The Russian Collection
Dec. 6-Jan. 11
Stanford Fine Art
6608-A Hwy 100
Hours: 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Mon-Sat.
Opening reception 6-10 p.m. Dec. 6
For information, call 352-5050
Russian writers, composers and dancers are world famous; Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Nureyev and Baryshnikov come easily to mind. The names of Russian artists, on the other hand, do not. Art lovers know Kandinsky and Chagall, of course, but those 20th century Russian artists spent much of their careers outside their homeland. As for the artists left behind after the revolution to create art under Communist rule, little has been heard—until recently.
Despite the fact that the Iron Curtain has been gone for over a decade, the visual artists who labored behind it are only beginning to emerge on the world stage. An exhibition of Communist-era Russian art at the Tennessee State Museum three years ago introduced Nashville to some of these artists. A new exhibition of Russian paintings, now at Stanford Fine Art, offers a chance to see works by 50 artists of the same era.
While the state museum show presented a broad overview and included large-scale propaganda paintings glorifying the worker and the state, the show at Stanford Fine Art focuses on Russian Impressionism, a more intimate style that flourished from 1930 to 1980. While operating well within state-sanctioned art guidelines, Russian Impressionists were able to celebrate the common people without being as overtly political.
As with French Impressionism, Russian Impressionism is characterized by loose brush strokes and a fascination with light and color. Depictions of the laboring peasantry by French artists Millet, Courbet, Boudin and Manet also influenced the subject matter of Russian Impressionism as much as any government mandate to paint proletarian themes. “Ukrainian Woman” by Vladimir Mikhailovich Chernikov, for example, depicts a young woman pausing in a field of tulips by a lake. Though his subject is a sturdy farm worker, Chernikov seems far more interested in the play of light on her and on the tulips, composed of pink, red and blue dabs of paint, than in promoting Communism.
Similarly, “Sofia, The Eighth Grader,” by Vladimir Ilich Nekrasov, is simply an appealing portrait of a schoolgirl in a white blouse and red skirt with a book in her lap and a thick braid of dark hair falling over one shoulder. The artist uses bold slashes of brown, cream, yellow, red and green to depict the young girl’s look as well as capture her unaffected air and youthful energy.
Portraits were one of the officially sanctioned types of paintings during the Communist era and followed traditional guidelines, as the ones in this show illustrate. Poses are formal, with the subject usually seated. The use of light is accomplished and often directed on the subject from slightly above and to the side. And while the subjects may be shown at rest, there is usually evidence of some mental or physical activity. Books are often included somewhere in the portrait, and expressions are either contemplative or serious and direct.
The state also approved of genre paintings—scenes of everyday life—as essential tools for expressing Communist ideals. Paintings of workers pulling together to build a stronger state through farming, fishing and logging were popular, as were scenes of the common man enjoying leisure pursuits as a break from his labors. Examples in the Stanford show include Aleksei Pavlovich Belykh’s “Moving Logs,” Boris Nikolaevich Kolesnik’s “Tractors, Virgin Lands” and Kirill Ivanovich Shebeko’s “Saw Mill.”
Genre scenes of young children at play or study were particularly popular with Russian Impressionists. Lidiya Pavlovna Semenova’s “Children Are Drawing” shows a young boy and girl diligently drawing at a table as the light streams in on them from a window. “The Morning,” by Elena Mikhailovna Kostenko, focuses on two brothers as they awaken. The older is getting dressed, while the younger, still in bed, is determined to catch a few more winks. Soft diffused light and a palette of pink, blue and cream add to the charming innocence of the scene. One of the show’s loveliest pieces, “Artist’s Dacha” by Nina Pavlovna Volkova, shows a country home surrounded by yellow and white daisies. The flowers fill the foreground, and a carriage with an infant is nestled among the blooms near the house. Two more children play under a clothesline filled with wash drying in the sun. The feeling is idyllic rather than ideological.
Landscapes celebrating the beauty of Mother Russia also got the government nod, and there are several of these in the show, ranging from romantic winter vistas right out of Dr. Zhivago to lake, forest and country village scenes. Industrialized Russia is also depicted in works like “A Blast Furnace Works” by Yakov Dorofeevich Romas, and the female farm worker is idealized in the five women who are collectively the “Masters of the Dairy Farm” by Evgeni Nisonovich Levin. Certainly, some of these works can be seen as products of a government that programmed its art and artists for its own ends. But viewed in a post-Cold War context, they can also be appreciated for what they are today—artistic interpretations of a time and place that is gone forever.
If these artists seemed out of step at the time—painting in the manner of Monet while the rest of the art world was into Picasso and Pollock—they may be vindicated by the marketplace. Though they aren’t on the general public’s radar yet, they are registering with collectors, according to Stan Mabry, owner of Stanford Fine Art. “These artists were working before the Iron Curtain came down, so they weren’t painting to please the Western market,” he says. “But just as American Impressionists have come into their own in the past few decades, I think the Russians are now. Their work is selling very well at Sotheby’s in New York.”
