900 years of Russian masterpieces

The Guggenheim's bold survey of the progress of the art of Russia offers stunning insights into its culture from early icons to the avant-garde.

The blockbuster exhibition of Russian painting and sculpture at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City has earned the explanation point at the end of the title. The full title is RUSSIA! 900 Years of Masterpieces and Master Collections. The show encompasses 900 years of art from the country now known again as Russia. It opened September 16, and continues until January 11. The exhibition fills the entire museum, winding upwards from a selection of Russian icons at the bottom to Soviet and contemporary art at the top of the museum’s signature spiraling ramp which constitutes most of the hanging space. Other smaller gallery rooms at the sides are filled with related works, which include the Guggenheim’s own selection of Russian masters such as Chagall or Kandinsky. Some of the larger side galleries are devoted to the art collections of the Tsars, and later, Russian collectors, which serve to demonstrate European influences on the artists of Russia.

The viewer, faced with 900 years of disparate painting styles, schools, influences and artists, will naturally want to find out what is “Russian” about Russian art. What makes the artistic products of this country—half in Europe, half in Asia—different from western European art, and what aspects of these paintings and sculptures fit in with the art history of “the West” that is more familiar to us?

At the beginning of the exhibition is a room of icons, in the forms of paintings and fabrics, which celebrate the beginning and continuity of Russian Christianity. The word icon is Greek for “image.” These images of the Trinity or of saints are very different from the paintings of Western Europe, even of similar subjects. The icon was meant to be a “window to heaven,” a representation of a holy personage that was not meant to be realistic or individual. The larger than life eyes were intended to engage the viewer and promote a direct contact with the Saint, to enable prayer. There was an established canon of proportions, style adopted from Byzantium. The stylized and conservative forms are not the place to look for a distinctly Russian style, although Russian artists did develop their own schools of icon painting, which became an inspiration to other artists of the Eastern Christian tradition eventually.

There are two treasures that are worth the price of admission alone, because they have not traveled to the Western hemisphere before. An Ascension, at least partly by the hand of Andrei Rubylev, the most famous iconographer in the world, is one. His greatest masterpiece is the Trinity, which the catalogue tells us has been restored to service in a functioning Church. The other special object is one of the most venerated copies of the Virgin of Vladimir, the most well known Russia icon, to which many miracles have been attributed.

The extended wall labels give the untutored a lot of valuable information on what it is they are looking at. Specifically, the use of icons as part of the Russian orthodox liturgy and placement in architecture helps the visitor to understand the context for these paintings which come from a time when paintings were not intended to hang on the walls of homes, museums and galleries. The audio guide adds to this for those who want to know more, but there could have been more information on what the Christian subjects are all about, as it can no longer be assumed that the general public knows what the Transfiguration represents, for example. (It is also too bad, but understandable because of space, that there are no more icons past this part of the exhibition, since icons were continually painted to be a part of the liturgy and worship of the Russian Orthodox Church until the revolution.)

On the first lap of the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim, the icons continue, and then suddenly, one sees a face of Christ, which is no longer flat, stylized, and with the Byzantine canon of proportions. Western influence enters Russian art in Nikita Pavlovets Icon of The King of Kings of 1676. A face that looks like a portrait appears in this icon, and soon to follow are portraits of the ruling class that resemble icons.

From this point on, there is a dialogue going on between Russian art and that of Western Europe. It is convenient that at this stage of the exhibition, there is a gallery of European art collected by the tsars Peter the Great and Catherine the second, which would have been available to some Russian artists. We can see a few of the particular influences on Russian artists, as well as a glimpse of the taste of the Russian court.

Here the visitor naturally takes up the challenge to determine what characterizes Russian art, and makes it different from the mainstream of western European painting and sculpture from around 1600 on.

At first, one is tempted to identify the similarities, and proceed to find the “Russian Impressionists,” “The Russian rococo”, the Russian Realists,” the Russian abstract expressionists”, or even more specifically, to compare Russian artists to more well known French, English or American artists: the Russian Ingres, the Russian Rodin, the Russian Eakins. With this approach, there is the assumption that Russia is copying Western European art, and is a few years behind the major trends. Although this simplistic approach helps the viewer who knows something about western European art and little about Russian art to organize the large amount of material, it denies the strong personality of Russian art which cannot help but assert itself through the works of many artists and schools.

(It should be mentioned, first of all, that Russian art is not always lagging two steps behind that of Western Europe. Vasily Vereschagin’s Defeated: Service for the Dead, 1878-9, looks forward to the International Symbolist movement of the late 1880s and 1890s. The Suprematists, best represented by Kasimir Malevich’s The Black Square, 1930 (but his first version of this was painted in 1915), made statements about form, color, and existence, that got the jump on American abstract expressionists by 30 years or more.)

As several writers in the catalogue point out, one of the circumstances that make Russia different culturally from Western Europe is the lack of Classical roots. Russia’s pre-Christian roots are rather in various pagan traditions in less developed ethnic groups ranging from Siberia to the arctic to the steppes of northern Asia. If one wanted to characterize stylistic trends in the history of Russian painting, I would suggest two elements: first, a love of symmetry and balanced composition, which are evident not only in the art of Russians, but in the paintings that Russian collectors selected from western European artists. Second, many Russian artists seem to be fascinated—more than those of Western Europe—by the dramatic effects of light. One example of the latter is the gigantic The Ninth Wave by Ivan Aivazovsky. A group seeking rescue from a shipwreck is clearly influenced by the famous Raft of the Medusa by the French artist Theodore Gericault in the Louvre. In the Russian seascape/drama, the figures are a central but diminished part of the composition, and the dramatic, almost otherworldly light of the sky and sea become the focus.

In subject matter, Russian artists cling to a fascination with their Christian past, more than their western European counterparts. Many of the genre pictures—and sculptures—of the late nineteenth century celebrate the presence of religious ceremonies as part of the life of the Russian people, as we can see in Taking of the Veil by Mikhail Nestorov, 1898, or Before the Confession by Alexei Korzukhin, 1877.

The question of the identity of Russian art is taken up by some of the essays in the exhibition catalogue (most of which were written by Russian art historians.) Mikhail Shwydkoi quotes Thomas Mann’s insight that there is a notion of “holiness” in Russian literature that Shwydkoi applies to Russian culture as a whole. It seems a true characterization of both Russian art (as seen in the works presented here) that everyday life is sanctified by human effort and faith.

Although some of the nineteenth century pictures depict middle-class villagers, there is also a fascination with the serf or peasant, which relates to the political struggles that led to the freedom of serfs in 1861, erupted again in the revolution in 1911, and helped define the communist state of most of the twentieth century. One compelling painting is Ilya Repin’s Barge Haulers on the Volga of 1870-3, where men are harnessed like animals to pull a boat. Their faces are individualized variations on the theme of human toil and misery while retaining the dignity common to all mankind. The youngest boy is not yet beaten down by life, and adds a touch of hope, as his face turns upward, rather than toward the ground.

The face of the Worker is notable in the room devoted to “Social Realism.” The constant in the paintings here is the facelessness of the common man, whether through a kind of idealism that creates a generic face for a man or woman, or represents people from behind, as in Alexander Deineka’s Future Pilots, 1938, or Yuri Pimenov’s New Moscow, 1937. The exceptions to this are the faces of the political leaders Lenin and Stalin, who represent a new kind of elite, with an iconic status not so different from the Tsars of Imperial Russia.

The most contemporary works, from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the present, again show a strong interaction with western art, and give us insight into the future of Russian art. Many of the works are multimedia, and use the written word as an element of expression. Many reflect on the artistic and political past of Russia. Although there is a lot of variety in these works, one sculpture stands out as making the statement, “Where do we go from here?” A small work by Leonid Sokov, The Meeting of Two Sculptures of 1986 shows a realistic Lenin looking at a Giacometti-like emaciated man striding boldly towards him. An installation by Vadim Zakharov's 2003 called The History of Russian Art–from the Avant-Garde to the Moscow School of Conceptual Art reflects the scope of the current exhibition and begs the same questions about Russian art, past, present and future that confronts the visitor to the Guggenheim.

The scope of the exhibition is bold to say the least. There are more than 250 works displayed, and many disparate schools and periods represented. However, the organizers have succeeded in presenting an overwhelming amount of material that is not impossible to take in—if the viewer allows the time. After a twenty-minute wait on the sidewalk—on a lovely Saturday morning—one should allow at least two to three hours even for a cursory visit. The classic malady of “museum fatigue” could be avoided by breaking the visit into several sessions. The price of admission with the audio guide is $24 for adults. Not bad for a virtual trip to Russia.

Sarah Phelps Smith is an art historian and critic who has taught at the University of Delaware and Swarthmore College. She lives in Ohio with family of eight children.