Nikolaj Fešin: [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin
Gespeichert in:
| 1. Verfasser: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | Russian |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Sankt-Peterburg
"Zolotoj Vek"
2007
|
| Schriftenreihe: | Russkie chudožniki : XX vek
|
| Schlagworte: | |
| Online-Zugang: | Inhaltsverzeichnis Abstract |
| Beschreibung: | In kyrill. Schr., russ. - Zsfassung in engl. Sprache |
| Beschreibung: | 478 S. überw. Ill. |
| ISBN: | 9785342001052 |
Internformat
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| 245 | 1 | 0 | |a Nikolaj Fešin |b [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |c G. P. Tuluzakova |
| 246 | 1 | 1 | |a Nikolai Fechin |
| 264 | 1 | |a Sankt-Peterburg |b "Zolotoj Vek" |c 2007 | |
| 300 | |a 478 S. |b überw. Ill. | ||
| 336 | |b txt |2 rdacontent | ||
| 336 | |b sti |2 rdacontent | ||
| 337 | |b n |2 rdamedia | ||
| 338 | |b nc |2 rdacarrier | ||
| 490 | 0 | |a Russkie chudožniki : XX vek | |
| 500 | |a In kyrill. Schr., russ. - Zsfassung in engl. Sprache | ||
| 600 | 1 | 7 | |a Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič |d 1881-1955 |0 (DE-588)132349132 |2 gnd |9 rswk-swf |
| 655 | 7 | |0 (DE-588)4145395-5 |a Bildband |2 gnd-content | |
| 689 | 0 | 0 | |a Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič |d 1881-1955 |0 (DE-588)132349132 |D p |
| 689 | 0 | |5 DE-604 | |
| 700 | 1 | |a Tuluzakova, Galina P. |d 1960- |e Sonstige |0 (DE-588)132740567 |4 oth | |
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| 856 | 4 | 2 | |m Digitalisierung BSB Muenchen |q application/pdf |u http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016287302&sequence=000004&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA |3 Abstract |
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Datensatz im Suchindex
| _version_ | 1805070998937010176 |
|---|---|
| adam_text |
ОСНОВНАЯ
БИБЛИОГРАФИЯ
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Н. И. Фешин
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Тулузакова Г. П. Русский американец Николай Фешин
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30.
Тулузакова Г. П. Николай Фешин
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Государственный му¬
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33.
Фешин Н. И.: Каталог выставки
/
Сост. Г. А. Могильни¬
кова. Казань,
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34.
Фешин: Каталог
/
Сост. и авт.
вступ,
ст. Г. А. Могильни¬
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35.
Фешин: Каталог
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/
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чевская. Казань,
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с.
36.
Щербакова Г. Николай Фешин
//
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1981. № 49.
С.
8-9.
37.
Якупов
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//
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1984. № 10.
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38.
Ainsworth
E.
Nicolai Fechin,
the man, who painted the desert's
soal
//
Palm Springs Villager. Vol.
11.
No
8.
Palm Springs,
California,
1957.
March.
7-13.
39.
Balcomb M.
N. N.
Fechin. Flagstaff Northerland Press,
1975.
167
p.
40.
Benesit.
Dictionnaire des peintes, sculpteurs, dessianateurs, et
graveurs. Librairie
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P.
300.
41.
Burliuk M.
N.
I.
Fechin
—
great painter (his life and works in
USA,
1923-1956)
//Colorând
Rhyme.
1958.
No
35.
P.
62-70.
42.
Coke V. D. Taos and Santa Fe
//
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51.
No
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1963.
Oct. P.
46.
43.
Coke V. D. Taos and Santa Fe. The artists environment.
1882—
1942.
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press,
1963.
44.
Coke V. D. The painter and the photograph. Albuquerque
University of New Mexico Press,
1964.
45.
Coke V. D. Fechin: The Volga and the pueblo
//
Art News.
Vol.
75.
No
2. 1976. Febr.
46.
Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptures and Engraves
/
By
Mentle Fillding. USA,
1974.
P.
117.
47.
Drawings of
N.
Fechin. Essay on Fechin's charcoal designs by
Julien
Ryner. Santa Fe; New Mexico,
1978. 18
p.
48.
Fechin
N.
Fechin on art
//
Persimmon Hill. Vol.
8.
No
3. 1978.
P.
47-53.
49.
Fechin
N.
Autobiography: The Russian years. P.
10—17.
50.
Fechin-Branham E., Porter M.
N.
Fechin: The Builder. Santa
Fe,
1982.62 p.
51.
Fechin-Branham E. Fechin. Issue of Fechin Institute, Taos,
1988. 10
p.
52.
Fechin E. Fechin's home in Taos
//
Southwestern Art Magazine.
Vol.
7.
No
1. 1978.
Autumn. P.
5-12.
53. Fenn F. Nicolai
Fechin,
1881-1955 //
Southwest Art. Vol.
4.
No
4. 1975.
Oct. P.
80-87.
54. Fenn F.
The Genius of
Nicolai
Fechin. One Horse Land and
Cattle Company and
Nedra Matteucci
Galleries. Santa Fe,
2001. 147
p.
55.
JellicoJ.
Nicolai
Fechin//American Artist.
1959.
Vol.
23.
No3.
March. P.
22.
56.
Jellico J. Drawings of
Nicolai
Fechin
//
American Artist.
1968.
Nov. P.
58-63.
57.
Jellico J.
Nicolai
Fechin
//
Southwest Art. Vol.
5.
No
2. 1976.
P.
19-31.
58.
Jellico J. Drawings of Fechin
//
Persimmon Hill. Vol.
8.
No
3.
1978.
P.
18-29.
59.
Jellico J.
N.
Fechin
//
Artists of the Rockies and the Golden
West. Summer
1981.
P.
74-83.
60.
Good S. L. The Works of
N.
Fechin
//
Gilcrease Magazine of
American History and Art. Vol.
8.
No
1. 1986.
Jan. P.
2-28.
61.
Hines J. Portrature: more then a face
//
Southwest Art. Vol.
22.
No
42. 1993.
Apr.
62. Krakel
D.
The faces of Fechin
//
Persimmon Hill. Vol.
4.
No
3.
1974.
P.
4-5.
63. Krakel
D. The house that Fechin built
//
Persimmon Hill. Vol.
8.
No3.
1978.
P.
62-69.
64.
Koster
M.
Nicolai
Fechin House in Taos, New Mexico
//
Antiques.
1998.
May. P.
730-738.
65.
Lively J. The
Nicolai
Fechin House. A Russian painter and
woodcarver builds a house of adobe in the American desert
//
Fine Homebuilding. No
25. 1985.
Febr./March. P.
26—33.
66.
Luhan M. D. Taos and its artists.
N.
Y.:
Duell,
Sloan, and
Pearce,
1947.
67.
McCracken H.
Nicolai
Fechin.
N.
Y.: Ram Press.
1961. 48
p.
68. N.
Fechin exhibition in the Grand Central Art Galleries
//
Buffalo
N.
Y. News.
1925.
Apr.
69. N.
Fechin. A centennial Exhibition. Montana Historical Society.
1981.41
p.
70. Nicolai
Fechin. One Man Exhibition. Fine Arts Museum of
New Mexico. Santa Fe,
1962. 4
p.
71. Nicolai
Fechin, a one man exhibition of drawings, oil paintings,
and sculptures. Maxwel Galleries. Ltd, San Francisco.
1968.
February
12—
March
4, 8
p.
72. Nicolai
Fechin. One Man Exhibition. Hammer Galleries.
N.
Y.,
1970. 12
p.
73. Nicolai
Fechin. One Man Exhibition.
Fenn
Galleries ltd. Santa
Fe,
1975.28 p.
74. Nicolai
Fechin. The exhibition of paintings, on loan from the
USSR: Catalogue. Foreword Eye Fechin
—
Branham and
Forrest
Fenn. Fenn
Galleries LTD. Santa Fe. New Mexico,
455
November,
23
through
December,
27;
Charles and Emma Frye
Art Museum, Seattle,
Washington,
January
6—
February
IO,
1976.
16 p.
75. Nicolai Fechin.
Centennial Exhibition in the
Fechin
House.
Taos; New Mexico,
1981. 24
p.
76. Nicolai
Fechin. Across Two Continents. Gerald Peters Gallery:
Exhibition catalogue. Santa Fe,
1997. 147
p.
77.
Nordman
J. B. N. Fechin.
Draw what you see: A personal mem¬
ory
//
Western Art Digest. Vol.
11.
Issue
3. 1985.
P.
80—89.
78.
Oils and drawings by
Nicolai
Fechin. Cowie Galleries. Los
Angeles; Michigan,
1957. 4
p.
79.
Persimmon Hill. Vol.
8.
No
3. 1978. 77
p.
80.
Pomello
J, M.
The house Fechin built
//
Southwest Art. Vol.
16.
No
12. 1987.
Apr.
81.
Romero-Oak J. The Russian house. Fechin builds dream in
Taos// New Mexico. Vol.
69.
No.
1991.
Apr.
82.
Samuels P., Samuels H., Samuels Y., Fabrian D. Techniques of
the artists of the American West. The Wellfleet Press,
1990.
83.
Schriever G.
Nicolai
Fechin. Russian artist in the American
West
//
American West. Vol.
XIX.
No
3. 1982.
May/June.
P.
34-42, 62-63.
84.
Sixteen charcoal drawings and litographs of
N.
Fechin.
Northridge House,
1946.
85.
Sixth International exhibition of litography and wood engrav¬
ing. Brochure from the Art Institute of Chicago.
1937.
Nov.
8
p.
86.
Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Russia:
The Land, The People. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1986.
87.
Special Exhibition of Paintings by
Nicolai
Fechin
/
Introduction
by
Cristian
Brinton. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago,
1924.
88.
A/we
N.
Soixante-dix ans d'émigration russe.
1919—1989.
P.,
1996.
89.
The Art of
Nicolai
Fechin
from the Eugene
B. Adkins
Collection.
Northern Arizona Society of Science and Art,
1972. 12
p.
90.
The works of
Nicolai
Fechin
/
Gilcrease Magazine of American
History and Art. Vol.
8.
No
1.
Jan.
1986. 30
p.
91.
The
Chirles
and Emma Fryer Art Museume. A Handbook of the
collection. Seattle, Washington, USA,
1989.
P.
35—38.
92.
Tuluzakova G. P. The Art of
Nicolai
Fechin
//
El Palacio.
109.
No
2.
P.
2004.
Summer. P.
20-25.
93.
Van
Deventer
M. J.
Nicolai Fechin // Southwest Art. 1991. Nov.
P. 61-69, 133, 135.
94. Waters F. Nicolai Fechin // Arizona Highways.
Vol. III. No
2.
1952. Febr. P. 22-34.
95.
Who's who
in American Art /Ed.
By
B.Gilbert. N.Y.; L, 1939.
P. 175-176.
SUMMARY
Nikolai Fechin occupies a distinct place in the galaxy of brilliant Russian artists of the
1910s
and
1920s,
although he does not rank with the most popular figures of the period. Each time he
is to be discovered anew. The reason is not the level and significance of his work, but the chain
of outward circumstances that shaped his destiny.
Fechin's art equally belongs to Russia and America. Both in Russia and the United States
he is connected primarily with the province. In Russia that was the city of Kazan where he was
born and received his initial training in the local art school, to which he returned as a teacher
upon graduation from the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In America, to which he immi¬
grated in
1923,
he is primarily associated with the regional art school of the Southwest or, to
be more exact, with the Taos artistic colony, although he also worked in New York and Los
Angeles. A lack of attention to Fechin's legacy among art scholars of the two Russian capitals
during the Soviet period was predetermined not only by his emigration, but also by fairly poor
collections of Fechin's works in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum. It cannot be
said that the American press ignored Fechin, but he was not in the mainstream, since he can
hardly be regarded as an avant-garde artist, while it is avant-garde art that primarily attracted
and continues to attract the attention of major American researchers. Poor knowledge of the
true scope of Fechin's legacy also hindered the due appreciation of his work for a long time.
This refers not only to his American period (according to the evaluations of the art dealer
Forrest
Fenn,
who specialized in the sale of works by artists of the Taos colony, including
Fechin, in America, their number was about
1,500
to
2,000
pieces), but the Russian period as
well. From
1909
onward Fechin regularly contributed to international exhibitions in Munich,
Amsterdam, Venice, and Rome. He had especially fruitful ties with America
—
the Carnegie
Institute in Pittsburgh and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, where he used to be invited
to exhibitions from
1910
until the beginning of the First World War that interrupted all inter¬
national contacts. Americans bought Fechin's works not from exhibitions alone. Art collectors,
especially William
Stimmel,
were offered a choice of his works from photographs to be then
delivered by Fechin from Kazan. As a rule
Stimmel
selected the artist's most significant pictures
of this period. Therefore even the largest collection of Fechin's works in Russia, that of the Fine
Arts Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan,
does not adequately reflect the evolution of Fechin's
art during his Russian period.
Fechin's real creative outline has been formed gradually, little by little. In Russia, the pio¬
neering role in this process belonged to art scholars from Kazan
' ,
starting with P. P. Dulsky,
the author of the first life-time monographic essay on Fechin published in
1921,
as well
as G. A. Mogilnikova, whose merits cannot be overestimated because it was thanks to her
that the first exhibition of Fechin's works was held at the Kazan Museum in
1958,
soon after it
had become possible at the beginning of the "thaw". This exhibition gave an impulse for his
1
It would be just to mention here the name of S. G.
Kaplanova,
a Moscow art scholar, who wrote an essay on
the artist's work: "N. I. Fechin", in: Essays on the Histoiy of Russian Portraiture of the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries, Moscow,
1964;
and an introduction to the book Nikolai Ivanovich Fechin: Documents. Letters.
Reminiscences of the Artist. Compiled by G. A. Mogilnikova, introduction by
G. S.
Kaplanova,
Leningrad,
1975
(both in Russian).
447
one-man shows in Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev and Kirov in
1963-65.
The exhibitions practical¬
ly meant a rediscovery of this prominent master. G. A. Mogilnikova succeeded in gathering
reminiscences of Fechin's pupils that became the basis for the creation of a volume of docu¬
mentary materials that became the principal source
ofinformation
about the artist, on the one
hand, and laid the foundation of an important archive, on the other. One should also not for¬
get about A. I. Novitsky, who took an active part in the formation of the quite sizeable collec¬
tion of Fechin's works in the Kazan Museum and about E. P. Kliuchevskaya, who published
a catalogue of Fechin's works created before
1923.
Among publications devoted to Fechin in the USA it is possible to single out the catalogue of
his one-man show held in New York in
1961,
compiled by Harold MacCracken's and reproduc¬
ing all works from the collection of the artist's family, a monograph published by Mary
N.
Balk in
1975,
as well as publications by I. Einsworth, D. Crackel, V. D. Coke, and G. Gellico.
The most important role in creating a nearly mythological image of the artist, in preserving
and popularizing Fechin's art in America, however, belonged to his daughter, Eya Fechin-
Brenham, who totally devoted the second half of her life to her father. Not a single publication
on Fechin passed without her participation; she accumulated a sizeable archive and, what was
most important, managed to include Fechin's house at Taos, built by the artist himself and
being one of his masterpieces, into the Inventory of Historical Landmarks of the United States.
Therefore, even after Eya's death in October
2002
the mansion could not be sold just as a usual
house. An indispensable condition was to preserve its appearance intact. At the present the
Fechin House belongs to the private Taos Museum of Art and functions as a memorial (even
if not devoted to Fechin alone) and the interior as a whole has been preserved.
Art was for Fechin the meaning and mode of his living, it was literally everything for him.
One can observe a predestination in the history of the four-year child's miraculous cure from
meningitis after he had touched the icon of the Mother of God of Tikhvin (the icon is not
only a sacral image, but a work of art, too), in the fact that his father owned a workshop where
iconostases
for Kazan and rural churches were carved and gilded, and that precisely at the
time of his graduation from the secondary school in Kazan an art school was opened there
—
otherwise a boy from a poor family would be unable to receive initial training in art. The boy's
poor health that led him to a restraint of his feelings and brought a permission not to learn
general subjects allowed him to concentrate on art alone. The most important formative
influences in Fechin's career as an artist were associated with his student years at the
Academy of Arts, where he mastered the academic principles and, most notably, the refined
culture of drawing. Of great importance was his training there in Ilya Repin's workshop,
where he completely mastered the Itinerants' traditions, the fundamentals of which had been
learned earlier, during his studies in Kazan. Fechin also acquired from Repin some notions
about Impressionism. No less important for his development was the artistic atmosphere of
St Petersburg of the 1900s. Fechin absorbed numerous creative ideas transforming them into
his own concepts. That became apparent only when Repin abandoned the Academy
(1907)
and Fechin, left alone, began to work in the manner of his own. His works of
1908 —
Lady in Lilac, now in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, and The
Cheremis
Wedding
(Bearing Away the Bride), National Cowboy
&
Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City,
USA
—
convincingly revealed his progress. These works also show that Fechin evolved his
distinctive artistic idiom and subject matter, which would undergo no radical changes
448
(in America, especially in Taos, he would change his color scheme, but his creative method
would fundamentally remain the same).
Fechin's individual artistic idiom took shape at the crossing of numerous stylistic trends
of the early twentieth century. It combines the academic background that can be easily dis¬
cerned, realistic features drawn from the Itinerants, Impressionistic elements and obvious
Expressionistic tendencies, which are nevertheless all blended together into an integral whole
that is by no means equal to the sum of its components. Nikolai Fechin was a product of the
Art
Nouveau
age (in the meaning formulated in publications by the art scholar Dmitry
Sarabyanov). Art
Nouveau
can be defined as a transitive style of an intermediary period when
the creative method was changing from the art of the second half of the nineteenth century, with
its firm positivistic belief in the possibility to get to know the essence of the visible world by
recording and summing up one's impressions, to the creative method of twentieth-century art
that found is necessary to transform reality and to create a new realm for the sake of an insight
into the essence of things. Since the Renaissance classical art had been based on a conviction
that ".reason does not possess the truth that cannot be discerned by the eye; our eyes do not
see the things inaccessible to the understanding of reason. any phenomenon of reality imme¬
diately appears as an absolute unity of form and content." 2 At the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries artists had already abandoned such understanding. A sense of spontaneity
of the stream of life gave birth to a feeling that the phenomenal and the essential do not always
coincide and one's approach to the truth occurs on an intuitive rather than rational level.
The transitional character of Art
Nouveau
was clearly reflected in its dualism of the real and
the conventional. Art
Nouveau
artists did not paint from life, but at the same time they often
transformed real images for the sake of revealing their essence. The main objective was Beauty
that was deified and grew all-embracing, encompassing all spheres of the universe, including
disharmonious, repulsive phenomena. Strenuous efforts to capture the beautiful largely deter¬
mined a choice of subject matter
—
for example, in portraiture, the Art
Nouveau
age revealed
itself in subtle female images rather than in male portraits of socially remarkable personalities
characteristic of the Itinerants with their civic pathos. The aesthetic aspirations of the period
were largely revealed in the heightened attention to artistic form, to the independent value of
the play of colour combinations or whimsically curving lines that gradually began to lead the
life of their own alongside the representation itself. The mimetic nature of art was not denied,
but now objects for imitation became not just natural forms, but the organic character of their
being, the dynamism of permanent development.
Very often the chromatic dough, from which Fechin models his images, is endowed with an
independent motion; it is growing, living, pulsating. The picture is regarded as a single organ¬
ism, with all its parts emerging simultaneously. The whole carries concentrated aesthetic infor¬
mation, as does any part of the composition. The creative process is important in itself, it is
open, unfolding before our eyes and is more important than the result
—
that is why Fechin did
not finish his works so often.
Fechin's main subject was man. He also painted landscapes and still
Ufes.
These kinds
of painting grew especially prominent in his work in America. Nevertheless man was invariably
the most important subject for Fechin, be it in the form of a multi-figure genre composition,
2
G. K. Argan, History of Italian Art, In
2
Vols,
Moscow,
1990.
Vol.
1,
p.
255.
449
a portrait or a nude, in painting or in drawing. Man was interesting for him in all manifesta¬
tions. Fechin had spent his childhood in travels from one village to other and the wild or, rather,
primordial forms and notions of human living in Russian villages
—
those of the
Cheremis
(Maris),
Tatars, Chuvashes, and Russians
—
have forever remained an inalienable part of his
life experience. On the other hand, the years spent in St Petersburg introduced him to the circle
of artistic elite, quite a different milieu
—
and that was another important experience.
These human hypostases
—
the creation of nature and the creation of culture
—
regularly
occur in Fechin's works. The elemental, emotional, risky outbursts of energy in mass-scale
country rituals and feasts, with their roots going down to the primordial and pagan times, rav¬
ish and frighten us in his genre compositions
(Cheremis
Wedding, Cabbage
Fest,
Shower). The
artist exaggerated to a grotesque the images of drunken peasants, engrossed in careless revelry
of a feast. The sound, vital quality of people living at one with nature, is combined with an
opportunity of spontaneous outbursts of usually suppressed, but irresistible and particularly
ruinous passions. And the juxtaposition of these polar standpoints enables the artist to seek for
an answer to the essential question of the time "Who are we"?" not in terms of social prob¬
lems as the Itinerant artists did, but on a deeper level
—
in the specific features of national
Being, rather than just in down-to-earth living. These Fechin's works, along with Peasant
Women by Fiodor
Maliavin,
laid the foundations for the "expressive-grotesque trend of
Russian art" (G. Pospelov) that would manifest itself in the Raseya series by Boris Grigoryev
and in Pavel Filonov's works devoted to peasant life. The theme of "natural man" would reap¬
pear in Fechin's work at Taos, but this time as portrait types of the Indians rather than as a
usual genre composition. They would contain no exaggeration or grotesque, no tormenting
questions and his admiration would not be darkened by an admixture of terror and hopeless¬
ness. He would feast his eyes upon the powerful energy coming from the soil, the physical
sense of the rhythm of drumming, the pulsation of blood due to the accelerating tempo of a
dance. He would not conceal his delight at the inherent unity of this people's life with the life
of canyons, rocks, mountains overgrown with forests, and the fascinating combination of
snow-covered peaks and bright sunshine (Corn Dancer, private collection,
USA; Pietro,
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, USA). Admittedly, the
artist still retained some distance from what he depicted.
Whatever great was the significance of multi-figure compositions in Fechin's
oeuvre,
he is more
famous as a portraitist. His main characters were usually people close to him, especially those asso¬
ciated with creative work in some way. He portrayed the charming young pupils of the Kazan Art
School (Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, Masha Medvedeva,
Tamara
Popova,
Masha Bystrova, Natasha
Podbelskaya, and Alexandra Belkovich, his future wife); his friends, first at the Academy of Arts
(Sergei Ovsiannikov and
Konstantin
Lepilov) and then his colleagues at the Kazan Art School (the
architect
Piotr
Abramychev and the artists Grigory Medvedev and Valentin Shcherbakov). Fechin
practically did not paint commissioned portraits. Few people in Kazan could appreciate his free
manner of painting
—
smooth brushwork was then more popular, as it is, in fact, today, too. For
instance, once Professor Lev Fofanov rejected his portrait commissioned from the artist, although
that proved to be one of Fechin's masterpieces. In America, Fechin also preferred to paint creative
people. In New York, he portrayed Russian emigrants and American Bohemians: the theatrical
director Nikolai Evreinov, the ballerinas
Vera Fokina
and
Ariadna Mikeshina,
the singer
E. Khatayeva, the famous master of the avant-garde David Burliuk, the American cinema star
450
Lilian Gish, the writer
Willa
Carter, and Walter Clark, the founder of the Grand Hotel Central
Gallery. In Taos, he depicted artists, writers, and patrons of the Taos artistic colony D. Brett, Frieda
Lawrence, Mable Dodge Luhan, etc. He preferred to represent those who created culture or were
connected with it. His manner in portraiture was often affected, but he very rarely turned to
grotesque. Changing plus for minus, as it were, sometimes he added a certain degree of idealiza¬
tion in his portraits. But that was not a desire to prettify the appearance in keeping with some given
example. For Fechin, beauty coincided with individuality and he never corrected natural features.
He sought for ideal qualities in real people, capturing the moment or state when all the best fea¬
tures of his sitter were revealed. Fechin's portraits show one more of his favourite ideas
—
a notion
about a thin border dividing the beautiful and the ugly, and their close interrelationship. He fol¬
lowed the Russian tradition of correlating beauty with the spiritual, inner content of one's person¬
ality. Nadezhda Sapozhnikova's somewhat crude face appears beautiful thanks to the integrity of
the female image suggesting a personality with a keen feel for beauty and living for its sake. By the
way, Fechin could not paint ideally beautiful faces (befitting the common standards)
—
such
portraits immediately turned ostentatious and prettified.
Fechin did not suffer from a shortage of art collectors and patrons. In Kazan, of great
importance was his friendship with Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, who studied in the art school
under him and at the same time taught him much about things that were outside the sphere
of art. She purchased his works paying good money, but no less important was the atmosphere
of creativity that reigned her own studio, where Fechin often worked side by side with pupils of
the Kazan Art School. The three portraits and two studies of Sapozhnikova done by him wit¬
ness to their friendship. In America, he was lucky to be noticed by Mable Dodge Luhan, not
only a rich woman, but a remarkable personality. After she had settled in Taos the small local
colony of artists turned into an international phenomenon, the most significant artistic colony
in the United States of the
1920s
to
1940s.
Fechin was fond of portraying children. It is difficult to avoid sentimentality in children's
portraiture, to regard the child not as a future grown up person, but to emphasize the self-con¬
tained value of the still unshaped character, to convey the specific fluent quality of childish
movements and the intrinsic vivacity of childish glances. In addition one has to work quickly,
because it is not easy to make a child sit for a portrait. All that explains why there are so few
artists capable to paint children. Fechin was certainly a great master of children's portraiture.
Little Katya, Misha Bardukov, a peasant girl (private collection, USA) or the village fool
Salavatulla —they are all just children for him. His indubitable masterpiece is the portrait of
Varia Adoratskaya
(1914).
That was his challenge to the sick time fraught with wars, violence,
and social catastrophes, his answer where to seek for support and outcome. The clarity of the
young girl's look, the inner balance predetermined by the natural purity of her soul, all that
brings forth a happy sensation of harmony, so rare in our lives, but so longed for.
Fechin's turbulent temperament, his emotionality and a sincere depth of his feelings,
that he never revealed (all witnesses mentioned his reticent manners), were manifested most
of all in his portraits of the people close to him
—
his father, his wife Alexandra and their
daughter Eya. The numerous portraits of his father, mentioned as outstanding works by his
contemporaries, have not reached us; some of them can be found in the United States.
We are lucky that the portrait of his father painted in
1918
is now in the collection of the
Fine Arts Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan.
This is a sort of formal portrait devoted to
451
a craftsman, with the fur coat, which is not justified in the interior from the point of view of
verisimilitude, playing the same distinctive role as regalia in portraits of aristocrats, power¬
fully emphasizes the sitter's social position, while the face expresses all the facets of his
complex and profound character.
It is just impossible to enumerate all Fechin's portraits of his wife Alexandra. He depicted
her in the open air, in compositional portraits-pictures, in rapid studies and in stylized like¬
nesses. He portrayed her as a Renaissance woman and a Russian peasant, an austere American
business lady and a careful mother, a passionate luxurious beauty and a common housewife
with an imprint of anxiety on her face. Most remarkable are Alexandra's portraits with her
small daughter produced in
1923 —
Mother and Daughter and his outstanding canvas Summer
(both are in American private collections). They record the great moments of his life and vivid¬
ly convey his happiness. Although their real family life was never smooth, a request to divorce
turned out to be a blow for him
.
He lost everything
—
his beloved woman, his Taos, where they
spent the most fruitful and happy years in America, he lost the house built by his own hands for
six years. Yet he did not lose his affection for Alexandra for a long time as his letters sent to her
after their divorce convincingly suggest
—
they express tenderness, pain, love and anguish, but
there is almost no reproaches or a desire to wound, to hurt in them.
Fechin maintained contacts with the world mainly through his daughter Eya. The artist's
fatherly love and tenderness enabled him to create a loot of her images full of amazing harmo¬
ny
—
from
plein-air
studies of his Kazan period to the American masterpieces: Eya with a
Muscat Melon
(1923) —
a paraphrase of his early portrait of
Varia Adoratskaya,
where more
complex painterly tasks were brilliantly solved; Eya after a Bath (Woolaroc Museum,
Oklahoma, USA), a work that seems to shine from within; Eya in a Peasant Shirt (private
collection, Taos, USA), a canvas producing an impression that it has just been painted thanks
to its unusual freshness; Eya (Taos Art Museum, USA), devoid of Fechin's usual
impasto,
sweeping brushwork, but remarkable for its barely perceptible nuances, chromatic variations,
and delicate shades of feelings.
A superb painter, Fechin was a brilliant master of drawing, too. His studies of naked models are
close to academic canons and yet distant from them. He depicts the human body isolated from its
real setting, with light and shade modeling
—
principal conditions seem to be fulfilled, but his choice
of models, too earthly and solidly built, his foreshortenings
—
sharp, elaborate, and often unex¬
pected, as well as his emphasis on the expressiveness of movements
—
all these features discard the
majestic calm of academic drawing. Somewhat corpulent female bodies, often even depicted with¬
out their heads, similarly to "Paleolithic Venuses", become light and elegant. Fechin did not seek to
render the material quality of form as much as he strove to convey its vibrant life. The artist explored
his model so thoroughly that it was not necessary for him to pay much attention to minute details.
The lightly yet firmly set lines, with their varying thickness, intensity, and form combined in an
absolutely free way, not only faithfully render the model's volume and individual structure, but also
fill the sheet with movement. In some drawings the play of lines and tints seems to grow predomi¬
nant. The artist likes to "lose", to dissolve the line, so as then to regain it. The line gets alive, self-
developing and organic. The modeling of form that creates a tender light and shade effect by the
slightest touches of charcoal, almost by dots, dematerializes and spiritualizes the flesh. The
light and shade treatment is not limited to the outline of the body, but scatters beyond its limits like
grains creating the light and air medium and promoting the plastic integrity of the sheet. The artist
452
experiments with light and shade effects. The form can emerge from uncertainty, as it were, grow¬
ing up in tone, but still not reaching completion. Fechin cultivated the manner of "incompleteness
in completion", hence a sense of vibration
—
the form is "breathing", pulsating. In this way he
attains the impression that the drawing is being created before our eyes. The linear openwork and
the representation exist in parallel and simultaneously combine into an integrated whole. Fechin
enjoyed the creative process and admired the perfection of Creation
—
there were no irregular or
unsightly bodies for him because he perceived them as a spiritualized matter.
Portraiture occupies a prominent place in Fechin's graphic legacy, like in his painting.
There are few portraits done in his Kazan period, but they are striking for their spiritual har¬
mony: e.g. Portrait of
Tamara
Popova,
private collection
(?),
St. Petersburg, or Portrait of a
Girl (Sidorchenko?), Regional Art Museum, Samara. These works make us remember draw¬
ings by masters of the Italian Renaissance. Fechin enjoyed a period of flowering in portrait
drawing in America. His highest achievements are portraits of Indians, artists of the Taos
artistic colony, and of
Balinese
people. His Californian period was most fruitful in terms of
quantity. But his portraits from this period are somewhat monotonous in treatment
—
heads
taken at close range, always captured in the same optimistic mood, and appearing to be too
smooth. Nevertheless even his most salon-like portraits strike us by their consummate exe¬
cution. Fechin's manner becomes keenly subtle and he employs different devices in each of
them. These portraits are technically irreproachable, although they have lost some unfath¬
omable inner quality
—
an important string seems to have been broken and the artist would
not allow his emotions to burst out any more.
Painting, graphic art, and teaching activity were Fechin's professional occupations. As for
sculpture, decorative and applied art, metalwork and ceramics, he practiced them merely for his
pleasure. But they also represent an important facet in the history of Russian art. Fechin devel¬
oped the decorative forms found by artists at Abramtsevo and Talashkino and combining the tra¬
ditions of Russian folk art with aesthetics of Art
Nouveau.
He created carved furniture for
his Kazan studio and some pieces for the studio of Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, which are known
to us from rare surviving examples and photographs. One can form a fairly good idea of Fechin
as a master of woodcarving from his mansion in Taos, where he created himself the principal
details of the interior (pillars, doors, and rafters), the entire furniture, as well as minor household
objects
—
such as bread containers and vases. The interior
décor
of the house makes up a fine
ensemble perfectly matching its architecture. Fechin's mansion in Taos is the latest example of
Russian Art
Nouveau
that emerged at the whim of fate under the hot sun of New Mexico.
Fechin was an artist in the full sense of this word. He never tried to go beyond the sphere
of artistic problems, to work out any special philosophic system or to seek for global gene¬
ralizations. He focused on the exploration of form and colour tenaciously capturing real and
particular objects, seeking for an insight into the nature of things rather than for a width of
perception. But microcosm is as limitless as macrocosm. And such depths that cannot be cog¬
nized otherwise opened up to him. |
| adam_txt |
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52.
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//
Southwestern Art Magazine.
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//
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1981.
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Hines J. Portrature: more then a face
//
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The faces of Fechin
//
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1974.
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//
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Nicolai
Fechin House in Taos, New Mexico
//
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1998.
May. P.
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Lively J. The
Nicolai
Fechin House. A Russian painter and
woodcarver builds a house of adobe in the American desert
//
Fine Homebuilding. No
25. 1985.
Febr./March. P.
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Luhan M. D. Taos and its artists.
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Fechin exhibition in the Grand Central Art Galleries
//
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Fechin. One Man Exhibition. Fine Arts Museum of
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November,
23
through
December,
27;
Charles and Emma Frye
Art Museum, Seattle,
Washington,
January
6—
February
IO,
1976.
16 p.
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Centennial Exhibition in the
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Taos; New Mexico,
1981. 24
p.
76. Nicolai
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Exhibition catalogue. Santa Fe,
1997. 147
p.
77.
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Draw what you see: A personal mem¬
ory
//
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Issue
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P.
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78.
Oils and drawings by
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1957. 4
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May/June.
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84.
Sixteen charcoal drawings and litographs of
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Fechin.
Northridge House,
1946.
85.
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1937.
Nov.
8
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86.
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The Land, The People. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1986.
87.
Special Exhibition of Paintings by
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Introduction
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P. 175-176.
SUMMARY
Nikolai Fechin occupies a distinct place in the galaxy of brilliant Russian artists of the
1910s
and
1920s,
although he does not rank with the most popular figures of the period. Each time he
is to be discovered anew. The reason is not the level and significance of his work, but the chain
of outward circumstances that shaped his destiny.
Fechin's art equally belongs to Russia and America. Both in Russia and the United States
he is connected primarily with the province. In Russia that was the city of Kazan where he was
born and received his initial training in the local art school, to which he returned as a teacher
upon graduation from the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In America, to which he immi¬
grated in
1923,
he is primarily associated with the regional art school of the Southwest or, to
be more exact, with the Taos artistic colony, although he also worked in New York and Los
Angeles. A lack of attention to Fechin's legacy among art scholars of the two Russian capitals
during the Soviet period was predetermined not only by his emigration, but also by fairly poor
collections of Fechin's works in the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum. It cannot be
said that the American press ignored Fechin, but he was not in the mainstream, since he can
hardly be regarded as an avant-garde artist, while it is avant-garde art that primarily attracted
and continues to attract the attention of major American researchers. Poor knowledge of the
true scope of Fechin's legacy also hindered the due appreciation of his work for a long time.
This refers not only to his American period (according to the evaluations of the art dealer
Forrest
Fenn,
who specialized in the sale of works by artists of the Taos colony, including
Fechin, in America, their number was about
1,500
to
2,000
pieces), but the Russian period as
well. From
1909
onward Fechin regularly contributed to international exhibitions in Munich,
Amsterdam, Venice, and Rome. He had especially fruitful ties with America
—
the Carnegie
Institute in Pittsburgh and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, where he used to be invited
to exhibitions from
1910
until the beginning of the First World War that interrupted all inter¬
national contacts. Americans bought Fechin's works not from exhibitions alone. Art collectors,
especially William
Stimmel,
were offered a choice of his works from photographs to be then
delivered by Fechin from Kazan. As a rule
Stimmel
selected the artist's most significant pictures
of this period. Therefore even the largest collection of Fechin's works in Russia, that of the Fine
Arts Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan,
does not adequately reflect the evolution of Fechin's
art during his Russian period.
Fechin's real creative outline has been formed gradually, little by little. In Russia, the pio¬
neering role in this process belonged to art scholars from Kazan
' ,
starting with P. P. Dulsky,
the author of the first life-time monographic essay on Fechin published in
1921,
as well
as G. A. Mogilnikova, whose merits cannot be overestimated because it was thanks to her
that the first exhibition of Fechin's works was held at the Kazan Museum in
1958,
soon after it
had become possible at the beginning of the "thaw". This exhibition gave an impulse for his
1
It would be just to mention here the name of S. G.
Kaplanova,
a Moscow art scholar, who wrote an essay on
the artist's work: "N. I. Fechin", in: Essays on the Histoiy of Russian Portraiture of the Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries, Moscow,
1964;
and an introduction to the book Nikolai Ivanovich Fechin: Documents. Letters.
Reminiscences of the Artist. Compiled by G. A. Mogilnikova, introduction by
G. S.
Kaplanova,
Leningrad,
1975
(both in Russian).
447
one-man shows in Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev and Kirov in
1963-65.
The exhibitions practical¬
ly meant a rediscovery of this prominent master. G. A. Mogilnikova succeeded in gathering
reminiscences of Fechin's pupils that became the basis for the creation of a volume of docu¬
mentary materials that became the principal source
ofinformation
about the artist, on the one
hand, and laid the foundation of an important archive, on the other. One should also not for¬
get about A. I. Novitsky, who took an active part in the formation of the quite sizeable collec¬
tion of Fechin's works in the Kazan Museum and about E. P. Kliuchevskaya, who published
a catalogue of Fechin's works created before
1923.
Among publications devoted to Fechin in the USA it is possible to single out the catalogue of
his one-man show held in New York in
1961,
compiled by Harold MacCracken's and reproduc¬
ing all works from the collection of the artist's family, a monograph published by Mary
N.
Balk in
1975,
as well as publications by I. Einsworth, D. Crackel, V. D. Coke, and G. Gellico.
The most important role in creating a nearly mythological image of the artist, in preserving
and popularizing Fechin's art in America, however, belonged to his daughter, Eya Fechin-
Brenham, who totally devoted the second half of her life to her father. Not a single publication
on Fechin passed without her participation; she accumulated a sizeable archive and, what was
most important, managed to include Fechin's house at Taos, built by the artist himself and
being one of his masterpieces, into the Inventory of Historical Landmarks of the United States.
Therefore, even after Eya's death in October
2002
the mansion could not be sold just as a usual
house. An indispensable condition was to preserve its appearance intact. At the present the
Fechin House belongs to the private Taos Museum of Art and functions as a memorial (even
if not devoted to Fechin alone) and the interior as a whole has been preserved.
Art was for Fechin the meaning and mode of his living, it was literally everything for him.
One can observe a predestination in the history of the four-year child's miraculous cure from
meningitis after he had touched the icon of the Mother of God of Tikhvin (the icon is not
only a sacral image, but a work of art, too), in the fact that his father owned a workshop where
iconostases
for Kazan and rural churches were carved and gilded, and that precisely at the
time of his graduation from the secondary school in Kazan an art school was opened there
—
otherwise a boy from a poor family would be unable to receive initial training in art. The boy's
poor health that led him to a restraint of his feelings and brought a permission not to learn
general subjects allowed him to concentrate on art alone. The most important formative
influences in Fechin's career as an artist were associated with his student years at the
Academy of Arts, where he mastered the academic principles and, most notably, the refined
culture of drawing. Of great importance was his training there in Ilya Repin's workshop,
where he completely mastered the Itinerants' traditions, the fundamentals of which had been
learned earlier, during his studies in Kazan. Fechin also acquired from Repin some notions
about Impressionism. No less important for his development was the artistic atmosphere of
St Petersburg of the 1900s. Fechin absorbed numerous creative ideas transforming them into
his own concepts. That became apparent only when Repin abandoned the Academy
(1907)
and Fechin, left alone, began to work in the manner of his own. His works of
1908 —
Lady in Lilac, now in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg, and The
Cheremis
Wedding
(Bearing Away the Bride), National Cowboy
&
Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City,
USA
—
convincingly revealed his progress. These works also show that Fechin evolved his
distinctive artistic idiom and subject matter, which would undergo no radical changes
448
(in America, especially in Taos, he would change his color scheme, but his creative method
would fundamentally remain the same).
Fechin's individual artistic idiom took shape at the crossing of numerous stylistic trends
of the early twentieth century. It combines the academic background that can be easily dis¬
cerned, realistic features drawn from the Itinerants, Impressionistic elements and obvious
Expressionistic tendencies, which are nevertheless all blended together into an integral whole
that is by no means equal to the sum of its components. Nikolai Fechin was a product of the
Art
Nouveau
age (in the meaning formulated in publications by the art scholar Dmitry
Sarabyanov). Art
Nouveau
can be defined as a transitive style of an intermediary period when
the creative method was changing from the art of the second half of the nineteenth century, with
its firm positivistic belief in the possibility to get to know the essence of the visible world by
recording and summing up one's impressions, to the creative method of twentieth-century art
that found is necessary to transform reality and to create a new realm for the sake of an insight
into the essence of things. Since the Renaissance classical art had been based on a conviction
that ".reason does not possess the truth that cannot be discerned by the eye; our eyes do not
see the things inaccessible to the understanding of reason. any phenomenon of reality imme¬
diately appears as an absolute unity of form and content." 2 At the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries artists had already abandoned such understanding. A sense of spontaneity
of the stream of life gave birth to a feeling that the phenomenal and the essential do not always
coincide and one's approach to the truth occurs on an intuitive rather than rational level.
The transitional character of Art
Nouveau
was clearly reflected in its dualism of the real and
the conventional. Art
Nouveau
artists did not paint from life, but at the same time they often
transformed real images for the sake of revealing their essence. The main objective was Beauty
that was deified and grew all-embracing, encompassing all spheres of the universe, including
disharmonious, repulsive phenomena. Strenuous efforts to capture the beautiful largely deter¬
mined a choice of subject matter
—
for example, in portraiture, the Art
Nouveau
age revealed
itself in subtle female images rather than in male portraits of socially remarkable personalities
characteristic of the Itinerants with their civic pathos. The aesthetic aspirations of the period
were largely revealed in the heightened attention to artistic form, to the independent value of
the play of colour combinations or whimsically curving lines that gradually began to lead the
life of their own alongside the representation itself. The mimetic nature of art was not denied,
but now objects for imitation became not just natural forms, but the organic character of their
being, the dynamism of permanent development.
Very often the chromatic dough, from which Fechin models his images, is endowed with an
independent motion; it is growing, living, pulsating. The picture is regarded as a single organ¬
ism, with all its parts emerging simultaneously. The whole carries concentrated aesthetic infor¬
mation, as does any part of the composition. The creative process is important in itself, it is
open, unfolding before our eyes and is more important than the result
—
that is why Fechin did
not finish his works so often.
Fechin's main subject was man. He also painted landscapes and still
Ufes.
These kinds
of painting grew especially prominent in his work in America. Nevertheless man was invariably
the most important subject for Fechin, be it in the form of a multi-figure genre composition,
2
G. K. Argan, History of Italian Art, In
2
Vols,
Moscow,
1990.
Vol.
1,
p.
255.
449
a portrait or a nude, in painting or in drawing. Man was interesting for him in all manifesta¬
tions. Fechin had spent his childhood in travels from one village to other and the wild or, rather,
primordial forms and notions of human living in Russian villages
—
those of the
Cheremis
(Maris),
Tatars, Chuvashes, and Russians
—
have forever remained an inalienable part of his
life experience. On the other hand, the years spent in St Petersburg introduced him to the circle
of artistic elite, quite a different milieu
—
and that was another important experience.
These human hypostases
—
the creation of nature and the creation of culture
—
regularly
occur in Fechin's works. The elemental, emotional, risky outbursts of energy in mass-scale
country rituals and feasts, with their roots going down to the primordial and pagan times, rav¬
ish and frighten us in his genre compositions
(Cheremis
Wedding, Cabbage
Fest,
Shower). The
artist exaggerated to a grotesque the images of drunken peasants, engrossed in careless revelry
of a feast. The sound, vital quality of people living at one with nature, is combined with an
opportunity of spontaneous outbursts of usually suppressed, but irresistible and particularly
ruinous passions. And the juxtaposition of these polar standpoints enables the artist to seek for
an answer to the essential question of the time "Who are we"?" not in terms of social prob¬
lems as the Itinerant artists did, but on a deeper level
—
in the specific features of national
Being, rather than just in down-to-earth living. These Fechin's works, along with Peasant
Women by Fiodor
Maliavin,
laid the foundations for the "expressive-grotesque trend of
Russian art" (G. Pospelov) that would manifest itself in the Raseya series by Boris Grigoryev
and in Pavel Filonov's works devoted to peasant life. The theme of "natural man" would reap¬
pear in Fechin's work at Taos, but this time as portrait types of the Indians rather than as a
usual genre composition. They would contain no exaggeration or grotesque, no tormenting
questions and his admiration would not be darkened by an admixture of terror and hopeless¬
ness. He would feast his eyes upon the powerful energy coming from the soil, the physical
sense of the rhythm of drumming, the pulsation of blood due to the accelerating tempo of a
dance. He would not conceal his delight at the inherent unity of this people's life with the life
of canyons, rocks, mountains overgrown with forests, and the fascinating combination of
snow-covered peaks and bright sunshine (Corn Dancer, private collection,
USA; Pietro,
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, USA). Admittedly, the
artist still retained some distance from what he depicted.
Whatever great was the significance of multi-figure compositions in Fechin's
oeuvre,
he is more
famous as a portraitist. His main characters were usually people close to him, especially those asso¬
ciated with creative work in some way. He portrayed the charming young pupils of the Kazan Art
School (Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, Masha Medvedeva,
Tamara
Popova,
Masha Bystrova, Natasha
Podbelskaya, and Alexandra Belkovich, his future wife); his friends, first at the Academy of Arts
(Sergei Ovsiannikov and
Konstantin
Lepilov) and then his colleagues at the Kazan Art School (the
architect
Piotr
Abramychev and the artists Grigory Medvedev and Valentin Shcherbakov). Fechin
practically did not paint commissioned portraits. Few people in Kazan could appreciate his free
manner of painting
—
smooth brushwork was then more popular, as it is, in fact, today, too. For
instance, once Professor Lev Fofanov rejected his portrait commissioned from the artist, although
that proved to be one of Fechin's masterpieces. In America, Fechin also preferred to paint creative
people. In New York, he portrayed Russian emigrants and American Bohemians: the theatrical
director Nikolai Evreinov, the ballerinas
Vera Fokina
and
Ariadna Mikeshina,
the singer
E. Khatayeva, the famous master of the avant-garde David Burliuk, the American cinema star
450
Lilian Gish, the writer
Willa
Carter, and Walter Clark, the founder of the Grand Hotel Central
Gallery. In Taos, he depicted artists, writers, and patrons of the Taos artistic colony D. Brett, Frieda
Lawrence, Mable Dodge Luhan, etc. He preferred to represent those who created culture or were
connected with it. His manner in portraiture was often affected, but he very rarely turned to
grotesque. Changing plus for minus, as it were, sometimes he added a certain degree of idealiza¬
tion in his portraits. But that was not a desire to prettify the appearance in keeping with some given
example. For Fechin, beauty coincided with individuality and he never corrected natural features.
He sought for ideal qualities in real people, capturing the moment or state when all the best fea¬
tures of his sitter were revealed. Fechin's portraits show one more of his favourite ideas
—
a notion
about a thin border dividing the beautiful and the ugly, and their close interrelationship. He fol¬
lowed the Russian tradition of correlating beauty with the spiritual, inner content of one's person¬
ality. Nadezhda Sapozhnikova's somewhat crude face appears beautiful thanks to the integrity of
the female image suggesting a personality with a keen feel for beauty and living for its sake. By the
way, Fechin could not paint ideally beautiful faces (befitting the common standards)
—
such
portraits immediately turned ostentatious and prettified.
Fechin did not suffer from a shortage of art collectors and patrons. In Kazan, of great
importance was his friendship with Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, who studied in the art school
under him and at the same time taught him much about things that were outside the sphere
of art. She purchased his works paying good money, but no less important was the atmosphere
of creativity that reigned her own studio, where Fechin often worked side by side with pupils of
the Kazan Art School. The three portraits and two studies of Sapozhnikova done by him wit¬
ness to their friendship. In America, he was lucky to be noticed by Mable Dodge Luhan, not
only a rich woman, but a remarkable personality. After she had settled in Taos the small local
colony of artists turned into an international phenomenon, the most significant artistic colony
in the United States of the
1920s
to
1940s.
Fechin was fond of portraying children. It is difficult to avoid sentimentality in children's
portraiture, to regard the child not as a future grown up person, but to emphasize the self-con¬
tained value of the still unshaped character, to convey the specific fluent quality of childish
movements and the intrinsic vivacity of childish glances. In addition one has to work quickly,
because it is not easy to make a child sit for a portrait. All that explains why there are so few
artists capable to paint children. Fechin was certainly a great master of children's portraiture.
Little Katya, Misha Bardukov, a peasant girl (private collection, USA) or the village fool
Salavatulla —they are all just children for him. His indubitable masterpiece is the portrait of
Varia Adoratskaya
(1914).
That was his challenge to the sick time fraught with wars, violence,
and social catastrophes, his answer where to seek for support and outcome. The clarity of the
young girl's look, the inner balance predetermined by the natural purity of her soul, all that
brings forth a happy sensation of harmony, so rare in our lives, but so longed for.
Fechin's turbulent temperament, his emotionality and a sincere depth of his feelings,
that he never revealed (all witnesses mentioned his reticent manners), were manifested most
of all in his portraits of the people close to him
—
his father, his wife Alexandra and their
daughter Eya. The numerous portraits of his father, mentioned as outstanding works by his
contemporaries, have not reached us; some of them can be found in the United States.
We are lucky that the portrait of his father painted in
1918
is now in the collection of the
Fine Arts Museum of the Republic of
Tatarstan.
This is a sort of formal portrait devoted to
451
a craftsman, with the fur coat, which is not justified in the interior from the point of view of
verisimilitude, playing the same distinctive role as regalia in portraits of aristocrats, power¬
fully emphasizes the sitter's social position, while the face expresses all the facets of his
complex and profound character.
It is just impossible to enumerate all Fechin's portraits of his wife Alexandra. He depicted
her in the open air, in compositional portraits-pictures, in rapid studies and in stylized like¬
nesses. He portrayed her as a Renaissance woman and a Russian peasant, an austere American
business lady and a careful mother, a passionate luxurious beauty and a common housewife
with an imprint of anxiety on her face. Most remarkable are Alexandra's portraits with her
small daughter produced in
1923 —
Mother and Daughter and his outstanding canvas Summer
(both are in American private collections). They record the great moments of his life and vivid¬
ly convey his happiness. Although their real family life was never smooth, a request to divorce
turned out to be a blow for him
.
He lost everything
—
his beloved woman, his Taos, where they
spent the most fruitful and happy years in America, he lost the house built by his own hands for
six years. Yet he did not lose his affection for Alexandra for a long time as his letters sent to her
after their divorce convincingly suggest
—
they express tenderness, pain, love and anguish, but
there is almost no reproaches or a desire to wound, to hurt in them.
Fechin maintained contacts with the world mainly through his daughter Eya. The artist's
fatherly love and tenderness enabled him to create a loot of her images full of amazing harmo¬
ny
—
from
plein-air
studies of his Kazan period to the American masterpieces: Eya with a
Muscat Melon
(1923) —
a paraphrase of his early portrait of
Varia Adoratskaya,
where more
complex painterly tasks were brilliantly solved; Eya after a Bath (Woolaroc Museum,
Oklahoma, USA), a work that seems to shine from within; Eya in a Peasant Shirt (private
collection, Taos, USA), a canvas producing an impression that it has just been painted thanks
to its unusual freshness; Eya (Taos Art Museum, USA), devoid of Fechin's usual
impasto,
sweeping brushwork, but remarkable for its barely perceptible nuances, chromatic variations,
and delicate shades of feelings.
A superb painter, Fechin was a brilliant master of drawing, too. His studies of naked models are
close to academic canons and yet distant from them. He depicts the human body isolated from its
real setting, with light and shade modeling
—
principal conditions seem to be fulfilled, but his choice
of models, too earthly and solidly built, his foreshortenings
—
sharp, elaborate, and often unex¬
pected, as well as his emphasis on the expressiveness of movements
—
all these features discard the
majestic calm of academic drawing. Somewhat corpulent female bodies, often even depicted with¬
out their heads, similarly to "Paleolithic Venuses", become light and elegant. Fechin did not seek to
render the material quality of form as much as he strove to convey its vibrant life. The artist explored
his model so thoroughly that it was not necessary for him to pay much attention to minute details.
The lightly yet firmly set lines, with their varying thickness, intensity, and form combined in an
absolutely free way, not only faithfully render the model's volume and individual structure, but also
fill the sheet with movement. In some drawings the play of lines and tints seems to grow predomi¬
nant. The artist likes to "lose", to dissolve the line, so as then to regain it. The line gets alive, self-
developing and organic. The modeling of form that creates a tender light and shade effect by the
slightest touches of charcoal, almost by dots, dematerializes and spiritualizes the flesh. The
light and shade treatment is not limited to the outline of the body, but scatters beyond its limits like
grains creating the light and air medium and promoting the plastic integrity of the sheet. The artist
452
experiments with light and shade effects. The form can emerge from uncertainty, as it were, grow¬
ing up in tone, but still not reaching completion. Fechin cultivated the manner of "incompleteness
in completion", hence a sense of vibration
—
the form is "breathing", pulsating. In this way he
attains the impression that the drawing is being created before our eyes. The linear openwork and
the representation exist in parallel and simultaneously combine into an integrated whole. Fechin
enjoyed the creative process and admired the perfection of Creation
—
there were no irregular or
unsightly bodies for him because he perceived them as a spiritualized matter.
Portraiture occupies a prominent place in Fechin's graphic legacy, like in his painting.
There are few portraits done in his Kazan period, but they are striking for their spiritual har¬
mony: e.g. Portrait of
Tamara
Popova,
private collection
(?),
St. Petersburg, or Portrait of a
Girl (Sidorchenko?), Regional Art Museum, Samara. These works make us remember draw¬
ings by masters of the Italian Renaissance. Fechin enjoyed a period of flowering in portrait
drawing in America. His highest achievements are portraits of Indians, artists of the Taos
artistic colony, and of
Balinese
people. His Californian period was most fruitful in terms of
quantity. But his portraits from this period are somewhat monotonous in treatment
—
heads
taken at close range, always captured in the same optimistic mood, and appearing to be too
smooth. Nevertheless even his most salon-like portraits strike us by their consummate exe¬
cution. Fechin's manner becomes keenly subtle and he employs different devices in each of
them. These portraits are technically irreproachable, although they have lost some unfath¬
omable inner quality
—
an important string seems to have been broken and the artist would
not allow his emotions to burst out any more.
Painting, graphic art, and teaching activity were Fechin's professional occupations. As for
sculpture, decorative and applied art, metalwork and ceramics, he practiced them merely for his
pleasure. But they also represent an important facet in the history of Russian art. Fechin devel¬
oped the decorative forms found by artists at Abramtsevo and Talashkino and combining the tra¬
ditions of Russian folk art with aesthetics of Art
Nouveau.
He created carved furniture for
his Kazan studio and some pieces for the studio of Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, which are known
to us from rare surviving examples and photographs. One can form a fairly good idea of Fechin
as a master of woodcarving from his mansion in Taos, where he created himself the principal
details of the interior (pillars, doors, and rafters), the entire furniture, as well as minor household
objects
—
such as bread containers and vases. The interior
décor
of the house makes up a fine
ensemble perfectly matching its architecture. Fechin's mansion in Taos is the latest example of
Russian Art
Nouveau
that emerged at the whim of fate under the hot sun of New Mexico.
Fechin was an artist in the full sense of this word. He never tried to go beyond the sphere
of artistic problems, to work out any special philosophic system or to seek for global gene¬
ralizations. He focused on the exploration of form and colour tenaciously capturing real and
particular objects, seeking for an insight into the nature of things rather than for a width of
perception. But microcosm is as limitless as macrocosm. And such depths that cannot be cog¬
nized otherwise opened up to him. |
| any_adam_object | 1 |
| any_adam_object_boolean | 1 |
| author | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 |
| author_GND | (DE-588)132349132 (DE-588)132740567 |
| author_facet | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 |
| author_role | aut |
| author_sort | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 |
| author_variant | n i f ni nif |
| building | Verbundindex |
| bvnumber | BV023084331 |
| ctrlnum | (OCoLC)237205178 (DE-599)BVBBV023084331 |
| format | Book |
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| genre | (DE-588)4145395-5 Bildband gnd-content |
| genre_facet | Bildband |
| id | DE-604.BV023084331 |
| illustrated | Illustrated |
| index_date | 2024-07-02T19:38:33Z |
| indexdate | 2024-07-20T04:30:50Z |
| institution | BVB |
| isbn | 9785342001052 |
| language | Russian |
| oai_aleph_id | oai:aleph.bib-bvb.de:BVB01-016287302 |
| oclc_num | 237205178 |
| open_access_boolean | |
| owner | DE-12 |
| owner_facet | DE-12 |
| physical | 478 S. überw. Ill. |
| publishDate | 2007 |
| publishDateSearch | 2007 |
| publishDateSort | 2007 |
| publisher | "Zolotoj Vek" |
| record_format | marc |
| series2 | Russkie chudožniki : XX vek |
| spelling | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 Verfasser (DE-588)132349132 aut Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin G. P. Tuluzakova Nikolai Fechin Sankt-Peterburg "Zolotoj Vek" 2007 478 S. überw. Ill. txt rdacontent sti rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Russkie chudožniki : XX vek In kyrill. Schr., russ. - Zsfassung in engl. Sprache Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 (DE-588)132349132 gnd rswk-swf (DE-588)4145395-5 Bildband gnd-content Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 (DE-588)132349132 p DE-604 Tuluzakova, Galina P. 1960- Sonstige (DE-588)132740567 oth Digitalisierung BSBMuenchen application/pdf http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016287302&sequence=000003&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA Inhaltsverzeichnis Digitalisierung BSB Muenchen application/pdf http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016287302&sequence=000004&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA Abstract |
| spellingShingle | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 (DE-588)132349132 gnd |
| subject_GND | (DE-588)132349132 (DE-588)4145395-5 |
| title | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |
| title_alt | Nikolai Fechin |
| title_auth | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |
| title_exact_search | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |
| title_exact_search_txtP | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |
| title_full | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin G. P. Tuluzakova |
| title_fullStr | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin G. P. Tuluzakova |
| title_full_unstemmed | Nikolaj Fešin [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin G. P. Tuluzakova |
| title_short | Nikolaj Fešin |
| title_sort | nikolaj fesin 1881 1955 alʹbom nikolai fechin |
| title_sub | [1881 - 1955 ; alʹbom] = Nikolai Fechin |
| topic | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 (DE-588)132349132 gnd |
| topic_facet | Fešin, Nikolaj Ivanovič 1881-1955 Bildband |
| url | http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016287302&sequence=000003&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016287302&sequence=000004&line_number=0002&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT fesinnikolajivanovic nikolajfesin18811955alʹbomnikolaifechin AT tuluzakovagalinap nikolajfesin18811955alʹbomnikolaifechin AT fesinnikolajivanovic nikolaifechin AT tuluzakovagalinap nikolaifechin |