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Ivan
Nikolayevich Kramskoy is an outstanding representative of the democratic
culture in Russia of the second half of the 19th century. He is known as
a wonderful painter and draughtsman, a remarkable art critic and theoretician
of art, a talented teacher. Besides, he was an originator and ardent inspirer
of the first independent artistic organizations, namely the Itinerants’
Society of Traveling Exhibitions and St. Petersburg Team of Artists, which
had played an important part in the development of art in Russia.
Born into the family of a provincial state clerk, Kramskoy had no opportunity
to study art during childhood. At the age of 15 he became an apprentice
to an icon-painter, a year later a photographer took him as a retoucher.
Only in 1857, he managed to come to St. Petersburg and enter the Academy
of Arts. There he soon became a popular leader among the students. In 1863,
he was among the 14 best graduates who refused to fulfill the diploma work
on a given mythological theme. All 14 were dismissed from the Academy,
and Kramskoy headed the St. Petersburg Team of Artists, a commune where
artists shared studios and household. The young wife of Kramskoy, Sophia
Nikolayevna, née Prokhorova, took care of their mutual household.
Ivan Kramskoy is famous mainly as a portraitist; his portraits of the 60s
are not large, and very often monochrome, reminding of photographs. At
the same period (1863-68) Kramskoy taught in The Drawing School of the
Society for Promoting of the Artists; his pupils, among others, were Iliya
Repin and Nicolay Yaroshenko.
Since 1869, Kramskoy started to receive regular commissions from the collector
of Russian art Pavel Tretyakov. Tretyakov
commissioned portraits of personalities of Russian culture and science.
These portraits have become an innate part of the Russian art and social
history. For Kramskoy it was a feat to preserve, for the generations to
come, the likeliness of his outstanding contemporaries. Portrait
of the Author Ivan Goncharov. Portrait of
the Sculptor Mark Antokolsky. Portrait of
Dmitry Mendeleyev.
In 1869, St. Petersburg Academy chose him an academician. The same year
he made his first trip abroad: he visited Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Düsseldorf,
Antwerp, Paris, and Vienna, where he studied famous art collections. After
his return to Russia he started organizing the Itinerants’ Society of Traveling
Exhibitions. The aim of the Society was:
1) to give the opportunity to everybody in Russia to get acquainted
with its contemporary art;
2) to develop love for art in Russian society;
3) to make selling their works easier for the artists.
In 1872 Kramskoy painted his masterpiece Christ
in the Desert, a traditional topic, yet, in Kramskoy’s work
it acquired new social interpretation and deep philosophical meaning.
Christ in the Desert carried the idea of man’s moral duty to society and
therefore it greatly impressed the painter’s contemporaries, who found
a definite affinity to their attitudes and feelings in it in the crucial
period of Russian history, which demanded personal heroism and sacrifice
for the sake of people. “The best Christ I ever saw”– Leo Tolstoy.
In 1873 Tretyakov commissioned the Portrait
of Leo Tolstoy for his gallery. Tolstoy had refused several
times. “Please use all your charm to persuade him “, wrote Tretyakov to
Kramskoy. And Kramskoy managed to do this, the writer and the artist were
both impressed by each other’s personalities. Kramskoy painted one of the
best of all Tolstoy’s portraits. Tolstoy was working on Anna Karenina
at the time and he used Kramskoy’s character as one of the secondary personages
in the novel – the artist Mikhailov.
Kramskoy
always understood the capturing charm of color, admired Alexander
Ivanov, his younger contemporaries – Repin, Vasiliyev,
Polenov,
French Impressionists - “…Just a small group of laughed at painters, but
the future belongs to them…”, he wrote in the 70s about his French colleagues.
But he himself was a poor colorist. Once during the work on the portrait
of Adrian Prakhov, the mother of the sitter
saw the portrait after the first day of painting and impressed by it, took
it away and did not allow Kramskoy to finish it, she said that if the artist
went on working he would dry it as usual. Kramskoy himself understood his
drawbacks and limits, but was afraid to change his manner.
The artist died on 24 March 1887 during his work on the portrait of Doctor
Rauhphus with brush in his hand.
Kramskoy’s works embody the high moral and social ideals of his time.
For him, artistic truth and beauty, moral and aesthetic values were inseparable.
His works greatly influenced his contemporaries’ ideology. Today they still
affect people because the artist’s attitude to life was based on love and
respect of man, on his belief in truth and justice.
Bibliography:
Kramskoy. by T. Kurochkina. Russian Painters of the XIX century.
Moscow. 1989.
The
Art and Architecture of Russia (Pelican History Art) by George
Heard Hamilton. Yale Univ Pr, 1992.
A
Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Artists 1420-1970 by John
Milner. Antique Collectors' Club, 1993.