structure, the harmony of the created environment - these ideas became the basis for solving new problems posed to young architects, artists and specialists in the field that came to be called industrial design. They had to build mass housing for new cities, workers' clubs for the all-round development of the personality, create objects for the work and rest of a new person. The amazing achievements of the avant-garde of the twenties cannot be ignored by studying the art of Russia, Europe and America of the entire subsequent time, is largely based on them. It is sad that these progressive ideas turned out to be the least in demand at home, and the "Stalinist Empire" style is considered by many to be the greatest achievement of Soviet architecture.

Art of the era of totalitarianism

In 1932, the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on the work of creative associations was issued. The stormy era of various currents and trends ended under the influence of the state machine, which had gained power, governed by an ideological apparatus, in which the sole power was gaining strength. For many years, the art of Russia of the 20th century, like much in the life of the country, began to depend on the opinion of one person - Joseph Stalin.

Creative unions have become a means of subordinating artistic thought to uniform ideological standards. The era of socialism began. Gradually, any deviations from the official course began to be declared criminal, those who disagree fell under real repression. Accusations of departing from the party line have become a method of solving creative discussions. The progressiveness of this is highly questionable. How would the theatrical art of Russia in the 20th century develop, for example, if the great stage reformer Vsevolod Meyerhold had not fallen victim to repression?

The nature of artistic talent is complex and inexplicable. The images of the leaders were embodied with great skill and sincere feeling. None of the most brutal repressions could prevent the emergence of truly talented artists, for whom the main thing was self-expression, regardless of the ideological framework.

In architecture, the time has come for the "Stalinist Empire". The search for avant-garde artists was replaced by a return to proven canons. The power of communist ideology was embodied in spectacular examples of reworked neoclassicism - Stalin's "skyscrapers".

Wartime art

There is a time in the history of our country that has become the greatest tragedy and a stage of unprecedented spiritual uplift. The art of Russia of the 20th and 21st centuries received one of the main themes that made it possible to express the greatness of the Russian folk character, the depth of feelings that can take possession of an individual and huge masses during historical upheavals.

The Great Patriotic War from the first days found expression in visual images of amazing power. Poster by I. Toidze "The Motherland Calls!" raised to defend the country better than any commanders, and Deineka's Defense of Sevastopol shocks any person, regardless of the ideas that he shares. The Seventh Symphony by Dmitry Shostakovich is just as impressive, and the musical art of Russia in the 20th century, no less than other types of creativity, paid tribute to the theme of the war against fascism.

Thaw

After the Great Victory, the next most powerful historical factor influencing social life in the USSR was the death of Stalin (March 1953) and the 20th Congress of the CPSU, which raised the issue of exposing the cult of the individual. For some time, for artists, as well as for the whole society, there was a breath of freedom of creativity and new ideas. The generation of the "sixties" is a very specific phenomenon, it left a memory of itself as a short breath of fresh air, taken before plunging again for decades into the swamp of measured, scheduled, regulated existence.

The first experiments of the artistic avant-garde of the "second wave" - ​​the works of E. Belyutin, Y. Sooster, V. Yankilevsky, B. Zhutovsky and others - at the exhibition timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists, were harshly condemned personally by the new leader of the country. Khrushchev. The party again began to explain to the people what art they needed, and to the artists how to write.

Architecture was ordered to fight excesses, which was rightly explained by the economic difficulties of the post-war period, the time of mass housing construction, the time of the Khrushchevs, which somewhat removed the urgency of the housing issue, but disfigured the appearance of many cities.

The art of "developed socialism"

In many ways, the art of Russia in the second half of the 20th century is in many ways a history of the confrontation between the artistic personality and the dominant ideology. But even in the atmosphere of ideological regulation of every piece of spiritual space, many artists found ways to slightly modify the prescribed method of socialist realism.

So, a real example for the young were the masters who formed their beliefs back in the twenties: N. Romadin, M. Saryan, A. Plastov and others. The painting by a former member of the OST art association Y. Pimenov "Wedding on Tomorrow's Street", painted in 1962, became a symbol of society's hopes for renewal.

Another striking phenomenon in Soviet painting of that time was the formation of a "severe style". This term was used to designate the work of G. Korzhov, P. Ossovsky, the Smolin brothers, P. Nikonov and others. Their paintings, painted in different genres (everyday life, historical), showed a hero who did not need instructions, busy with an understandable and necessary task. He was portrayed without unnecessary details and coloristic delights, succinctly and expressively.

Of particular importance is the work of such a master as The civic sound of his canvases contains a general humanistic, almost religious message, rare for Soviet art, and his painting style has roots in the times of the Italian Renaissance.

Non-conformism

The official domination of "socialist realism" forced informal artists to look for their own way to the audience or to resort to emigration. M. Shemyakin, I. Kabakov, O. Rabin, E. Neizvestny and many others left. These were artists of the 20th century in Russia, who were the bearers of spiritual values ​​born by the avant-garde at the beginning of the century, and who returned to their homeland after the collapse of communist ideology.

And during her reign, internal emigration appeared, which gave rise to the popular motive of a crazy, always drunk artist, an inhabitant of psychiatric hospitals, persecuted by the authorities and the leadership of creative unions, but highly valued by independent Western experts. A typical bearer of such an image was A. Zverev, a legendary personality for Moscow in the era of developed socialism.

Polystylistics and pluralism

Having freed itself from the state dictatorship of the Soviet era, the fine arts of the 20th century in Russia entered the global process as its inseparable part, having common properties and tendencies with it. Many forms of creativity, familiar to the West for a long time, were quickly mastered by domestic artists. The words "performance", "video installation", etc. have become commonplace in our speech, and among the most significant contemporary masters of world fame are artists with views diametrically opposite: Z. Tsereteli, T. Nazarenko, M. Kishev , A. Burganov and many others.

The turbulent, unpredictable recent history of the country, which occupied one sixth of the earth's land, looks into its mirror - the art of Russia of the 20th century - and is reflected in it in thousands of unforgettable images ...

With the crisis of the populist movement in the 90s, "the analytical method of realism of the 19th century", as it is called in Russian science, is becoming obsolete. Many of the Itinerant artists experienced a creative decline, went into the "petty topic" of an entertaining genre painting. Perov's traditions were preserved most of all in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture thanks to the teaching activities of such artists as S.V. Ivanov, K.A. Korovin, V.A. Serov and others.

Complex life processes led to the diversity of forms of artistic life in these years. All types of art - painting, theater, music, architecture - came out for the renewal of the artistic language, for high professionalism.

For the painters of the turn of the century, different ways of expression are characteristic than those of the Itinerants, other forms of artistic creativity - in images that are contradictory, complicated and reflecting modernity without illustrativeness and narrative. Artists are painfully looking for harmony and beauty in a world that is fundamentally alien to both harmony and beauty. That is why many saw their mission in fostering a sense of beauty. This time of "eves", expectations of changes in social life gave rise to many trends, associations, groupings, a clash of different worldviews and tastes. But it also gave rise to the universalism of a whole generation of artists who appeared after the "classical" Wanderers. It is enough to name only the names of V.A. Serov and M.A. Vrubel.

The artists of the World of Art association played an important role in the popularization of Russian art, especially of the 18th century, as well as of Western European art, in attracting Western European masters to exhibitions. "Miriskusniki", who gathered the best artistic forces in St. Petersburg, published their own magazine, by their very existence contributed to the consolidation of artistic forces in Moscow, the creation of the "Union of Russian Artists".

The impressionistic lessons of plein air painting, the composition of "random framing", a wide free painting manner - all this is the result of evolution in the development of visual means in all genres at the turn of the century. In search of "beauty and harmony", artists try themselves in a variety of techniques and types of art - from monumental painting and theatrical scenery to book design and arts and crafts.

At the turn of the century, a style emerged that affected all the plastic arts, starting first of all with architecture (in which eclecticism prevailed for a long time) and ending with graphics, which was called the Art Nouveau style. This phenomenon is not unambiguous, in modernity there is also decadent pretentiousness, pretentiousness, designed mainly for bourgeois tastes, but there is also a striving for the unity of style, significant in itself. Art Nouveau is a new stage in the synthesis of architecture, painting, decorative arts.

In the visual arts, Art Nouveau has shown itself: in sculpture - the fluidity of forms, the special expressiveness of the silhouette, the dynamism of compositions; in painting - the symbolism of images, a predilection for allegories.

The emergence of modernity did not mean that the ideas of itinerant movement died by the end of the century. In the 90s, genre painting developed, but it develops somewhat differently than in the "classical" movement of the 70s and 80s. Thus, the peasant theme is revealed in a new way. Sergei Alekseevich Korovin (1858–1908) depicts the split in the rural community in an emphatic accusatory manner in his painting On the World (1893, Tretyakov Gallery). Abram Efimovich Arkhipov (1862–1930) managed to show the rapidity of existence in hard exhausting work in the painting Washerwomen (1901, Tretyakov Gallery). He achieved this to a large extent thanks to new pictorial discoveries, a new understanding of the possibilities of color and light.

The lack of agreement, “subtext”, a well-found expressive detail make the painting of Sergei Vasilyevich Ivanov (1864–1910) “On the Road. Death of an Immigrant ”(1889, Tretyakov Gallery). The shafts sticking out, as if raised in a scream, dramatize the action much more than the dead man depicted in the foreground or the woman howling over him. Ivanov owns one of the works dedicated to the revolution of 1905 - "Shooting". The impressionistic technique of "partial composition", as if by accidentally snatched a frame, is preserved here: only a line of houses, a line of soldiers, a group of demonstrators are outlined, and in the foreground, in a sunlit square, is the figure of a dead dog running from shots. Ivanov is characterized by sharp black-and-white contrasts, an expressive contour of objects, a well-known flatness of the image. His language is lapidary.

In the 90s of the XIX century. art includes the artist who makes the worker the protagonist of his works. In 1894, a painting by N.A. Kasatkina (1859-1930) "Miner" (State Tretyakov Gallery), in 1895 - "Miners. Change".

At the turn of the century, a slightly different path of development than that of Surikov was outlined in the historical theme. So, for example, Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin (1861-1904) works more in the historical and everyday than purely historical genre. “Russian Women of the 17th Century in the Church” (1899, Tretyakov Gallery), “Wedding Train in Moscow. XVII century "(1901, TG)," They're coming. (The Moscow people during the entry of a foreign embassy to Moscow at the end of the 17th century) ”(1901, RM),“ Moscow street of the 17th century on a holiday ”(1895, RM), etc. - these are everyday scenes from the life of Moscow in the 17th century. Ryabushkin was especially attracted by this century, with its gingerbread elegance, polychrome, ornamental patterns. The artist aesthetically admires the bygone world of the 17th century, which leads to a subtle stylization far from Surikov's monumentalism and his assessments of historical events. Ryabushkin's stylization manifests itself in the flatness of the image, in a special structure of plastic and linear rhythm, in the coloring built on bright major colors, in the general decorative solution. Ryabushkin boldly introduces local colors into the open-air landscape, for example, in "The Wedding Train ..." - the red color of the carriage, large spots of festive clothes against the background of dark buildings and snow, given, however, in the finest color nuance. The landscape always poetically conveys the beauty of Russian nature. True, sometimes Ryabushkin is also characterized by an ironic attitude in the depiction of certain aspects of life, as, for example, in the painting "Tea Party" (cardboard, gouache, tempera, 1903, Russian Museum). In the frontally seated static figures with saucers in their hands, one reads regularity, boredom, sleepiness, we also feel the oppressive force of the bourgeois life, the limitations of these people.

Apollinary Mikhailovich Vasnetsov (1856-1933) pays even more attention to the landscape in his historical compositions. His favorite theme is also the 17th century, but not everyday scenes, but the architecture of Moscow. ("A street in Kitay-gorod. Beginning of the 17th century", 1900, State Russian Museum). Painting “Moscow at the end of the 17th century. At Dawn at the Resurrection Gate (1900, Tretyakov Gallery), perhaps, was inspired by the introduction to Musorgsky's opera Khovanshchina, sketches of the scenery for which Vasnetsov had performed shortly before.

A.M. Vasnetsov taught in the landscape class of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1901-1918). As a theorist, he outlined his views in the book “Art. The experience of analyzing the concepts that define the art of painting ”(Moscow, 1908), in which he advocated realistic traditions in art. Vasnetsov was also the founder of the "Union of Russian Artists".

Philip Andreevich Malyavin (1869-1940) created a new type of painting, in which folklore artistic traditions were mastered in a completely special way and transposed into the language of contemporary art, who in his youth was engaged in icon painting in the Athos Monastery, and then studied at the Academy of Arts under Repin. His images of "women" and "girls" have a certain symbolic meaning - of healthy soil Russia. His paintings are always expressive, and although they are, as a rule, easel works, they receive a monumental and decorative interpretation under the artist's brush. Laughter (1899, Museum of Modern Art, Venice), Whirlwind (1906, Tretyakov Gallery) are a realistic depiction of peasant girls laughing contagiously loudly or rushing uncontrollably in a round dance, but this is a different realism than in the second half of the century. The painting is sweeping, sketchy, with a textured brushstroke, the forms are generalized, there is no spatial depth, the figures, as a rule, are located in the foreground and fill the entire canvas.

Malyavin combined expressive decorativeism with realistic fidelity to nature in his painting.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov (1862-1942) addresses the theme of Ancient Rus, like a number of masters before him, but the image of Rus appears in the artist's paintings as a kind of ideal, almost enchanted world, in harmony with nature, but disappeared forever like the legendary city of Kitezh ... This acute sensation of nature, delight in the world, in front of every tree and blade of grass is especially vividly expressed in one of the most famous works of Nesterov of the pre-revolutionary period - "Vision to the youth Bartholomew" (1889-1890, TG). In the disclosure of the plot of the picture, there are the same stylistic features as in Ryabushkin, but a deeply lyrical feeling of the beauty of nature is invariably expressed, through which the high spirituality of the heroes, their enlightenment, their alienation from worldly vanity is transmitted.

Before turning to the image of St. Sergius of Radonezh, Nesterov had already expressed interest in the theme of Ancient Russia with such works as "Christ's Bride" (1887, whereabouts unknown), "Hermit" (1888, RM; 1888-1889, Tretyakov Gallery), creating images of high spirituality and quiet contemplation. He dedicated several more works to Sergius of Radonezh himself (The Youth of St. Sergius, 1892–1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; triptych "Works of St. Sergius", 1896–1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; Sergius of Radonezh, 1891–1899, State Russian Museum).

M.V. Nesterov did a lot of religious monumental painting: together with V.M. Vasnetsov painted the Kiev Vladimir Cathedral, independently - the monastery in Abastuman (Georgia) and the Martha-Mariinsky monastery in Moscow. The murals are always dedicated to the Old Russian theme (for example, in Georgia, to Alexander Nevsky). In Nesterov's wall paintings, there are many observed real signs, especially in the landscape, portrait features - in the depiction of saints. In the artist's striving for a plane interpretation of the composition of elegance, ornamentation, refined sophistication of plastic rhythms, the undoubted influence of modernity manifested itself.

Stylization, in general, so characteristic of this time, to a large extent affected the easel works of Nesterov. This can be observed in one of the best canvases dedicated to women's fate - "The Great Vows" (1898, RM): deliberately flat figures of nuns, "nuns" and "white women", generalized silhouettes, as if a slowed-down ritual rhythm of light and dark spots - figures and landscape with its light birches and almost black spruces. And as always with Nesterov, the landscape plays one of the main roles. "I love the Russian landscape," the artist wrote, "against its background somehow better, more clearly you feel both the meaning of Russian life and the Russian soul."

The landscape genre itself develops in a new way at the end of the 19th century. Levitan, in fact, completed the search for the Itinerants in the landscape. A new word at the turn of the century was to be said by K.A. Korovin, V.A. Serov and M.A. Vrubel.

Already in the early landscapes of Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin (1861–1939) purely painterly problems were solved - to paint gray on white, black on white, gray on gray. “Conceptual” landscape (M.M. Allenov's term), such as Savrasov's or Levitan's, does not interest him.

For the brilliant colorist Korovin, the world appears to be a "riot of colors." Generously gifted by nature, Korovin was engaged in both portrait and still life, but it would not be a mistake to say that landscape remained his favorite genre. He brought into art the strong realistic traditions of his teachers from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - Savrasov and Polenov, but he has a different view of the world, he sets different tasks. He began to paint in the open air early, already in the portrait of the chorus girl in 1883 one can see the independent development of the principles of plein airism, which were then embodied in a number of portraits made in the estate of S. Mamontov in Abramtsevo ("In a boat", State Tretyakov Gallery; portrait of TS Lyubatovich, State Russian Museum, etc.), in the northern landscapes, performed in S. Mamontov's expedition to the north ("Winter in Lapland", Tretyakov Gallery). His French landscapes, united by the name "Paris Lights", are already quite impressionistic writing, with its highest etude culture. Sharp, instant impressions from the life of a big city: quiet streets at different times of the day, objects dissolved in a light-air environment, molded with a dynamic, "trembling", vibrating brushstroke, a stream of such strokes, creating the illusion of a curtain of rain or urban, saturated with thousands of different air vapors, - features reminiscent of the landscapes of Manet, Pissarro, Monet. Korovin is temperamental, emotional, impulsive, theatrical, hence the bright color and romantic uplifting of his landscapes (Paris. Boulevard des Capucines, 1906, Tretyakov Gallery; Paris at night. Italian boulevard. 1908, Tretyakov Gallery). The same features of impressionistic etude, pictorial maestria, amazing artistry are preserved by Korovin in all other genres, primarily in portrait and still life, but also in decorative panels, in applied art, in theatrical scenery, which he has been engaged in all his life (Portrait of Chaliapin, 1911, State Russian Museum; "Fish, Wine and Fruits" 1916, Tretyakov Gallery).

Korovin's generous gift of painting was brilliantly manifested in theatrical and decorative painting. As a theater painter, he worked for the Abramtsevo theater (and Mamontov was almost the first to appreciate him as a theater artist), for the Moscow Art Theater, for the Moscow Private Russian Opera, where his lifelong friendship with Chaliapin began for the Diaghilev entreprise. Korovin raised theatrical scenery and the importance of the artist in the theater to a new level, he made a revolution in the understanding of the role of the artist in the theater and had a great influence on his contemporaries with his colorful, "spectacular" decorations that reveal the very essence of a musical performance.

Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov (1865–1911) was one of the most important artists, an innovator of Russian painting at the turn of the century. His "Girl with Peaches" (portrait of Verusha Mamontova, 1887, Tretyakov Gallery) and "Girl illuminated by the sun" (portrait of Masha Simanovich, 1888, Tretyakov Gallery) represent a whole stage in Russian painting. Serov was brought up among prominent figures of Russian musical culture (his father is a famous composer, his mother is a pianist), studied with Repin and Chistyakov, studied the best museum collections in Europe and, upon returning from abroad, entered the Abramtsevo circle. In Abramtsevo, the aforementioned two portraits were written, from which the glory of Serov began, who entered art with his own, light and poetic view of the world. Vera Mamontova sits in a calm position at the table, peaches are scattered on a white tablecloth in front of her. She herself and all objects are presented in the most complex light-air environment. The sun glare falls on the tablecloth, on clothes, a wall plate, a knife. The girl depicted sitting at the table is in organic unity with all this material world, in harmony with it, is full of vital trepidation, inner movement. To an even greater extent, the principles of plein air painting were reflected in the portrait of the artist's cousin Masha Simanovich, painted right in the open air. The colors here are given in a complex interaction with each other, they perfectly convey the atmosphere of a summer day, color reflexes that create the illusion of sun rays gliding through the foliage. Serov departs from the critical realism of his teacher Repin to "poetic realism" (the term of DV Sarabyanov). The images of Vera Mamontova and Masha Simanovich are permeated with a sense of the joy of life, a bright feeling of being, a bright victorious youth. This was achieved by "light" impressionistic painting, for which the "principle of the random" is so characteristic, by sculpting the form with a dynamic, free brushstroke, creating the impression of a complex light-air environment. But unlike the Impressionists, Serov never dissolves an object in this environment so that it dematerializes, his composition never loses stability, the masses are always in equilibrium. And most importantly, it does not lose the integral generalized characteristics of the model.

Serov often writes representatives of the artistic intelligentsia: writers, artists, artists (portraits of K. Korovin, 1891, Tretyakov Gallery; Levitan, 1893, Tretyakov Gallery; Ermolova, 1905, Tretyakov Gallery). They are all different, he interprets all of them deeply individually, but all of them bear the light of intellectual exclusivity and inspirational creative life. An antique column, or rather a classical statue, is reminiscent of the figure of Yermolova, which is further enhanced by the vertical format of the canvas. But the main thing is the face - beautiful, proud, detached from everything petty and vain. The color scheme is based on a combination of two colors: black and gray, but in many shades. This truth of the image, created not by narrative, but by purely pictorial means, corresponded to the very personality of Yermolova, who, with her restrained, but deeply penetrating play, shocked young people in the turbulent years of the beginning of the 20th century.

The portrait of Ermolova is ceremonial. But Serov is such a great master that, choosing a different model, in the same genre of ceremonial portrait, in fact, with the same expressive means, he was able to create an image of a completely different character. So, in the portrait of Princess Orlova (1910-1911, Russian Museum), exaggeration of some details (a huge hat, too long back, acute knee angle), emphasized attention to the luxury of the interior, conveyed only fragmentarily, like a snatched frame (part of a chair, paintings, corner of a table ), allow the master to create an almost grotesque image of an arrogant aristocrat. But the same grotesqueness in his famous "Peter I" (1907, Tretyakov Gallery) (Peter in the picture is simply gigantic), which allows Serov to depict the rapid movement of the tsar and the courtiers absurdly rushing after him, leads to an image that is not ironic, as in Orlova's portrait, but symbolic, conveying the meaning of an entire era. The artist admires the originality of his hero.

Portrait, landscape, still life, household, historical painting; oil, gouache, tempera, charcoal - it is difficult to find both pictorial and graphic genres in which Serov would not work, and materials that he would not use.

A special theme in Serov's work is peasantry. In his peasant genre there is no itinerant social acuteness, but there is a sense of the beauty and harmony of the peasant life, admiration for the healthy beauty of the Russian people ("In the village. A woman with a horse," b. On cards, pastel, 1898, Tretyakov Gallery). Winter landscapes with their silvery-pearl colors are especially exquisite.

Serov interpreted the historical theme in his own way: the "royal hunts" with the amusement walks of Elizabeth and Catherine II were conveyed by the artist of the new era, ironic, but also invariably admiring the beauty of life in the 18th century. Serov's interest in the 18th century arose under the influence of The World of Art and in connection with his work on the publication of The History of the Grand Ducal, Tsarist and Imperial Hunt in Russia.

Serov was a deeply thinking artist, constantly looking for new forms of artistic implementation of reality. Inspired by the Art Nouveau, ideas of flatness and increased decorativeness were reflected not only in historical compositions, but also in his portrait of the dancer Ida Rubinstein, in his sketches for The Abduction of Europa and Odyssey and Navzicae (both 1910, Tretyakov Gallery, cardboard, tempera). It is significant that at the end of his life Serov turns to the ancient world. In a poetic legend, interpreted by him freely, outside the classicist canons, he wants to find harmony, the search for which the artist devoted all his work.

It is hard to believe right away that the portrait of Verusha Mamontova and The Abduction of Europe was painted by the same master, Serov is so versatile in his evolution from the impressionistic authenticity of portraits and landscapes of the 80s and 90s to Art Nouveau in historical motives and compositions from ancient mythology.

The creative path of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856–1910) was more direct, although at the same time it was unusually difficult. Before the Academy of Arts (1880) Vrubel graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. In 1884 he went to Kiev to supervise the restoration of frescoes in the Church of St. Cyril and himself created several monumental compositions. He makes watercolor sketches for the paintings of the Vladimir Cathedral. The sketches were not transferred to the walls, since the client was frightened by their non-canonical and expressive nature.

In the 90s, when the artist settled in Moscow, Vrubel's style of writing, full of mystery and almost demonic power, took shape, which cannot be confused with any other. He sculpts the form like a mosaic, from sharp "faceted" pieces of different colors, as if glowing from the inside ("Girl against the background of a Persian carpet", 1886, KMRI; "Fortune Teller", 1895, State Tretyakov Gallery). Color combinations do not reflect the reality of the relationship of color, but have a symbolic meaning. Nature has no power over Vrubel. He knows her, perfectly owns her, but he creates his own fantastic world, which has little resemblance to reality. In this sense, Vrubel is antipode to the impressionists (about whom it is not accidentally said that they are the same as naturalists in literature), because he does not in any way strive to fix the immediate impression of reality. He gravitates towards literary subjects, which he interprets in an abstract way, striving to create images of eternal, enormous spiritual power. So, taking up illustrations for "The Demon", he soon departs from the principle of direct illustration ("Tamara's Dance", "Do not cry child, do not cry in vain", "Tamara in a coffin", etc.) and already in the same 1890 creates his "Demon Sitting" - a work, in fact, plotless, but the image is eternal, like the images of Mephistopheles, Faust, Don Juan. The image of the Demon is the central image of all Vrubel's work, its main theme. In 1899 he wrote "The Flying Demon", in 1902 - "The Demon Defeated". Vrubel's demon is a creature that suffers first of all. Suffering prevails in him over evil, and this is the peculiarity of the national-Russian interpretation of the image. Contemporaries, as rightly noted, saw in his "Demons" a symbol of the fate of an intellectual - a romantic, rebelliously trying to escape from a reality devoid of harmony into the surreal world of dreams, but plunged into the rough earthly reality. This tragedy of artistic perception of the world also determines the portrait characteristics of Vrubel: mental discord, breakdown in his self-portraits, alertness, almost fright, but also majestic strength, monumentality - in the portrait of S. Mamontov (1897, Tretyakov Gallery), confusion, anxiety - in the fabulous image of "Princess -The Swan "(1900, Tretyakov Gallery), even in his festive, in design and purpose, decorative panels" Spain "(1894, Tretyakov Gallery) and" Venice "(1893, State Russian Museum), executed for the mansion of E.D. Dunker, there is no peace and serenity. Vrubel himself formulated his task - "to wake up the soul with stately images from the little things of everyday life."

The already mentioned industrialist and philanthropist Savva Mamontov played a very important role in Vrubel's life. Abramtsevo connected Vrubel with Rimsky-Korsakov, under whose influence the artist also writes his "Swan Princess", performs sculptures "The Volkhovs", "Mizgir", etc. a fairy tale, to an epic, the result of which was the panel "Mikula Selyaninovich", "Heroes". Vrubel tries his hand at ceramics, making sculptures in majolica. He is interested in pagan Russia and Greece, the Middle East and India - all the cultures of mankind, the artistic techniques of which he seeks to comprehend. And each time he transformed the impressions he gained into deeply symbolic images reflecting all the originality of his attitude.

Vrubel created his most mature paintings and graphic works at the turn of the century - in the genre of landscape, portrait, book illustration. In the organization and decorative-plane interpretation of the canvas or sheet, in the combination of the real and the fantastic, in adherence to ornamental, rhythmically complex solutions in his works of this period, the features of Art Nouveau are increasingly asserting themselves.

Like K. Korovin, Vrubel worked a lot in the theater. His best sets were performed for Rimsky-Korsakov's operas The Snow Maiden, Sadko, The Tale of Tsar Saltan and others on the stage of the Moscow Private Opera, that is, for those works that gave him the opportunity to “communicate” with Russian folklore, a fairy tale, a legend.

The universalism of talent, boundless imagination, and extraordinary passion in the assertion of noble ideals distinguish Vrubel from many of his contemporaries.

Creativity Vrubel brighter than others reflected the contradictions and painful throwing of the milestone era. On the day of Vrubel's funeral, Benoit said: “The life of Vrubel, as it will now go down in history, is a marvelous pathetic symphony, that is, the most complete form of artistic life. Future generations ... will look back at the last decades of the 19th century, as at the "era of Vrubel" ... It was in him that our time was expressed in the most beautiful and saddest that it was capable of ”.

With Vrubel we are entering a new century, the era of the "Silver Age", the last period of the culture of St. Petersburg Russia, which is out of touch with both the "ideology of revolutionaryism" (P. Sapronov) and "with the autocracy and the state that have long ceased to be a cultural force." The rise of Russian philosophical and religious thought, the highest level of poetry (suffice it to name Blok, Bely, Annensky, Gumilyov, Georgy Ivanov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Sologub) is associated with the beginning of the century; drama and musical theater, ballet; The "discovery" of Russian art of the 18th century (Rokotov, Levitsky, Borovikovsky), Old Russian icon painting; the finest professionalism of painting and graphics from the very beginning of the century. But the "Silver Age" was powerless in the face of the impending tragic events in Russia, which was heading for a revolutionary catastrophe, continuing to be in the "ivory tower" and in the poetics of symbolism.

If Vrubel's work can be correlated with the general direction of symbolism in art and literature, although, like any great artist, he destroyed the boundaries of the direction, then Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905) is a direct exponent of pictorial symbolism and one of the first retrospectivists in the visual arts. art of foreign Russia. Critics of that time even called him "a dreamer of retrospectiveism." Died on the eve of the first Russian revolution, Borisov-Musatov turned out to be completely deaf to the new moods that were rapidly bursting into life. His works are elegiac sadness for the old empty "noble nests" and dying "cherry gardens", for beautiful women, spiritualized, almost unearthly, dressed in some timeless costumes that do not bear external signs of place and time.

His easel works most of all resemble not even decorative panels, but tapestries. The space is decided extremely conditionally, flat, the figures are almost ethereal, as, for example, the girls by the pond in the painting "The Pond" (1902, tempera, Tretyakov Gallery), immersed in dreamy meditation, in deep contemplation. Faded, pale gray shades of color enhance the overall impression of fragile, unearthly beauty and anemicity, ghostly, which extends not only to human images, but also to the nature depicted by them. It is no coincidence that Borisov-Musatov called one of his works "Ghosts" (1903, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery): silent and inactive female figures, marble statues by the stairs, a half-naked tree - a faded range of blue, gray, purple tones enhances the illusion of the depicted.

This longing for the bygone times made Borisov-Musatov akin to the artists of the World of Art, an organization that emerged in St. Petersburg in 1898 and united masters of the highest artistic culture, the artistic elite of Russia in those years. ("Miriskusniki", by the way, did not understand Borisov-Musatov's art and recognized it only at the end of the artist's life.) The "World of Art" began with evenings in A. Benois's house dedicated to art, literature and music. The people who gathered there were united by love for beauty and the confidence that it can only be found in art, since reality is ugly. Having also arisen as a reaction to the petty themes of the late Wanderers, its edification and illustrativeness, "The World of Art" soon turned into one of the major phenomena of Russian artistic culture. This association was attended by almost all famous artists - Benois, Somov, Bakst, E.E. Lancere, Golovin, Dobuzhinsky, Vrubel, Serov, K. Korovin, Levitan, Nesterov, Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Bilibin, Sapunov, Sudeikin, Ryabushkin, Roerich, Kustodiev, Petrov-Vodkin, Malyavin, even Larionov and Goncharova. Of great importance for the formation of this association was the personality of Diaghilev, a patron and organizer of exhibitions, and later - an impresario of Russian ballet and opera tours abroad (Russian Seasons, which introduced Europe to the works of Chaliapin, Pavlova, Karsavina, Fokin, Nijinsky, etc. and the world is an example of the highest culture of the form of various arts: music, dance, painting, scenography). At the initial stage of the formation of the "World of Art" Diaghilev arranged an exhibition of English and German watercolors in St. Petersburg in 1897, then an exhibition of Russian and Finnish artists in 1898. From 1899 to 1904 he edited a magazine under the same name, consisting of two departments: artistic and literary (the last one was of a religious-philosophical plan, in which D. Filosofov, D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius collaborated before the opening of his journal “New Way” in 1902. Then the religious-philosophical direction in the journal “Mir art ”gave way to the theory of aesthetics, and in this part the magazine became a tribune for other Symbolists headed by A. Bely and V. Bryusov).

The editorial articles of the first issues of the magazine clearly formulated the main provisions of the "world of art" about the autonomy of art, that the problems of modern culture are exclusively problems of the artistic form and that the main task of art is to educate the aesthetic tastes of Russian society, primarily through acquaintance with the works world art. We must pay tribute to them: thanks to the "world of art", English and German art was really appreciated in a new way, and most importantly, the painting of the Russian XVIII century and the architecture of St. Petersburg classicism became a discovery for many. "Miriskusniki" fought for "criticism as art", proclaiming the ideal of a critic-artist with a high professional culture and erudition. The type of such a critic was embodied by one of the founders of the "World of Art" A.N. Benoit. "Miriskusniki" organized exhibitions. The first was the only international one, which united, in addition to Russians, artists from France, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Finland, etc. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow painters and graphic artists took part in it. But the crack between these two schools - St. Petersburg and Moscow - has been outlined almost from the first day. In March 1903, the last, fifth exhibition of the "World of Art" was closed, in December 1904 the last issue of the magazine "World of Art" was published. Most of the artists moved to the "Union of Russian Artists" organized on the basis of the Moscow exhibition "36", writers - to the magazine "New Way" opened by Merezhkovsky's group, Moscow Symbolists united around the magazine "Libra", musicians organized "Evenings of Contemporary Music", Diaghilev went entirely to ballet and theater. His last significant work in the visual arts was a grandiose historical exhibition of Russian painting from icon painting to modern times in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1906, then exhibited in Berlin and Venice (1906-1907). In the section of contemporary painting, the main place was occupied by the "world of art". This was the first act of all-European recognition of the "World of Art", as well as the discovery of Russian painting in the 18th and early 20th centuries. in general for Western criticism and a real triumph of Russian art.

In 1910, an attempt was made to breathe life into the "World of Art" (headed by Roerich). At this time, a demarcation took place among painters. Benoit and his supporters break with the Union of Russian Artists ", with Muscovites, and leave this organization, but they understand that the secondary association called" World of Art "has nothing to do with the first. Benoit sadly states that "not reconciliation under the banner of beauty has now become a slogan in all spheres of life, but a fierce struggle." Glory came to the "world of art", but the "World of Arts", in fact, no longer existed, although formally the association existed until the early 20s (1924) - with a complete lack of integrity, on boundless tolerance and flexibility of positions, reconciling artists from Rylov to Tatlin, from Grabar to Chagall. How not to remember the Impressionists here? The Commonwealth, which was once born in the workshop of Gleyre, in the Salon of the Outcast, at the tables of the Herbois cafe and which was to have a huge impact on all European painting, also disintegrated on the threshold of its recognition. The second generation of the "world of art" is less occupied with the problems of easel painting, their interests lie in graphics, mainly books, and theatrical and decorative arts, in both areas they have made a real artistic reform. In the second generation of the "World of Artists" there were also large individuals (Kustodiev, Sudeikin, Serebryakova, Chekhonin, Grigoriev, Yakovlev, Shukhaev, Mitrokhin, etc.), but there were no innovators at all, for since the 1910s the "World of Art" has been overwhelming wave of epigonism. Therefore, when characterizing the "World of Art", we will mainly talk about the first stage of the existence of this association and its core - Benoit, Somov, Bakst.

The leading artist of the World of Art was Konstantin Andreevich Somov (1869–1939). The son of the chief curator of the Hermitage, who graduated from the Academy of Arts and traveled to Europe, Somov received an excellent education. Creative maturity came to him early, but, as the researcher (V.N.

Somov, as we know him, appeared in the portrait of the artist Martynova ("Lady in Blue", 1897-1900, Tretyakov Gallery), in the painting-portrait "Echo of the Past Tense" (1903, on maps, aqu., Gouache, Tretyakov Gallery ), where he creates a poetic description of the fragile, anemic female beauty of a decadent model, refusing to convey the real everyday signs of modernity. He dresses the models in old costumes, gives their appearance the features of secret suffering, sadness and dreaminess, painful brokenness.

Somov owns a series of graphic portraits of his contemporaries - the intellectual elite (V. Ivanov, Blok, Kuzmin, Sollogub, Lancere, Dobuzhinsky, etc.), in which he uses one general technique: on a white background - in a certain timeless sphere - he draws a face, resemblance in which it is achieved not through naturalization, but by bold generalizations and an accurate selection of characteristic details. This absence of signs of time creates the impression of static, stiffness, coldness, almost tragic loneliness.

Earlier than anyone else in The World of Art, Somov turned to the themes of the past, to the interpretation of the 18th century. ("Letter", 1896; "Confidentiality", 1897), being the predecessor of Benoit's Versailles landscapes. He was the first to create an unreal world, woven from the motives of the noble estate and court culture and his own purely subjective artistic sensations, permeated with irony. The historicism of the "World of Artists" was an escape from reality. Not the past, but its dramatization, longing for its irrevocability - this is their main motive. Not true fun, but playing fun with kisses in the alleys - this is Somov.

Somov's other works are pastoral and gallant festivities (Laughed Kiss, 1908, RM; Walk of the Marquise, 1909, RM), full of caustic irony, spiritual emptiness, even hopelessness. Love scenes from the 18th - early 19th centuries. are always given with a touch of eroticism. The latter was especially evident in his porcelain figurines, dedicated, as it were, to one theme - the ghostly pursuit of pleasure.

Somov worked a lot as a graphic artist, he designed a monograph by S. Diaghilev about D. Levitsky, A. Benois's work about Tsarskoe Selo. The book as a single organism with its rhythmic and stylistic unity was raised by him to an extraordinary height. Somov is not an illustrator, he “illustrates not a text, but an epoch, using a literary device as a springboard,” wrote A.A. Sidorov, and this is very true.

The ideological leader of the "World of Art" was Alexander Nikolaevich Benois (1870-1960) - an unusually versatile talent. A painter, graphic easel painter and illustrator, theater artist, director, author of ballet librettos, theoretician and art historian, musical figure, he was, in the words of A. Bely, the main politician and diplomat of the World of Art. Coming from the upper stratum of the St. Petersburg artistic intelligentsia (composers and conductors, architects and painters), he first studied at the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. As an artist, he is related to Somov by stylistic tendencies and addiction to the past (“I am intoxicated with Versailles, this is some kind of illness, love, criminal passion ... I have completely moved into the past ...”). Benois's Versailles landscapes merged the historical reconstruction of the 17th century. and contemporary impressions of the artist, his perception of French classicism, French engraving. Hence the clear composition, clear spatiality, grandeur and cold severity of rhythms, contrasting the grandeur of the monuments of art and the smallness of human figures, which are only staffage among them (the 1st Versailles series of 1896–1898 entitled “The Last Walks of Louis XIV”). In the second Versailles series (1905-1906), the irony, which is also characteristic of the first sheets, is colored with almost tragic notes (The King's Walk, k., Gouache, aqu., Gold, silver, feather, 1906, Tretyakov Gallery). Benoit's thinking is the thinking of a theater artist par excellence, who knew and felt the theater perfectly.

Nature is perceived by Benois in an associative connection with history (views of Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo, performed by him in watercolor technique).

In a series of paintings from the Russian past, commissioned by the Moscow publishing house Knebel (illustrations for "The Tsar's Hunt"), in scenes of the noble, landlord life of the 18th century. Benois created an intimate image of this era, albeit somewhat theatrical (Parade under Paul I, 1907, RM).

Benois the illustrator (Pushkin, Hoffmann) is a whole page in the history of the book. Unlike Somov, Benoit creates a narrative illustration. The plane of the page is not an end in itself for him. The illustrations for "The Queen of Spades" were more likely complete independent works, not so much "book art", according to A.A. Sidorov, how much "art in the book." A masterpiece of book illustration was the graphic design of The Bronze Horseman (1903,1905,1916,1921–1922, ink and watercolor imitating color woodcut). In a series of illustrations for the great poem, the main character is the architectural landscape of St. Petersburg, now solemnly pathetic, now peaceful, now ominous, against which the figure of Eugene seems even more insignificant. This is how Benoit expresses the tragic conflict between the fate of the Russian statehood and the personal fate of the little man (“And the poor madman all night long, / Wherever he turned his feet, / 3 the Copper Horseman was everywhere / He rode with a heavy stomp”).

As a theater artist, Benoit designed the performances of the Russian Seasons, of which the most famous was the ballet Petrushka to the music of Stravinsky, worked extensively at the Moscow Art Theater, and subsequently on almost all major European stages.

The activity of Benois, an art critic and art historian, who, together with Grabar, updated the methods, techniques and themes of Russian art history, is a whole stage in the history of art history (see "History of 19th century painting" by R. Muther - volume "Russian painting", 1901– 1902; "Russian School of Painting", published in 1904; "Tsarskoe Selo during the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna", 1910; articles in the magazines "World of Art" and "Old Years", "Artistic Treasures of Russia", etc.).

The third in the core of the World of Art was Lev Samuilovich Bakst (1866–1924), who became famous as a theater artist and was the first among the “world of art” to gain fame in Europe. He came to the "World of Art" from the Academy of Arts, then professed the Art Nouveau style, adjoined the left trends in European painting. At the first exhibitions of the World of Art, he exhibited a number of pictorial and graphic portraits (Benoit, Bely, Somov, Rozanov, Gippius, Diaghilev), where nature, coming in a stream of living conditions, was transformed into a kind of ideal idea of ​​a contemporary person. Bakst created the brand of the magazine "World of Art", which became the emblem of Diaghilev's "Russian Seasons" in Paris. There are no motives of the 18th century in Bakst's graphics. and manor themes. He gravitates towards antiquity, and towards the Greek archaic, interpreted symbolically. His painting "Ancient Horror" - "Terror antiquus" (tempera, 1908, RM) enjoyed particular success among the Symbolists. A terrible stormy sky, lightning that illuminates the abyss of the sea and the ancient city - and the archaic crust with a mysterious frozen smile dominates over this entire universal catastrophe. Soon Bakst completely went into theatrical and decorative work, and his scenery and costumes for the ballets of Diaghilev's entreprise, performed with extraordinary brilliance, masterly, artistically, brought him world fame. It was designed for performances with Anna Pavlova, Fokine's ballets. The artist made sets and costumes for Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, Stravinsky's Firebird (both -1910), Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, and for the ballet Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun (both -1912).

Of the first generation of the "world of art" the younger in age was Evgeny Evgenievich Lanceray (1875-1946), who in his work touched upon all the main problems of book graphics at the beginning of the 20th century. (see his illustrations for the book "Legends of the ancient castles of Brittany", for Lermontov, the cover for "Nevsky Prospect" by Bozheryanov, etc.). Lanceray created a number of watercolors and lithographs of St. Petersburg ("Kalinkin Bridge", "Nikolsky Market", etc.). Architecture occupies a huge place in his historical compositions (Empress Elizaveta Petrovna in Tsarskoe Selo, 1905, State Tretyakov Gallery). We can say that a new type of historical picture was created in the works of Serov, Benois, Lanceray - it is devoid of a plot, but at the same time it perfectly recreates the appearance of the era, evokes many historical, literary and aesthetic associations. One of the best creations of Lanceray - 70 drawings and watercolors for the story by L.N. Tolstoy's "Hadji Murad" (1912-1915), which Benoit considered "an independent song that perfectly fits into the mighty music of Tolstoy." In Soviet times, Lanceray became a prominent monumental painter.

In the graphics of Mstislav Valerianovich Dobuzhinsky (1875–1957), it is not so much the Petersburg of the Pushkin period or the 18th century that is presented, as a modern city, which he was able to convey with almost tragic expressiveness ("Old House", 1905, watercolor, Tretyakov Gallery), as well as a person - an inhabitant of such cities (The Man with Glasses, 1905–1906, pastel, State Tretyakov Gallery: a lonely, sad man against the background of dull houses, whose head resembles a skull). The urbanism of the future inspired Dobuzhinsky with panic. He also worked a lot in illustration, where the most remarkable can be considered his cycle of ink drawings for "White Nights" by Dostoevsky (1922). Dobuzhinsky also worked in the theater, designed for Nemirovich-Danchenko "Nikolai Stavrogin" (staging of Dostoevsky's "Demons"), Turgenev's plays "A Month in the Country" and "Freeloader".

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) occupies a special place in the "World of Art". An expert in the philosophy and ethnography of the East, an archaeologist and scientist, Roerich received an excellent education first at home, then at the Faculty of Law and History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, then at the Academy of Arts, in Kuindzhi's workshop, and in Paris at F. Cormon's studio. He early acquired the authority of a scientist. He was related to the “world of art” by the same love of retrospection, only not of the 17th – 18th centuries, but of pagan Slavic and Scandinavian antiquity, to Ancient Russia; stylistic tendencies, theatrical decorativeness ("The Messenger", 1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; "The Elders Are Converging", 1898, State Russian Museum; "Sinister", 1901, State Russian Museum). Roerich was most closely associated with the philosophy and aesthetics of Russian symbolism, but his art did not fit into the framework of the existing trends, for, in accordance with the artist's worldview, it appealed, as it were, to all mankind with the appeal of a friendly union of all peoples. Hence the special epic character of his canvases.

After 1905, the mood of pantheistic mysticism grew in Roerich's work. Historical themes give way to religious legends ("Heavenly Battle", 1912, RM). The Russian icon had a tremendous influence on Roerich: his decorative panel Cutting at Kerzhenets (1911) was exhibited while performing a fragment of the same title from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia in the Parisian Russian Seasons.

In the second generation of the World of Art, one of the most gifted artists was Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev (1878–1927), a student of Repin, who had helped him in the work on the State Council. Kustodiev is also characterized by stylization, but this is the stylization of folk popular prints. Hence the bright festive "Fairs", "Maslenitsa", "Balagany", hence his paintings from the bourgeois and merchant life, conveyed with light irony, but not without admiration for these red-cheeked half-asleep beauties at the samovar and with saucers in plump fingers ("Merchant", 1915, State Russian Museum; "Merchant's Wife at Tea", 1918, State Russian Museum).

A.Ya. Golovin - one of the largest theater artists of the first quarter of the XX century, I. Ya. Bilibin, A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedev and others.

The World of Art was a major aesthetic movement at the turn of the century, which overestimated the entire modern artistic culture, approved new tastes and problems, and returned to art - at the highest professional level - the lost forms of book graphics and theatrical and decorative painting, which acquired through their efforts all-European recognition, which created new art criticism, promoting Russian art abroad, in fact, even opening some of its stages, like the Russian XVIII century. "Miriskusniki" created a new type of historical painting, portrait, landscape with their own stylistic features (distinct stylistic tendencies, the predominance of graphic techniques over painting, purely decorative understanding of color, etc.). This determines their importance for Russian art.

The weaknesses of the "World of Art" were reflected primarily in the variegation and inconsistency of the program, proclaiming an example of "now Böcklin, now Manet"; in idealistic views on art, affected by indifference to the civic tasks of art, in the programmatic apoliticality, in the loss of the social significance of the painting. The intimacy of the World of Art, its pure aestheticism also determined the short historical period of its life in the era of formidable tragic foreshadowings of the impending revolution. These were only the first steps on the path of creative pursuits, and very soon the "World of Art" were overtaken by the young.

For some of the "world of art", however, the first Russian revolution was a real revolution in their worldview. The mobility and accessibility of graphics caused its particular activity during these years of revolutionary turmoil. A huge number of satirical magazines arose (380 titles were counted from 1905 to 1917). The magazine "Sting" stood out for its revolutionary-democratic orientation, but the largest artistic forces were grouped around "Bogeyman" and its application "Hell's Mail". Rejection of the autocracy united liberal-minded artists of various directions. In one of the issues of "Bogey" Bilibin places a cartoon "Donkey in 1/20 of life size": in a frame with the attributes of power and glory, where the image of the king was usually placed, a donkey is drawn. Lanceray in 1906 prints a cartoon "Tryzna": tsarist generals in a gloomy feast listen not to singing, but to screaming soldiers standing at attention. Dobuzhinsky in his drawing "October Idyll" remains faithful to the theme of the modern city, only ominous signs of events burst into this city: a window broken by a bullet, a lying doll, glasses and a blood stain on the wall and on the pavement. Kustodiev performed a number of caricatures of the tsar and his generals and portraits of the tsar's ministers - Witte, Ignatiev, Dubasov, etc., exceptional in their sharpness and evil irony, which he studied so well while helping Repin in the work on the "State Council". Suffice it to say that Witte appears under his hand as a staggering clown with a red banner in one hand and a royal flag in the other.

But the most expressive in the revolutionary graphics of those years are the drawings by V.A. Serov. His position was quite definite during the 1905 revolution. The revolution gave rise to a number of Serov's caricatures: “1905. After the Pacification ”(Nicholas II, with a racket under his arm, handing out the crosses of St. George to the suppressors); "Harvest" (rifles are packed in sheaves on the field). The most famous composition in this series is “Soldiers, brave children! Where is your glory? " (1905, RM). Serov's civic position, his skill, observation and wise laconicism of the draftsman were fully manifested here. Serov depicts the beginning of the attack of the Cossacks on the demonstrators on January 9, 1905. In the background, the general mass is given to the demonstrators; in front, at the very edge of the sheet, there are large separate figures of the Cossacks, and between the first and the background, in the center - an officer on horseback calling them to attack, with a saber bald. The name, as it were, contains all the bitter irony of the situation: Russian soldiers raised weapons against their people. So it was and so this tragic event was seen not only by Serov from the window of his workshop, but also (let us say figuratively) from the depths of the liberal consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole. Russian artists sympathizing with the 1905 revolution did not know what kind of cataclysms in Russian history they were on the verge of. Taking the side of the revolution, they preferred, relatively speaking, a terrorist-bomber (from the heirs of the nihilists-raznochinets, “with their skills of political struggle and ideological indoctrination of broad strata of society ", according to the correct definition of one historian) to the city officer, who is protecting order. They did not know that the "red wheel" of the revolution would sweep away not only the autocracy they hated, but the entire way of Russian life, all Russian culture, which they served and which was dear to them.

In 1903, as already mentioned, one of the largest exhibition associations of the beginning of the century arose - the Union of Russian Artists. At first, it included almost all the prominent figures of the "World of Art" - Benoit, Bakst, Somov, Dobuzhinsky, Serov, participants in the first exhibitions were Vrubel, Borisov-Musatov. The initiators of the creation of the association were Moscow artists associated with the "World of Art", but weighed down by the programmatic aesthetics of Petersburgers. The face of the "Union" was determined mainly by Moscow painters of the itinerant movement, students of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the heirs of Savrasov, students of Serov and K. Korovin. Many of them were exhibited at the same time at traveling exhibitions. The exhibitors of the "Union" were artists of different attitudes: S. Ivanov, M. Nesterov, A. Arkhipov, the Korovin brothers, L. Pasternak. Organizational affairs were in charge of A.M. Vasnetsov, S.A. Vinogradov, V.V. Bookbinders. The pillars of V.M. Vasnetsov, Surikov, Polenov were its members. K. Korovin was considered the leader of the Union.

National landscape, lovingly painted pictures of peasant Russia - one of the main genres of artists of the "Union", in which "Russian impressionism" with its predominantly rural, not urban motives, expressed itself in a peculiar way. So the landscapes of I.E. Grabar (1871-1960) with their lyrical mood, with the subtlest pictorial nuances, reflecting instant changes in true nature, is a kind of parallel on Russian soil to the impressionistic landscape of the French ("September Snow", 1903, Tretyakov Gallery). In his auto-monograph, Grabar recalls this plein-air landscape: "The sight of snow with bright yellow foliage was so unexpected and at the same time so beautiful that I immediately settled down on the terrace and within three days painted ... a picture." Grabar's interest in the decomposition of visible color into spectral, pure colors of the palette makes him similar with neo-impressionism, with J. Seurat and P. Signac ("March Snow", 1904, Tretyakov Gallery). The play of colors in nature, complex coloristic effects become the subject of close study of the "Allies", who create on the canvas a pictorial-plastic figurative world, devoid of narrative and illustrativeness.

With all the interest in the transmission of light and air in the painting of the masters of the "Union", the dissolution of an object in a light-air environment is never observed. The color becomes decorative.

“Allies”, in contrast to the Petersburgers, the graphic artists of the World of Art, are mainly painters with a heightened decorative sense of color. An excellent example of this is the paintings of F.A. Malyavin.

Among the participants of the "Union" were artists who were close to the "world of art" by the very theme of creativity. So, K.F. Yuon (1875–1958) was attracted by the appearance of ancient Russian cities, the panorama of old Moscow. But Yuon is far from aesthetic admiration for the motives of the past, a ghostly architectural landscape. These are not Versailles parks and Tsarskoye Selo baroque, but the architecture of old Moscow in its spring or winter guise. Pictures of nature are full of life, they have a natural impression from which the artist first of all made a start (The March Sun, 1915, Tretyakov Gallery; Trinity Lavra in Winter, 1910, State Russian Museum). Subtle changeable states of nature are conveyed in the landscapes of another member of the "Union" and at the same time a member of the Association of Traveling Exhibitions - S.Yu. Zhukovsky (1873-1944): the bottomlessness of the sky changing its color, the slow movement of water, the sparkling of snow under the moon (Moonlit Night, 1899, Tretyakov Gallery; Dam, 1909, State Russian Museum). Often he also has the motive of an abandoned estate.

In the picture of the painter of the St. Petersburg school, a loyal member of the "Union of Russian Artists" A.A. Rylova (1870–1939), Green Noise (1904), the master managed to convey, as it were, the very breath of a fresh wind, under which trees sway and sails swell. Some joyful and disturbing forebodings are felt in her. The romantic traditions of his teacher Kuindzhi also affected here.

In general, the "Allies" gravitated not only to plein-air studies, but also to monumental painting forms. By 1910, the time of the split and secondary education of the "World of Art", at the exhibitions of the "Union" one could see an intimate landscape (Vinogradov, Petrovichev, Yuon, etc.), painting close to French divisionism (Grabar, early Larionov) or close symbolism (P. Kuznetsov, Sapunov, Sudeikin); they were attended by the artists of Diaghilev's "World of Art" - Benoit, Somov, Bakst, Lansere, Dobuzhinsky.

The "Union of Russian Artists", with its solid realistic foundations, which played a significant role in Russian fine arts, had a definite impact on the formation of the Soviet school of painting, and existed until 1923.

The years between the two revolutions are characterized by the intensity of creative pursuits, sometimes directly mutually exclusive. In 1907, in Moscow, the magazine "Golden Fleece" organized the only exhibition of artists-followers of Borisov-Musatov, called "Blue Rose". P. Kuznetsov became the leading artist of the Blue Rose. During his studies M. Saryan, N. Sapunov, S. Sudeikin, K. Petrov-Vodkin, A. Fonvizin, sculptor A. Matveev were grouped around him. Closest of all, the "Blue Rozovites" are to symbolism, which was expressed first of all in their "language": the fragility of mood, the vague, untranslatable musicality of associations, the refinement of color ratios. In Russian art, symbolism was most likely formed in literature, in the very first years of the new century such names as A. Blok, A. Bely, V. Ivanov, S. Soloviev were already heard. Certain elements of "pictorial symbolism" were also manifested in the work of Vrubel, as already mentioned, Borisov-Musatov, Roerich, Churlionis. In the painting of Kuznetsov and his associates, there were many points of contact with the poetics of Balmont, Bryusov, Bely, only they joined symbolism through the operas of Wagner, the dramas of Ibsen, Hauptmann and Maeterlinck. The Blue Rose exhibition presented a kind of synthesis: Symbolist poets performed at it, contemporary music was performed. The aesthetic platform of the exhibitors made an impact in subsequent years, and the name of this exhibition became a household name for a whole trend in art in the second half of the 900s. The entire activity of the "Blue Rose" also bears the strongest imprint of the influence of the Art Nouveau style (plane-decorative stylization of forms, whimsicality of linear rhythms).

The works of Pavel Varfolomeevich Kuznetsov (1878–1968) reflect the basic principles of the “Blue Rozovites”. In his work, the neo-romantic concept of "beautiful clarity" (the expression of the poet M. Kuzmin) is embodied. Kuznetsov created a decorative panel-picture in which he tried to abstract from everyday concreteness, to show the unity of man and nature, the stability of the eternal cycle of life and nature, the birth in this harmony of the human soul. Hence the desire for monumental forms of painting, dreamy-contemplative, purified from everything instantaneous, universal, timeless notes, a constant desire to convey the spirituality of matter. A figure is only a sign that expresses a concept; color serves to convey feelings; rhythm - in order to introduce sensations into a certain world (as in icon painting - a symbol of love, tenderness, sorrow, etc.). Hence, the reception of a uniform distribution of light over the entire surface of the canvas as one of the foundations of Kuznetsov's decorativeness. Serov said that nature in P. Kuznetsov "breathes". This is perfectly expressed in his Kyrgyz (Steppe) and Bukhara suites, in Central Asian landscapes. (“Sleeping in a koshare” in 1911, as A. Rusakova, a researcher of Kuznetsov's work, writes, is an image of a dreamy steppe world, peace, harmony. The depicted woman is not a specific person, but a Kyrgyz woman in general, a sign of the Mongolian race.) High sky, boundless desert, gentle hills, tents, flocks of sheep create the image of a patriarchal idyll. The eternal, unattainable dream of harmony, of the merging of man with nature, which at all times worried artists (Mirage in the Steppe, 1912, State Tretyakov Gallery). Kuznetsov studied the techniques of Old Russian icon painting, the early Italian Renaissance. This appeal to the classical traditions of world art in search of its own grand style, as correctly noted by researchers, was of fundamental importance in a period when any traditions were often denied altogether.

The exoticism of the East - Iran, Egypt, Turkey - is embodied in the landscapes of Martiros Sergeevich Saryan (1880-1972). The East was a natural theme for an Armenian artist. Saryan creates in his painting a world full of bright decorativeness, more passionate, more earthly than Kuznetsov's, and the pictorial solution is always built on contrasting color ratios, without nuances, in a sharp shadow comparison (Date Palm, Egypt, 1911, maps. , tempera, Tretyakov Gallery). Note that Sarian's oriental works with their color contrasts appear earlier than the works of Matisse, created by him after a trip to Algeria and Morocco.

The images of Saryan are monumental due to the generalization of forms, large colorful planes, the general lapidarity of the language - this is, as a rule, a generalized image of Egypt, Persia, native Armenia, while maintaining vital naturalness, as if written from life. Saryan's decorative canvases are always cheerful, they correspond to his idea of ​​creativity: “... a work of art is the very result of happiness, that is, creative labor. Consequently, it should kindle the flame of creative combustion in the viewer, help to reveal the desire for happiness and freedom inherent in it ”.

Kuznetsov and Saryan in different ways created a poetic image of a colorfully rich world, one based on the traditions of the ancient Russian art of icons, the other - ancient Armenian miniatures. During the "Blue Rose" period, they were also united by their interest in oriental motives and symbolic tendencies. The impressionistic perception of reality was not characteristic of the Blue Rose artists.

"Goluborozovtsy" worked a lot and fruitfully in the theater, where they came into close contact with the drama of symbolism. N.N. Sapunov (1880-1912) and S.Yu. Sudeikin (1882-1946) designed dramas by M. Maeterlinck, one Sapunov - G. Ibsen and Blok's "Balaganchik". Sapunov also transferred this theatrical fiction, fair and popular print stylization into his easel works, acutely decorative still lifes with paper flowers in exquisite porcelain vases (Peonies, 1908, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery), into grotesque genre scenes in which reality is mixed with phantasmagoria ("Masquerade", 1907, Tretyakov Gallery).

In 1910, a number of young artists - P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov R. Falk, A. Kuprin, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova and others - united in the "Jack of Diamonds" organization, which had its own charter, which arranged exhibitions and published its own collections of articles. "The Jack of Diamonds" actually existed until 1917. Just as post-impressionism, first of all Cezanne, was a "reaction to impressionism", so the "Jack of Diamonds" opposed the obscurity, untranslatable, subtle nuances of the symbolic language of the "Blue Rose" and the aesthetic stylism of the "World of Art" ... The "Diamonds of Diamonds", carried away by the materiality, the "materiality" of the world, professed a clear construction of the picture, emphasized the objectivity of form, intensity, full-sounding color. It is no coincidence that still life is becoming a favorite genre of the "Valetovites", as a landscape is a favorite genre of members of the "Union of Russian Artists". Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov (1881-1944) in his still lifes (Blue Plums, 1910, Tretyakov Gallery; Still Life with Camellia, 1913, Tretyakov Gallery) fully expresses the program of this association, as Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky (1876-1956) - in portraits (portrait of G. Yakulov, 1910, State Russian Museum; "Matador Manuel Hart", 1910, State Tretyakov Gallery). The subtlety in conveying the change of moods, the psychologism of the characteristics, the understatement of the states, the dematerialization of the painting of the “Blue Rozovites”, their romantic poetry are rejected by the “Valetovites”. They are contrasted with the almost spontaneous festivity of colors, the expression of the contour drawing, the luscious, pasty broad manner of writing, which convey an optimistic vision of the world, creating an almost bohemian, areal mood. Konchalovsky and Mashkov in their portraits give a vivid, but one-sided characterization, sharpening one feature almost to the point of grotesque; in still lifes they emphasize the flatness of the canvas, the rhythm of color spots (Agave, 1916, Tretyakov Gallery, - Konchalovsky; portrait of a lady with a pheasant, 1911, State Russian Museum, - Mashkov). "Diamonds of Diamonds" allow such simplifications in the interpretation of the form, which are akin to folk popular prints, folk toys, tile painting, signboards. The craving for primitivism (from the Latin primitivus - primitive, initial) manifested itself in various artists who imitated the simplified forms of art of the so-called primitive eras - primitive tribes and nationalities - in search of gaining immediacy and integrity of artistic perception. The Jack of Diamonds also drew its perceptions from Cézanne (hence the sometimes name “Russian Cézanne”), or rather, from the decorative version of Cézanneism - Fauvism, even more from Cubism, even from Futurism; from Cubism "shift" of forms, from Futurism - dynamics, various modifications of the form, as in the painting "Ringing. Ivan the Great Bell Tower "(1915, State Tretyakov Gallery) by A.V. Lentulov (1884-1943). Lentulov created a very expressive image based on the motif of old architecture, the harmony of which is disturbed by the nervous, acute perception of modern man, conditioned by industrial rhythms.

Portraits of P.P. Falk (1886-1958), who remained faithful to Cubism in understanding and interpreting the form (not without reason they speak of Falk's "lyrical cubism"), were developed in subtle color-plastic harmonies that convey a certain state of the model.

In the still lifes and landscapes of A. V. Kuprin (1880-1960), sometimes an epic note appears, there is a tendency towards generalization ("Still life with a pumpkin, a vase and brushes", 1917, the State Tretyakov Gallery, researchers have rightly called a "poem praising the painter's tools") ... Kuprin's decorative element is combined with analytical insight into nature.

The extreme simplification of the form, the direct connection with the art of signage is especially noticeable in M.F. Larionov (1881-1964), one of the founders of the Jack of Diamonds, but already in 1911 broke with him and organized new exhibitions: Donkey's Tail and Target. Larionov paints landscapes, portraits, still lifes, works as a theatrical artist of Diaghilev's entreprise, then turns to a genre painting, his theme becomes the life of a provincial street, soldiers' barracks. The forms are flat, grotesque, as if deliberately stylized as a child's drawing, splint or signboard. In 1913 Larionov published his book "Luchism" - in fact, the first of the manifestos of abstract art, the real creators of which in Russia were V. Kandinsky and K. Malevich.

Artist N.S. Goncharova (1881-1962), Larionov's wife, developed the same tendencies in her genre paintings, mainly on the peasant theme. In the years under consideration, in her work, which is more decorative and colorful than Larionov's art, monumental in its inner strength and laconicism, there is a keen sense of a fascination with primitivism. Describing the work of Goncharova and Larionov, the term "neo-primitivism" is often used. During these years A. Shevchenko, V. Chekrygin, K. Malevich, V. Tatlin, M. Chagall were close to them in terms of their artistic perception of the world, the search for an expressive language. Each of these artists (the only exception is Chekrygin, who died very early) soon found his own creative path.

M.Z. Chagall (1887–1985) created fantasies transformed from the boring impressions of the small-town Vitebsk life and interpreted in a naive-poetic and grotesque-symbolic spirit. With surreal space, bright color, deliberate primitivization of form, Chagall turns out to be close to both Western expressionism and folk primitive art (“I and the Village”, 1911, Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; “Over Vitebsk”, 1914, collection of Zak. Toronto; "The Wedding", 1918, Tretyakov Gallery).

Many of the aforementioned masters who were close to Jack of Diamonds were members of the St. Petersburg Youth Union, which was formed almost simultaneously with Jack of Diamonds (1909). In addition to Chagall, P. Filonov, K. Malevich, V. Tatlin, Yu. Annenkov, N. Altman, D. Burliuk, A. Exter and others were exhibited in the Union. L. Zheverzheev played the leading role in it. Just like the "Valetovites", the members of the "Union of Youth" published theoretical collections. Until the collapse of the association in 1917. The "Union of Youth" did not have a specific program, professing symbolism, and cubism, and futurism, and "non-objectiveness", but each of the artists had his own creative face.

The most difficult to characterize P.N. Filonov (1883-1941). D. Sarabyanov correctly defined Filonov's work as “lonely and unique”. In this sense, he rightly puts the artist on a par with A. Ivanov, N. Ge, V. Surikov, M. Vrubel. Nevertheless, the figure of Filonov, his appearance in Russian artistic culture in the 10s of the XX century. natural. Filonov is closest to futurism because of his orientation towards “a kind of self-developing movement of forms” (D. Sarabyanov), but far from it in terms of the problems of his work. Rather, it is closer not to the picturesque, but to the poetic futurism of Khlebnikov with his search for the original meaning of the word. “Often, starting to paint a picture from some one edge, transferring his creative charge to the forms, Filonov gives them life, and then, as if not by the will of the artist, but by their own movement, they develop, change, renew, grow. This self-development of forms in Filonov is truly amazing ”(D. Sarabyanov).

The art of the pre-revolutionary years in Russia is marked by the extraordinary complexity and contradictoriness of artistic searches, hence the successive groupings with their own program settings and stylistic sympathies. But along with the experimenters in the field of abstract forms in Russian art of this time, both the "world of art", and the "goluborozovtsy", "allies", art "in its" second generation "Z.E. Serebryakova (1884-1967). In his poetic genre canvases with their laconic drawing, palpable-sensual plastic molding, the poise of the composition, Serebryakov proceeds from the high national traditions of Russian art, first of all Venetsianov and even further - Old Russian art (Peasants, 1914, RM; Harvest, 1915 , Odessa Art Museum; "Whitening of the Canvas", 1917, State Tretyakov Gallery).

Finally, the work of Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939), an artist-thinker who later became the most prominent master of art of the Soviet period, is a brilliant evidence of the vitality of national traditions and great Old Russian painting. In the famous painting "Bathing the Red Horse" (1912, PT), the artist resorted to a pictorial metaphor. As it was rightly noted, the young man on a bright red horse evokes associations with the popular image of George the Victorious ("Saint Egoriy"), and the generalized silhouette, rhythmic, compact composition, saturation of contrasting color spots sounding in full force, flatness in the interpretation of forms lead in memory of the ancient Russian icon. A harmoniously enlightened image is created by Petrov-Vodkin in the monumental painting Girls on the Volga (1915, Tretyakov Gallery), in which one can also feel his orientation towards the traditions of Russian art, leading the masters to a true nationality.

RUSSIAN ART OF THE ENDXIX--BEGINNINGXXCENTURY

Late 19th - early 20th century represents an era, a turning point in all spheres of social and spiritual life. Russia was heading towards revolution. "We are going through turbulent times," wrote V. I. Lenin in 1902, "when the history of Russia leaps forward with leaps and bounds, each year sometimes means more than decades of peaceful periods." The key to understanding the relationship between art and the historical reality of that time can be the position formulated by V. I. Lenin in the famous series of articles about L. N. Tolstoy: should have been reflected in his works. "" This implies Lenin's interpretation of Tolstoy's contradictions: classes and various strata of Russian society in the post-reform, but pre-revolutionary era. " This Leninist proposition contains a general methodological principle of the historical explanation of art, which makes it possible to extend what has been said about Tolstoy to the area of ​​artistic creation as a whole.

However, this position should not be understood oversimplified and to think that in any separately taken work of art signs of a crisis of the bourgeois system or the influence of proletarian ideology are directly revealed. This only means that art as a whole, in the basic tendencies of the artistic process, becomes an expression of the contradictions of late bourgeois development, fraught with a revolutionary outburst and putting forward the proletariat as the leading revolutionary force. The degree of depth and acuteness of these contradictions is already such that art, and even more so fine art, dealing with the world accessible to external vision, is gradually imbued with the consciousness of the impossibility of displaying a new sense of life using the method of old realism - the method of directly depicting reality in the forms of reality itself. The primacy of artistic images and forms that indirectly express the content of modernity over the forms of its direct display is the main distinguishing feature of the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

CULTURE AT THE BORDER OF THE AGE

Chronologically, this period is located between the beginning of the 90s and 1917. It is preceded by the 1980s as a transitional decade, when realism of the second half of the 19th century reaches its heights. in the works of Repin and Surikov, and at the same time, sprouts of a new art of understanding are found in the first works of artists who reached their creative heyday in the next period.

In the context of the polarization of social forces in the growing class battles, questions about the place and role of art are raised and revised anew. The demand for the democratization of art put forward by life itself, which was acutely felt by the artists themselves, faced the tendency for the sophisticated refinement of the artistic form that characterized the work of the greatest masters of that time - Vrubel, Levitan, Serov, Borisov-Musatov, and especially representatives of the World of Art circle - the first large art group after the Itinerants.

After the revolutionary situation of the 60s and 70s, a violent political reaction ensued in Russia. The 80s were the time of the crisis of revolutionary populism and the ideological platform on which the aesthetics of the Itinerants was based. This decade was at the same time at the same time the highest flowering of itinerant realism in the works of Repin and Surikov, and the beginning of its crisis. It is already beginning to be regarded by contemporaries as a phenomenon that has survived its heyday.

In 1894, the largest representatives of the Partnership - Repin, Makovsky, Shishkin, Kuindzhi - became members of the academic professorship.

The socially-critical pathos of the previous art does not disappear, but is substantially transformed. It takes the form of affirming the ideals of harmony and beauty in full consciousness of their illusory nature, the hostility of these eternal ideals of culture to the modern world order, which was the source of pessimistic sentiments that constituted one of the important features of the intellectual climate at the end of the century. The awareness that beauty is not created from the materials of this world, but arises only from the artist's own resources of talent and poetic imagination, manifested itself in the gravitation towards fairy-tale, allegorical or mythological plots and in the very structure of the artistic form, which translated the images of external reality into the field of folklore representations. memories of the past or vague premonitions of the future.

The analytical method of realism in the mid-19th century. is becoming obsolete. The opposition of art to the prose of bourgeois relations acquires not so much a moral, ethical and social tint, as a strictly aesthetic one: the main evil that the bourgeois world brings with it is indifference to beauty, an atrophy of the sense of beauty. The humanistic mission of the artist is now seen in fostering this feeling by all means available to art. “To wake up ... from the little things of everyday life with stately images ...” - this is how M. Vrubel formulated this task. ”In its most consistent form, this problem boiled down to liberation from the yoke of utilitarian proseism in this very everyday sphere - the sphere of everyday life.

The task of bringing art closer to life was understood by the artists of the middle of the century and the Wanderers as the task of reflecting life in art, while art itself remained fenced off from reality by the walls of the museum. Artists of the late 19th century accept the formula for bringing art closer to life in its direct meaning - as the task of bringing art into life, transforming the beauty of the surrounding world.

A painting, a sculptural work must leave the museum, become an integral part of everyday life, along with everyday things and architecture that make up the environment of a person. But for this, a work of art in its very fabric, in the configurations of forms and colors, must be in tune with the environment, make up a single ensemble with it. This unity is ensured by the style that gives the law of shaping, permeating the entire field of spatial arts, the style towards the creation of which the efforts of the artists of the late 19th - early 20th centuries were directed. In Russia, he received the name of the Art Nouveau style.

The revolution of 1905-1907 produced profound shifts in the artistic consciousness of the period under consideration, which, in the words of V. I. Lenin, “is a national revolution” 2. Of course, these shifts in artistic consciousness did not immediately reveal themselves, and their direction was determined by the entire course of the previous development of Russian art. The turning point of the era under consideration was expressed in art in the internal conflict of development, in the relations of explicit or hidden polemics between individual artistic groups, replacing each other in kaleidoscopic diversity, in the gradually increasing impetuosity of artistic evolution, especially after 1910. active exhibition life, as well as an increase in the number of periodicals and other types of publications, specially devoted to the issues of fine art, especially contemporary - Russian, and Western European.

A large role in this process belonged to the group of artists "The World of Art", who organized their own exhibitions and retrospective shows of Russian art of the 18th century, published for six years a magazine with the same name, which was immensely popular both among artists and among wide circles of young people, the intelligentsia ... By attracting Western European masters to participate in its exhibitions, World of Art contributed to the expansion of contacts between Russian art and contemporary foreign art. It is becoming commonplace for young Russian artists to study in private European schools and studios. The activities of the "World of Art", the center of which was St. Petersburg, stimulated the process of consolidation of artistic forces in Moscow, which led to the emergence in 1903 of a new artistic association - the "Union of Russian Artists". In general, the self-determination of the Moscow school of painting in relation to the St. Petersburg "world of art" direction with its cult of graphics should be noted as an essential factor in the development of art in the period under review.

Another important feature of this period is the alignment of the previously uneven development of certain types of art: next to painting, architecture, decorative and applied art, book graphics, sculpture, and theatrical scenery are becoming. The hegemony of easel painting, which distinguished the art of the middle of the century, is becoming a thing of the past. In the conditions when the spheres of application of visual creativity are unusually expanding, a new type of universal artist is being formed who “can do everything” - to paint a picture and decorative panels, to make a vignette for a book and monumental painting, to sculpt a sculpture and compose a theatrical costume. The works of M. Vrubel, the artists of the World of Art, are marked by the features of such universalism.

The cult of artistic universalism reigned in the circle of artists, grouped around the industrialist and philanthropist S. I. Mamontov. Founded in 1872 and having its "residence" near Moscow Abramtsevo, the circle became a kind of forge of ideas and forms of new Russian art. The activities of the circle are gradually acquiring an orientation towards theatrical, decorative and applied arts, and the revival of folk art. Handicrafts are collected, folklore motifs are studied in fine art - in popular prints, embroidery, toys, and wooden carvings.

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Russian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Introduction

Painting

Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin

Valentin Alexandrovich Serov

Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel

"World of Art"

"Union of Russian Artists"

"Jack of Diamonds"

"Union of Youth"

Architecture

Sculpture

Bibliography

Introduction

Russian culture of the late XIX - early XX centuries is a complex and contradictory period in the development of Russian society. The culture of the turn of the century always contains elements of a transitional era, including the traditions of the culture of the past and the innovative tendencies of a new emerging culture. There is a transfer of traditions and not just a transfer, but the emergence of new ones, all this is associated with the stormy process of searching for new ways of cultural development, is corrected by the social development of a given time. The turn of the century in Russia is a period of imminent major changes, a change in the state system, a change from the classical culture of the 19th century to the new culture of the 20th century. The search for new ways of developing Russian culture is associated with the assimilation of the progressive trends of Western culture. The diversity of directions and schools is a feature of Russian culture at the turn of the century. Western trends are intertwined and complemented by modern ones, filled with specifically Russian content. A peculiarity of the culture of this period is its orientation towards a philosophical understanding of life, the need to build a holistic picture of the world, where art, along with science, is assigned a huge role. The focus of Russian culture at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries turned out to be a person who becomes a kind of connecting link in the motley variety of schools and areas of science and art on the one hand, and a kind of starting point for the analysis of all the most diverse cultural artifacts on the other. Hence the powerful philosophical foundation that lies at the foundation of Russian culture at the turn of the century.

While highlighting the most important priorities in the development of Russian culture in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, one cannot ignore its most important characteristics. The end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century in the history of Russian culture is usually called the Russian Renaissance or, in comparison with the golden age of Pushkin, the silver age of Russian culture.

At the turn of the century, a style emerged that affected all the plastic arts, starting first of all with architecture (in which eclecticism prevailed for a long time) and ending with graphics, which was called the Art Nouveau style. This phenomenon is not unambiguous, in modernity there is also decadent pretentiousness, pretentiousness, designed mainly for bourgeois tastes, but there is also a striving for the unity of style, significant in itself. Art Nouveau is a new stage in the synthesis of architecture, painting, decorative arts.

In the visual arts, Art Nouveau has shown itself: in sculpture - the fluidity of forms, the special expressiveness of the silhouette, the dynamism of compositions; in painting - the symbolism of images, a predilection for allegories. symbolism modern avant-garde silver

Russian Symbolists played an important role in the development of the Silver Age aesthetics. Symbolism as a phenomenon in literature and art first appeared in France in the last quarter of the 19th century and by the end of the century had spread in most European countries. But after France, it is in Russia that symbolism is realized as the most ambitious, significant and original phenomenon in culture. At first, Russian symbolism had basically the same premises as Western symbolism: "the crisis of a positive worldview and morality." The main principle of the Russian Symbolists is the aestheticization of life and the striving for various forms of substitution of the aesthetics for logic and morality. Russian symbolism is characterized, first of all, by a demarcation from the traditions of the revolutionary democratic "sixties" and populism, with ideologization atheism, utilitarianism. according to Russian Symbolists, they correspond to the principles of "pure", free art.

Another striking phenomenon of the Silver Age that has acquired global significance is the art and aesthetics of the avant-garde. In the space of the already listed areas of aesthetic consciousness, the avant-garde artists were distinguished by their markedly rebellious character. They enthusiastically perceived the crisis of classical culture, art, religion, sociality, statehood as a natural dying, destruction of the old, obsolete, irrelevant, and they realized themselves as revolutionaries, destroyers and gravediggers of "all old things" and creators of everything new, generally a new emerging race. Nietzsche's ideas about the superman, developed by P. Uspensky, were understood literally by many avant-garde artists and tried on, especially by the futurists, for themselves.

Hence the rebellion and outrageousness, the striving for everything fundamentally new in the means of artistic expression, in the principles of approach to art, the tendency to expand the boundaries of art before it comes to life, but on completely different principles than those of representatives of theurgic aesthetics. Life for the avant-gardists of the 10s. XX century. - it is, first of all, a revolutionary revolt, an anarchist revolt. Absurdity, chaos, anarchy are for the first time understood as synonyms of modernity and precisely as creatively positive principles based on a complete denial of the rational principle in art and the cult of the irrational, intuitive, unconscious, meaningless, abstruse, formless, etc. The main directions of the Russian avant-garde were: abstractionism (Wassily Kandinsky), Suprematism (Kazimir Malevich), constructivism (Vladimir Tatlin), Cubofuturism (Cubism, Futurism) (Vladimir Mayakovsky).

Painting

For the painters of the turn of the century, different ways of expression are characteristic than among the Itinerants, other forms of artistic creativity - in images that are contradictory, complicated and reflecting modernity without illustrativeness and narrative. Artists are painfully looking for harmony and beauty in a world that is fundamentally alien to both harmony and beauty. That is why many saw their mission in fostering a sense of beauty. This time of "eves", expectations of changes in social life gave rise to many trends, associations, groupings, a clash of different worldviews and tastes. But it also gave rise to the universalism of a whole generation of artists who appeared after the "classical" Wanderers.

The impressionistic lessons of plein air painting, the composition of "random framing", a wide free painting manner - all this is the result of evolution in the development of visual means in all genres of the turn of the century. In search of "beauty and harmony", artists try themselves in a variety of techniques and types of art - from monumental painting and theatrical scenery to book design and arts and crafts.

In the 90s, genre painting developed, but it develops somewhat differently than in the "classical" movement of the 70-80s. Thus, the peasant theme is revealed in a new way. The schism in the rural community is emphatically accusatory depicted by SA Korovin (1858-1908) in the painting "On the World" (1893,).

At the turn of the century, a somewhat peculiar path is outlined in the historical theme. So, for example, A.P. Ryabushkin (1861-1904) works more in the historical and everyday than purely historical genre. “Russian women of the 17th century in the church” (1899), “Wedding train in Moscow. XVII century "(1901,) - these are everyday scenes from the life of Moscow in the XVII century. Ryabushkin's stylization manifests itself in the flatness of the image, in a special structure of plastic and linear rhythm, in the coloring built on bright major colors, in the general decorative solution. Ryabushkin boldly introduces local colors into the open-air landscape, for example, in "The Wedding Train ..." - the red color of the carriage, large spots of festive clothes against the background of dark buildings and snow, given, however, in the finest color nuance. The landscape always poetically conveys the beauty of Russian nature.

F. A. Malyavin (1869-1940) created a new type of painting, in which folklore artistic traditions were mastered in a completely special way and transposed into the language of contemporary art. His images of "women" and "girls" have a certain symbolic meaning - of healthy soil Russia. His paintings are always expressive, and although these are, as a rule, easel works, they receive a monumental and decorative interpretation under the artist's brush. "Laughter" (1899, Museum of Modern Art, Venice), "Whirlwind" (1906,) is a realistic image peasant girls, contagiously loudly laughing or rushing uncontrollably in a round dance, but this realism is different than in the second half of the century.The painting is sweeping, sketchy, with a textured brushstroke, the forms are generalized, there is no spatial depth, the figures are usually located in the foreground and fill the whole canvas.

M.V.Nesterov (1862-1942) addresses the theme of Ancient Rus, but the image of Rus appears in the artist's paintings as a kind of ideal, almost enchanted world, in harmony with nature, but disappeared forever like the legendary city of Kitezh. This acute sensation of nature, delight in front of the world, in front of every tree and blade of grass is especially pronounced in one of the most famous works of Nesterov of the pre-revolutionary period - "Vision to the youth Bartholomew" (1889-1890,). In the disclosure of the plot of the picture, there are the same stylistic features as in Ryabushkin, but a deeply lyrical feeling of the beauty of nature is invariably expressed, through which the high spirituality of the heroes, their enlightenment, their alienation from worldly vanity is transmitted.

M.V. Nesterov did a lot of religious monumental painting. The murals are always dedicated to the Old Russian theme (for example, in Georgia - to Alexander Nevsky). In Nesterov's wall paintings, there are many observed real signs, especially in the landscape, portrait features - in the depiction of saints. In the artist's striving for a plane interpretation of the composition of elegance, ornamentation, refined sophistication of plastic rhythms, the undoubted influence of modernity manifested itself.

The landscape genre itself develops in a new way at the end of the 19th century. Levitan, in fact, completed the search for the Itinerants in the landscape. A new word at the turn of the century was to be said by K.A. Korovin, V.A. Serov and M.A. Vrubel.

Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin

For the brilliant colorist Korovin, the world appears to be a "riot of colors." Generously gifted by nature, Korovin was engaged in both portrait and still life, but it would not be a mistake to say that landscape remained his favorite genre. He brought into art the strong realistic traditions of his teachers from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture - Savrasov and Polenov, but he has a different view of the world, he sets different tasks. He began to paint in the open air early, already in the portrait of the chorus girl in 1883 one can see his independent development of the principles of plein airism, which was then embodied in a number of portraits made in the estate of S. Mamontov in Abramtsevo ("In a boat"; portrait of TS Lyubatovich, and etc.), in northern landscapes, performed in S. Mamontov's expedition to the north ("Winter in Lapland",). His French landscapes, united by the name "Paris Lights", are already quite impressionistic writing, with its highest etude culture. Sharp, instant impressions from the life of a big city: quiet streets at different times of the day, objects dissolved in a light-air environment, molded with a dynamic, "trembling", vibrating brushstroke, a stream of such strokes, creating the illusion of a curtain of rain or urban, saturated with thousands of different air vapors, - features reminiscent of the landscapes of Manet, Pissarro, Monet. Korovin is temperamental, emotional, impulsive, theatrical, hence the bright colorfulness and romantic upliftness of his landscapes ("Paris. Boulevard des Capucines", 1906, State Tretyakov Gallery; "Paris at night. Italian boulevard". 1908,). The same features of impressionistic etude, pictorial maestria, amazing artistry are preserved by Korovin in all other genres, primarily in portrait and still life, but also in decorative panels, in applied art, in theatrical scenery, which he has been engaged in all his life (Portrait of Chaliapin, 1911, State Russian Museum; "Fish, Wine and Fruits" 1916, Tretyakov Gallery).

Korovin's generous gift of painting was brilliantly manifested in theatrical and decorative painting. As a theater painter, he worked for the Abramtsevo theater (and Mamontov was almost the first to appreciate him as a theater artist), for the Moscow Art Theater, for the Moscow Private Russian Opera, where his lifelong friendship with Chaliapin began for the Diaghilev entreprise. Korovin raised theatrical scenery and the importance of the artist in the theater to a new level, he made a revolution in the understanding of the role of the artist in the theater and had a great influence on his contemporaries with his colorful, "spectacular" decorations that reveal the very essence of a musical performance.

Valentin Alexandrovich Serov

Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov (1865-1911) was one of the most important artists, an innovator of Russian painting at the turn of the century. Serov was brought up among prominent figures of Russian musical culture (father - a famous composer, mother - a pianist), studied with Repin and Chistyakov.

Serov often writes representatives of the artistic intelligentsia: writers, artists, artists (portraits of K. Korovin, 1891, Tretyakov Gallery; Levitan, 1893, Tretyakov Gallery; Ermolova, 1905, Tretyakov Gallery). They are all different, he interprets all of them deeply individually, but all of them bear the light of intellectual exclusivity and inspirational creative life.

Portrait, landscape, still life, household, historical painting; oil, gouache, tempera, charcoal - it is difficult to find both pictorial and graphic genres in which Serov would not work, and materials that he would not use.

A special theme in Serov's work is the peasant one. In his peasant genre there is no itinerant social acuteness, but there is a sense of the beauty and harmony of the peasant life, admiration for the healthy beauty of the Russian people ("In the village. A woman with a horse," b. On cards, pastel, 1898, Tretyakov Gallery). Winter landscapes with their silvery-pearl colors are especially exquisite.

Serov interpreted the historical theme in his own way: the "royal hunts" with the amusement walks of Elizabeth and Catherine II were conveyed by the artist of the new era, ironic, but also invariably admiring the beauty of life in the 18th century. Serov's interest in the 18th century arose under the influence of The World of Art and in connection with his work on the publication of The History of the Grand Ducal, Tsarist and Imperial Hunt in Russia.

Serov was a deeply thinking artist, constantly looking for new forms of artistic implementation of reality. Inspired by the Art Nouveau, ideas of flatness and increased decorativeness were reflected not only in historical compositions, but also in his portrait of the dancer Ida Rubinstein, in his sketches for The Abduction of Europa and Odyssey and Navzicae (both 1910, Tretyakov Gallery, cardboard, tempera). It is significant that at the end of his life Serov turns to the ancient world. In a poetic legend, interpreted by him freely, outside the classicist canons, he wants to find harmony, the search for which the artist devoted all his work.

Mikhail Alexandrovich Vrubel

The creative path of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (1856-1910) was more direct, although at the same time it was unusually difficult. Before the Academy of Arts (1880) Vrubel graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. In 1884 he went to Kiev to supervise the restoration of frescoes in the Church of St. Cyril and himself created several monumental compositions. He makes watercolor sketches for the paintings of the Vladimir Cathedral. The sketches were not transferred to the walls, since the client was frightened by their non-canonical and expressive nature.

In the 90s, when the artist settled in Moscow, Vrubel's style of writing, full of mystery and almost demonic power, took shape, which cannot be confused with any other. He sculpts the form like a mosaic, from sharp "faceted" pieces of different colors, as if glowing from the inside ("Girl against the background of a Persian carpet", 1886, KMRI; "Fortune Teller", 1895, State Tretyakov Gallery). Color combinations do not reflect the reality of the relationship of color, but have a symbolic meaning. Nature has no power over Vrubel. He knows her, perfectly owns her, but he creates his own fantastic world, which has little resemblance to reality. He gravitates towards literary subjects, which he interprets in an abstract way, striving to create images of eternal, enormous spiritual power. So, having taken up illustrations for "The Demon", he soon departed from the principle of direct illustration ("Tamara's Dance", "Do not cry child, do not cry in vain", "Tamara in a coffin", etc.). The image of the Demon is the central image of all Vrubel's work, its main theme. In 1899 he wrote "The Flying Demon", in 1902 - "The Demon Defeated". Vrubel's demon is a creature that suffers first of all. Suffering prevails in him over evil, and this is the peculiarity of the national-Russian interpretation of the image. Contemporaries, as rightly noted, saw in his "Demons" a symbol of the fate of an intellectual - a romantic trying to rebelliously escape from a reality deprived of harmony into the surreal world of dreams, but plunged into the rough reality of the earthly

Vrubel created his most mature paintings and graphic works at the turn of the century - in the genre of landscape, portrait, book illustration. In the organization and decorative-plane interpretation of the canvas or sheet, in the combination of the real and the fantastic, in adherence to ornamental, rhythmically complex solutions in his works of this period, the features of Art Nouveau are increasingly asserting themselves.

Like K. Korovin, Vrubel worked a lot in the theater. His best sets were performed for Rimsky-Korsakov's operas The Snow Maiden, Sadko, The Tale of Tsar Saltan and others on the stage of the Moscow Private Opera, that is, for those works that gave him the opportunity to “communicate” with Russian folklore, a fairy tale, a legend.

The universalism of talent, boundless imagination, and extraordinary passion in the assertion of noble ideals distinguish Vrubel from many of his contemporaries.

Victor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov

Viktor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov (1870-1905) is a direct exponent of pictorial symbolism. His works are elegiac sadness for the old empty "noble nests" and dying "cherry orchards", for beautiful women, spiritualized, almost unearthly, dressed in some kind of timeless costumes that do not bear external signs of place and time.

His easel works most of all resemble not even decorative panels, but tapestries. The space is decided extremely conditionally, flat, the figures are almost ethereal, as, for example, the girls by the pond in the painting "The Pond" (1902, tempera, Tretyakov Gallery), immersed in dreamy meditation, in deep contemplation. Faded, pale gray shades of color enhance the overall impression of fragile, unearthly beauty and anemicity, ghostly, which extends not only to human images, but also to the nature depicted by them. It is no coincidence that Borisov-Musatov called one of his works "Ghosts" (1903, tempera, State Tretyakov Gallery): silent and inactive female figures, marble statues by the stairs, a half-naked tree - a faded range of blue, gray, purple tones enhances the illusion of the depicted.

"World of Art"

The World of Art is an organization that emerged in St. Petersburg in 1898 and brought together masters of the highest artistic culture, the artistic elite of Russia in those years. The World of Art has become one of the largest phenomena of Russian artistic culture. Almost all famous artists took part in this association.

The editorial articles of the first issues of the magazine clearly formulated the main provisions of the "world of art" about the autonomy of art, that the problems of modern culture are exclusively problems of the artistic form and that the main task of art is to educate the aesthetic tastes of Russian society, primarily through acquaintance with the works of the world art. We must pay tribute to them: thanks to the "world of art", English and German art was really appreciated in a new way, and most importantly, the painting of the Russian XVIII century and the architecture of St. Petersburg classicism became a discovery for many. "Miriskusniki" fought for "criticism as art", proclaiming the ideal of a critic-artist with a high professional culture and erudition. The type of such a critic was embodied by one of the founders of the "World of Art" A.N. Benoit.

"Miriskusniki" organized exhibitions. The first was the only international one, which united, in addition to Russians, artists from France, England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Finland, etc. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow painters and graphic artists took part in it. But the crack between these two schools - St. Petersburg and Moscow - has been outlined almost from the first day. In March 1903, the last, fifth exhibition of the "World of Art" was closed, in December 1904 the last issue of the magazine "World of Art" was published. Most of the artists moved to the "Union of Russian Artists" organized on the basis of the Moscow exhibition "36", writers - to the magazine "New Way" opened by Merezhkovsky's group, Moscow Symbolists united around the magazine "Libra", musicians organized "Evenings of Contemporary Music", Diaghilev went entirely to ballet and theater.

In 1910, an attempt was made to breathe life into the "World of Art" (headed by Roerich). Glory came to the "World of Artists", but the "World of Arts", in fact, no longer existed, although formally the association existed until the early 1920s (1924), with a complete lack of integrity, on boundless tolerance and flexibility of positions. The second generation of the "world of art" was less occupied with the problems of easel painting, their interests lie in graphics, mainly books, and theatrical and decorative arts, in both areas they made a real artistic reform. In the second generation of the "world of art" there were also large individuals (Kustodiev, Sudeikin, Serebryakova, Chekhonin, Grigoriev, Yakovlev, Shukhaev, Mitrokhin, etc.), but there were no innovative artists at all.

The leading artist of the "World of Art" was K. A. Somov (1869-1939). The son of the chief curator of the Hermitage, who graduated from the Academy of Arts and traveled to Europe, Somov received an excellent education. Creative maturity came to him early, but, as the researcher (V.N.

Somov, as we know him, appeared in the portrait of the artist Martynova ("Lady in Blue", 1897-1900, Tretyakov Gallery), in the painting-portrait "Echo of the Past Tense" (1903, on maps, aqu., Gouache, Tretyakov Gallery ), where he creates a poetic description of the fragile, anemic female beauty of a decadent model, refusing to convey the real everyday signs of modernity. He dresses the models in old costumes, gives their appearance the features of secret suffering, sadness and dreaminess, painful brokenness.

Somov owns a series of graphic portraits of his contemporaries - the intellectual elite (V. Ivanov, Blok, Kuzmin, Sollogub, Lancere, Dobuzhinsky, etc.), in which he uses one general technique: on a white background - in a certain timeless sphere - he draws a face, resemblance in which it is achieved not through naturalization, but by bold generalizations and an accurate selection of characteristic details. This absence of signs of time creates the impression of static, stiffness, coldness, almost tragic loneliness.

Earlier than anyone else in The World of Art, Somov turned to the themes of the past, to the interpretation of the 18th century. ("Letter", 1896; "Confidentiality", 1897), being the predecessor of Benoit's Versailles landscapes. He was the first to create an unreal world, woven from the motives of the noble estate and court culture and his own purely subjective artistic sensations, permeated with irony. The historicism of the "World of Artists" was an escape from reality. Not the past, but its dramatization, longing for its irreversibility - that is their main motive. Not true fun, but playing fun with kisses in the alleys - this is Somov.

The ideological leader of the "World of Art" was A. N. Benois (1870-1960), an unusually versatile talent. A painter, graphic easel painter and illustrator, theater artist, director, author of ballet librettos, theoretician and art historian, musical figure, he was, in the words of A. Bely, the main politician and diplomat of the World of Art. As an artist, he is related to Somov by stylistic tendencies and addiction to the past (“I am intoxicated with Versailles, this is some kind of illness, love, criminal passion ... I have completely moved into the past ...”). Benois's Versailles landscapes merged the historical reconstruction of the 17th century. and contemporary impressions of the artist, his perception of French classicism, French engraving. Hence the clear composition, clear spatiality, grandeur and cold severity of rhythms, contrasting the grandeur of art monuments and the smallness of human figures, which are only staffage among them (1st Versailles series 1896-1898 entitled “The Last Walks of Louis XIV”). In the second Versailles series (1905-1906), the irony, which is also characteristic of the first sheets, is painted with almost tragic notes ("The King's Walk", k., Gouache, aqu., Gold, silver, feather, 1906, Tretyakov Gallery). Benoit's thinking is the thinking of a theater artist par excellence, who knew and felt the theater perfectly.

Nature is perceived by Benois in an associative connection with history (views of Pavlovsk, Peterhof, Tsarskoye Selo, performed by him in watercolor technique).

Benois the illustrator (Pushkin, Hoffmann) is a whole page in the history of the book. Unlike Somov, Benoit creates a narrative illustration. The plane of the page is not an end in itself for him. A masterpiece of book illustration was the graphic design of The Bronze Horseman (1903,1905,1916,1921-1922, ink and watercolor imitating color woodcut). In a series of illustrations for the great poem, the main character is the architectural landscape of St. Petersburg, now solemnly pathetic, now peaceful, now ominous, against which the figure of Eugene seems even more insignificant. This is how Benoit expresses the tragic conflict between the fate of the Russian statehood and the personal fate of the little man (“And the poor madman all night long, / Wherever he turned his feet, / 3 the Copper Horseman was everywhere / He rode with a heavy stomp”).

As a theater artist, Benoit designed the performances of the Russian Seasons, of which the most famous was the ballet Petrushka to the music of Stravinsky, worked extensively at the Moscow Art Theater, and subsequently on almost all major European stages.

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) occupies a special place in the "World of Art". An expert in the philosophy and ethnography of the East, an archaeologist and scientist, Roerich received an excellent education first at home, then at the Faculty of Law and History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, then at the Academy of Arts, in Kuindzhi's workshop, and in Paris at F. Cormon's studio. He early acquired the authority of a scientist. He was related to the "world of art" by the same love of retrospection, only not of the 17th-18th centuries, but of pagan Slavic and Scandinavian antiquity, to Ancient Russia; stylistic tendencies, theatrical decorativeness ("The Messenger", 1897, State Tretyakov Gallery; "The Elders Are Converging", 1898, State Russian Museum; "Sinister", 1901, State Russian Museum). Roerich was most closely associated with the philosophy and aesthetics of Russian symbolism, but his art did not fit into the framework of the existing trends, for, in accordance with the artist's worldview, it appealed, as it were, to all mankind with the appeal of a friendly union of all peoples. Hence the special epic character of his canvases.

After 1905, the mood of pantheistic mysticism grew in Roerich's work. Historical themes give way to religious legends ("Heavenly Battle", 1912, RM). The Russian icon had a tremendous influence on Roerich: his decorative panel Cutting at Kerzhenets (1911) was exhibited while performing a fragment of the same title from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia in the Parisian Russian Seasons.

The World of Art was a major aesthetic movement at the turn of the century that overestimated the entire modern artistic culture, approved new tastes and problems, and returned to art, at the highest professional level, the lost forms of book graphics and theatrical and decorative painting, which acquired through their efforts all-European recognition, which created new art criticism, promoting Russian art abroad, in fact, even opening some of its stages, like the Russian XVIII century. "Miriskusniki" created a new type of historical painting, portrait, landscape with their own stylistic features (distinct stylistic tendencies, the predominance of graphic techniques over painting, purely decorative understanding of color, etc.). This determines their importance for Russian art.

The weaknesses of the "World of Art" were reflected primarily in the variegation and inconsistency of the program, proclaiming an example of "now Böcklin, now Manet"; in idealistic views on art, affected by indifference to the civic tasks of art, in the programmatic apoliticality, in the loss of the social significance of the painting. The intimacy of the World of Art, its pure aestheticism also determined the short historical period of its life in the era of formidable tragic foreshadowings of the impending revolution. These were only the first steps on the path of creative pursuits, and very soon the "World of Art" were overtaken by the young.

"Union of Russian Artists"

In 1903, one of the largest exhibition associations of the beginning of the century, the Union of Russian Artists, was founded. At first, it included almost all the prominent figures of the "World of Art" - Benoit, Bakst, Somov, participants in the first exhibitions were Vrubel, Borisov-Musatov. The initiators of the creation of the association were Moscow artists associated with the "World of Art", but weighed down by the programmatic aesthetics of Petersburgers.

National landscape, lovingly painted pictures of peasant Russia - one of the main genres of the artists of the "Union", in which "Russian impressionism" with its predominantly rural, not urban motives, expressed itself in a peculiar way. So the landscapes of I.E. Grabar (1871-1960), with their lyrical mood, with the subtlest pictorial nuances, reflecting instant changes in true nature, is a kind of parallel on Russian soil to the impressionistic landscape of the French ("September Snow", 1903, Tretyakov Gallery). Grabar's interest in the decomposition of visible color into spectral, pure colors of the palette makes him similar with neo-impressionism, with J. Seurat and P. Signac ("March Snow", 1904, Tretyakov Gallery). The play of colors in nature, complex coloristic effects become the subject of close study of the "Allies", who create on the canvas a pictorial-plastic figurative world, devoid of narrative and illustrativeness.

With all the interest in the transmission of light and air in the painting of the masters of the "Union", the dissolution of an object in a light-air environment is never observed. The color becomes decorative.

The “allies”, in contrast to the Petersburgers, the graphic artists of the World of Art, are mostly painters with a heightened decorative sense of color. An excellent example of this is the paintings of F.A. Malyavin.

In general, the "Allies" gravitated not only to plein-air studies, but also to monumental painting forms. By 1910, the time of the split and secondary education of the "World of Art", at the exhibitions of the "Union" one could see an intimate landscape (Vinogradov, Yuon, etc.), painting close to French divisionism (Grabar, early Larionov) or close to symbolism ( P. Kuznetsov, Sudeikin); they were attended by the artists of Diaghilev's "World of Art" - Benoit, Somov, Bakst.

The "Union of Russian Artists", with its solid realistic foundations, which played a significant role in Russian fine arts, had a definite impact on the formation of the Soviet school of painting, and existed until 1923.

In 1907 in Moscow, the magazine "Golden Fleece" organized the only exhibition of artists-followers of Borisov-Musatov, called "Blue Rose". P. Kuznetsov became the leading artist of the Blue Rose. Closest of all, the "Blue Rozovites" are to symbolism, which was expressed first of all in their "language": the fragility of mood, the vague, untranslatable musicality of associations, the refinement of color ratios. The aesthetic platform of the exhibitors made an impact in subsequent years, and the name of this exhibition became a household name for a whole trend in art in the second half of the 900s. The entire activity of the "Blue Rose" also bears the strongest imprint of the influence of the Art Nouveau style (plane-decorative stylization of forms, whimsicality of linear rhythms).

The works of P. V. Kuznetsov (1878-1968) reflect the basic principles of the "blue-rooted" people. Kuznetsov created a decorative panel-picture in which he tried to abstract from everyday concreteness, to show the unity of man and nature, the stability of the eternal cycle of life and nature, the birth in this harmony of the human soul. Hence the desire for monumental forms of painting, dreamy-contemplative, purified from everything instantaneous, universal, timeless notes, a constant desire to convey the spirituality of matter. A figure is only a sign that expresses a concept; color serves to convey feelings; rhythm - in order to introduce sensations into a certain world (as in icon painting - a symbol of love, tenderness, sorrow, etc.). Hence, the reception of a uniform distribution of light over the entire surface of the canvas as one of the foundations of Kuznetsov's decorativeness. Serov said that nature in P. Kuznetsov "breathes". This is perfectly expressed in his Kyrgyz (Steppe) and Bukhara suites, in Central Asian landscapes. Kuznetsov studied the techniques of Old Russian icon painting, the early Italian Renaissance. This appeal to the classical traditions of world art in search of its own grand style, as correctly noted by researchers, was of fundamental importance in a period when any traditions were often denied altogether.

The exoticism of the East - Iran, Egypt, Turkey - is embodied in the landscapes of M. S. Saryan (1880-1972). The East was a natural theme for an Armenian artist. Saryan creates in his painting a world full of bright decorativeness, more passionate, more earthly than Kuznetsov's, and the pictorial solution is always built on contrasting color ratios, without nuances, in a sharp shadow comparison (Date Palm, Egypt, 1911, maps. , tempera, Tretyakov Gallery).

The images of Saryan are monumental due to the generalization of forms, large colorful planes, the general lapidarity of the language - this is, as a rule, a generalized image of Egypt, Persia, native Armenia, while preserving vital naturalness, as if written from life. Saryan's decorative canvases are always cheerful, they correspond to his idea of ​​creativity: “... a work of art is the very result of happiness, that is, creative labor. Consequently, it should kindle the flame of creative combustion in the viewer, help to reveal the desire for happiness and freedom inherent in it ”.

"Jack of Diamonds"

In 1910, a number of young artists - P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov R. Falk, A. Kuprin, M. Larionov, N. Goncharova and others - united into the "Jack of Diamonds" organization, which had its own charter, which arranged exhibitions and published its own collections of articles. "The Jack of Diamonds" actually existed until 1917. Just as post-impressionism, first of all Cezanne, was a "reaction to impressionism", so the "Jack of Diamonds" opposed the obscurity, untranslatable, subtle nuances of the symbolic language of the "Blue Rose" and the aesthetic stylism of the "World of Art" ... The "Diamonds of Diamonds", carried away by the materiality, the "materiality" of the world, professed a clear construction of the picture, emphasized the objectivity of form, intensity, full sound of color. It is no coincidence that still life becomes a favorite genre of the "Valetovites", as a landscape - a favorite genre of members of the "Union of Russian Artists". The subtlety in conveying the change of moods, the psychologism of the characteristics, the understatement of the states, the dematerialization of the painting of the "Blue Rozovites", their romantic poetry are rejected by the "Valetovites". They are contrasted with the almost spontaneous festivity of colors, the expression of the contour drawing, the juicy pasty wide manner of painting, which convey an optimistic vision of the world, an almost booth, areal mood is created. "Diamonds of Diamonds" allow such simplifications in the interpretation of the form, which are akin to folk popular prints, folk toys, tiles, signs. The craving for primitivism (from the Latin primitivus - primitive, initial) manifested itself in various artists who imitated the simplified forms of art of the so-called primitive eras - primitive tribes and nationalities - in search of gaining immediacy and integrity of artistic perception. "The Jack of Diamonds" drew its perceptions from Cezanne (hence sometimes the name "Russian Cesannism"), even more from Cubism ("shift" of forms) and even from Futurism (dynamics, various modifications of the form.

The extreme simplification of the form, the direct connection with the art of signage is especially noticeable in M.F. Larionov (1881-1964), one of the founders of the Jack of Diamonds, but already in 1911 broke with him. Larionov paints landscapes, portraits, still lifes, works as a theatrical artist of Diaghilev's entreprise, then turns to a genre painting, his theme becomes the life of a provincial street, soldiers' barracks. The forms are flat, grotesque, as if deliberately stylized as a child's drawing, splint or signboard. In 1913 Larionov published his book "Luchism" - in fact, the first of the manifestos of abstract art, the real creators of which in Russia were V. Kandinsky and K. Malevich.

Artist N.S. Goncharova (1881-1962), Larionov's wife, developed the same tendencies in her genre paintings, mainly on the peasant theme. In the years under consideration, in her work, which is more decorative and colorful than Larionov's art, monumental in its inner strength and laconicism, there is a keen sense of a fascination with primitivism. Describing the work of Goncharova and Larionov, the term "neo-primitivism" is often used.

M.Z. Chagall (1887-1985) created fantasies, transformed from the boring impressions of the small-town Vitebsk life and interpreted in a naive-poetic and grotesque-symbolic spirit. With surreal space, bright color, deliberate primitivization of form, Chagall turns out to be close to both Western expressionism and folk primitive art (“I and the Village”, 1911, Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; “Over Vitebsk”, 1914, collection of Zak. Toronto; "The Wedding", 1918, Tretyakov Gallery).

"Union of Youth"

The Youth Union is a St. Petersburg organization formed almost simultaneously with the Jack of Diamonds (1909). The leading role in it was played by L. Zheverzheev. Just like the "Valetovites", the members of the "Union of Youth" published theoretical collections. Until the collapse of the association in 1917. The "Union of Youth" did not have a specific program, professing symbolism, and cubism, and futurism, and "non-objectiveness", but each of the artists had his own creative face.

The art of the pre-revolutionary years in Russia is marked by the extraordinary complexity and contradictoriness of artistic searches, hence the successive groupings with their own program settings and stylistic sympathies. But along with the experimenters in the field of abstract forms in Russian art of this time, both the "Miriskusniki" and "Goluborozovtsy", "allies", "Diamonds of Diamonds" continued to work at the same time, there was also a powerful stream of the neoclassicist movement, an example of which is the work of an active member of the "World art "in his" second generation "ZE Serebryakova (1884-1967). In his poetic genre canvases with their laconic drawing, palpable-sensual plastic molding, the poise of the composition, Serebryakov proceeds from the high national traditions of Russian art, first of all Venetsianov and even further - Old Russian art (Peasants, 1914, RM; Harvest, 1915 , Odessa Art Museum; "Whitening of the Canvas", 1917, State Tretyakov Gallery).

Finally, the work of K. S. Petrov-Vodkin (1878-1939), an artist-thinker who later became the most prominent master of art of the Soviet period, is a brilliant evidence of the vitality of national traditions, of the great Old Russian painting. In the famous painting "Bathing the Red Horse" (1912, PT), the artist resorted to a pictorial metaphor. As it was rightly noted, the young man on a bright red horse evokes associations with the popular image of George the Victorious ("Saint Egoriy"), and the generalized silhouette, rhythmic, compact composition, saturation of contrasting color spots sounding in full force, flatness in the interpretation of forms lead in memory of the ancient Russian icon. A harmoniously enlightened image is created by Petrov-Vodkin in the monumental painting Girls on the Volga (1915, Tretyakov Gallery), in which one can also feel his orientation towards the traditions of Russian art, leading the masters to a true nationality.

Architecture

The era of highly developed industrial capitalism caused significant changes in architecture, primarily in the architecture of the city. New types of architectural structures are emerging: factories and plants, railway stations, shops, banks, with the advent of cinema - cinemas. The revolution was made by new building materials: reinforced concrete and metal structures, which made it possible to overlap gigantic spaces, make huge showcases, and create a whimsical pattern of bindings.

In the last decade of the 19th century, it became clear to architects that in the use of historical styles of the past, architecture had come to a certain dead end, what was needed, according to the researchers, was not a "rearrangement" of historical styles, but a creative understanding of the new that was accumulating in the environment of a rapidly growing capitalist city ... The last years of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th centuries are the time of the domination of modernity in Russia, which was formed in the West primarily in Belgian, South German and Austrian architecture, a phenomenon in general cosmopolitan (although here Russian modernity also differs from Western European, for it is a mixture with historical styles of neo-Renaissance, neo-baroque, neo-rococo, etc.).

A striking example of modernity in Russia was the work of F.O. Shekhtel (1859-1926). Tenement houses, mansions, buildings of trading companies and train stations - Shekhtel left his handwriting in all genres. The asymmetry of the building is effective for him, the organic increase in volumes, the different nature of the facades, the use of balconies, porches, bay windows, sandrids above the windows, the introduction of a stylized image of lilies or irises into the architectural decor, the use of stained-glass windows with the same ornament motif, different textures of materials in interior design. A whimsical pattern, built on twisting lines, extends to all parts of the building: the favorite modernist mosaic frieze, or a belt of glazed ceramic tiles in faded decadent colors, bindings of stained glass windows, a pattern of a fence, balcony gratings; on the composition of the stairs, even on furniture, etc. Capricious curvilinear outlines dominate in everything. In Art Nouveau, a certain evolution can be traced, two stages of development: the first is decorative, with a special passion for ornament, decorative sculpture and picturesqueness (ceramics, mosaics, stained glass), the second is more constructive, rationalistic.

Modern is well represented in Moscow. During this period, railway stations, hotels, banks, mansions of the rich bourgeoisie, and apartment buildings were built here. Ryabushinsky's mansion at the Nikitsky Gate in Moscow (1900-1902, architect F.O.Shekhtel) is a typical example of Russian Art Nouveau.

An appeal to the traditions of ancient Russian architecture, but through the techniques of modernity, without copying naturalistically the details of medieval Russian architecture, which was characteristic of the "Russian style" of the middle of the 19th century, but freely varying it, trying to convey the very spirit of Ancient Russia, gave rise to the so-called neo-Russian style of the beginning XX century. (sometimes called neo-romanticism). Its difference from Art Nouveau itself is primarily in disguise, and not in revealing, which is typical for Art Nouveau, the internal structure of the building and utilitarian purpose behind the bizarrely complex ornamentation (Shekhtel - Yaroslavsky station in Moscow, 1903-1904; A.V. Shchusev-Kazansky railway station in Moscow, 1913-1926; V.M. Vasnetsov - the old building of the Tretyakov Gallery, 1900-1905). Both Vasnetsov and Shchusev, each in their own way (and the second under a very great influence of the first), imbued with the beauty of ancient Russian architecture, especially Novgorod, Pskov and early Moscow, appreciated its national originality and creatively interpreted its forms.

Modernism was developed not only in Moscow, but also in St. Petersburg, where it developed under the undoubted influence of the Scandinavian, so-called "northern modernity": P.Yu. Suzor in 1902-1904 builds a building for the Singer company on Nevsky Prospekt (now the House of Books). The terrestrial sphere on the roof of the building was to symbolize the international character of the firm. In the facing of the facade, precious stones (granite, labrador), bronze, mosaics were used. But Petersburg Art Nouveau was influenced by the traditions of monumental Petersburg classicism. This served as the impetus for the emergence of another branch of Art Nouveau - neoclassicism of the XX century. In the mansion of A.A. Polovtsov on Kamenny Island in St. Petersburg (1911-1913) by architect I.A. Fomin (1872-1936) fully influenced the features of this style: the facade (central volume and side wings) was solved in the Ionic order, and the interiors of the mansion in a smaller and more modest form, as it were, repeat the enfilade hall of the Tauride Palace, but the huge windows of the semi-rotunda of the winter garden , stylized drawing of architectural details clearly define the time of the beginning of the century. Works of a purely Petersburg architectural school of the beginning of the century - profitable houses - at the beginning of Kamennoostrovsky (No. 1-3) Avenue, Count M.P. Tolstoy on the Fontanka (No. 10-12), buildings b. The Azovo-Donskoy Bank on Bolshaya Morskaya and the Astoria Hotel belong to the architect F.I. Lidval (1870-1945), one of the most prominent masters of St. Petersburg Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau was one of the most significant styles that ended the 19th century and opened the next. All modern achievements of architecture were used in it. Modern is not only a certain constructive system. Since the domination of classicism, Art Nouveau is perhaps the most consistent style in terms of its holistic approach, ensemble interior design. Modern as a style captured the art of furniture, utensils, fabrics, carpets, stained-glass windows, ceramics, glass, mosaics, it is recognized everywhere for its drawn outlines and lines, its special color range of faded, pastel tones, and its favorite pattern of lilies and irises.

Sculpture

Russian sculpture at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. and the first pre-revolutionary years is represented by several major names. This is primarily P.P. Trubetskoy (1866-1938). His early Russian works (portrait of Levitan, depiction of Tolstoy on horseback, both - 1899, bronze) give a complete picture of Trubetskoy's impressionistic method: the form is, as it were, permeated with light and air, dynamic, designed to be viewed from all points of view and from different angles creates a multifaceted characterization of the image. The most remarkable work of P. Trubetskoy in Russia was a bronze monument to Alexander III, erected in 1909 in St. Petersburg, on Znamenskaya Square. Here Trubetskoy leaves his impressionistic style. Researchers have repeatedly noted that Trubetskoy's image of the emperor is resolved, as it were, in contrast to Falconet's, and next to The Bronze Horseman it is an almost satirical image of autocracy. It seems to us that this contrast has a different meaning; not Russia, "reared up" like a ship lowered into European waters, but the Russia of peace, stability and strength is symbolized by this horseman, sitting heavily on a heavy horse.

Impressionism in a peculiar, very individual creative refraction found expression in the works of A.S. Golubkina (1864-1927). In the images of Golubkina, especially those of women, there is a lot of high moral purity and deep democracy. These are most often images of ordinary poor people: hard-working women or sickly "children of the dungeon."

The most interesting thing in Golubkina's work is her portraits, always dramatically tense, which is generally characteristic of the work of this master, and unusually diverse (portrait of V.F. Ern (wood, 1913, Tretyakov Gallery) or bust of Andrei Bely (plaster, 1907, Tretyakov Gallery)) ...

In the works of Trubetskoy and Golubkina, for all their difference, there is one thing in common: features that make them related not only to impressionism, but also to the rhythm of the flowing lines and forms of modernity.

Impressionism, which captured the sculpture of the beginning of the century, little affected the work of S. T. Konenkov (1874-1971). The marble Nike (1906, Tretyakov Gallery) with clearly portrait (and Slavic) features of a round face with dimples on the cheeks foreshadows the works that Konenkov performed after a trip to Greece in 1912. Images of Greek pagan mythology are intertwined with Slavic mythology. Konenkov begins to work in wood, draws a lot from Russian folklore, Russian fairy tales. Hence his "Stribog" (tree, 1910, Tretyakov Gallery), "Velikosil" (tree, private., Collection), images of beggars and old people ("Old Polevichok", 1910).

Konenkov's great achievement in the revival of wooden sculpture. Love for the Russian epic, for the Russian fairy tale coincided in time with the "discovery" of Old Russian icon painting, Old Russian wooden sculpture, with an interest in Old Russian architecture. Unlike Golubkina, Konenkov lacks drama and emotional breakdown. His images are full of popular optimism.

In the portrait, Konenkov was one of the first to pose the problem of color at the beginning of the century. The tint of a stone or wood is always very delicate, taking into account the characteristics of the material and the peculiarities of the plastic solution.

Of the monumental works of the beginning of the century, it should be noted the monument to N.V. Gogol N.A. Andreeva (1873-1932), discovered in Moscow in 1909. This is Gogol of the last years of his life, terminally ill. His sad profile with a sharp ("Gogol's") nose, a thin figure wrapped in an overcoat are unusually expressive; in the lapidary language of sculpture, Andreev conveyed the tragedy of the great creative personality. In a bas-relief frieze on a pedestal in multi-figured compositions in a completely different way, with humor or even satirically, the immortal Gogol heroes are depicted.

A. T. Matveev (1878-1960). He overcame the impressionist influence of his teacher and in his early works - in the nude (the main theme of those years. Strict architectonics, laconicism of stable generalized forms, a state of enlightenment, peace, harmony distinguish Matveyev, directly opposing his work to sculptural impressionism.

As the researchers correctly noted, the master's works are designed for a long, thoughtful perception, they require an inner mood, "silence" and then they open up most fully and deeply. They have musicality of plastic forms, great artistic taste and poetry. All these qualities are inherent in V.E. Borisov-Musatov in Tarusa (1910, granite). In the figure of a sleeping boy, it is difficult to see the line between sleep and nothingness, and this is done in the best traditions of memorial plastics of the 18th century. Kozlovsky and Martos, with her wise calm acceptance of death, which in turn leads us even further, to archaic antique steles with scenes of "funeral feast". This tombstone is the pinnacle of Matveyev's work of the pre-revolutionary period, who still had to work fruitfully and become one of the famous Soviet sculptors. In the pre-October period, a number of talented young masters appeared in Russian sculpture (SD Merkurov, VI Mukhina, ID Shadr, etc.), who in the 1910s were just beginning their creative activities. They worked in different directions, but preserved the realistic traditions that they brought into the new art, having played an important role in its formation and development.

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