Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev: [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev
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| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | Russian |
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Sankt-Peterburg
"Zolotoj Vek" [u.a.]
2007
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| Online-Zugang: | Abstract |
| Beschreibung: | In kyrill. Schr., russ. - Zsfassung in engl. Sprache |
| Beschreibung: | 478 S. überw. Ill. |
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Datensatz im Suchindex
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| adam_text | SUMMARY
The name of Boris Kustodiev
(1878-1927)
is associated with the sunny and variegated world of
the Russian province as it appeared in his numerous paintings, drawings and engravings. His
canvases Shrovetide
(1916),
Merchant s Wife
(1915),
Belle
(1915),
Show-Booths
(1917)
and
Merchant s Wife at Tea
(1918)
became classics of Russian art and an integral part of the Russian
people s national memory. A brilliant graduate of the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg
(1896-1903),
Kustodiev studied under the great painter Ilya Repin and was his assistant in the
creation of the group portrait The Ceremonial Session of the State Council
(1901-03).
His por¬
trait of Ivan Biiibin, painted within the walls of the Academy, won the young artist the Gold
Medal at the international Exhibition in Munich
(1901).
A prominent portraitist of his age,
Kustodiev created a whole gallery of images of children, women and men representing all social
groups of Russian society in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Among them are portraits
of Emperor Nicholas II, the Chairman of the State Council Count Dmitry Solsky, the engraver
Vasily
Mathé,
the artist s wife Yulia Kustodieva, the singers Ivan Yershov and Fiodor Chaliapin,
the actor and stage director Vasily Luzhsky, the writers Fiodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, the
poet Maximilian Voloshin and the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, as well as Group Portrait of
the Members of the World of Art Union. In
1913
Kustodiev s Self-Portrait was acquired by the
Uffizi
Gallery in Florence. Besides painting and graphic art, Kustodiev distinguished himself
as a talented sculptor, was active in the fields of poster and book graphics and worked much for
the theatre. Kustodiev s works enjoyed success at exhibitions in Russia and abroad. In addition
to Russian art collections, they can be found in museums of Vienna, Cambridge, Kiev,
Malmö,
Minsk, Odessa, Riga and Florence as well as in private collections of France and America and
of the Emperor of Japan.
The development of Kustodiev s art and the highly individual artistic system he evolved
reflect general tendencies in the evolution of Russian art in the first quarter of the twentieth
century.
Boris Kustodiev was born on
7
March
1878
in Astrakhan. His parents were Yekaterina
(née
Smirnova,
1854-1919)
and Mikhail
(1841-1879)
Kustodiev. His father, Candidate of
Theology, taught literature and logic at the Astrakhan Theological Seminary. He died in a year
after the future artist s birth leaving his 25-year-old wife alone with two daughters, Alexandra
(1871—1941)
and Yekaterina
(1873-1941),
and two sons, Boris
(1878-1927)
and Mikhail
(1879-1942).
Their uncle,
Stepán Nikolsky,
an official of the Department of Railway Accounts
of the State Control in St Petersburg, became their custodian.
At five Boris began to draw and went to an opera performance for the first time. The
appearance of Astrakhan, a rich ancient merchant city in the estuary of the Volga and a meet¬
ing point of routes from Europe and Asia, the Caucasus and Persia, with the colourful every¬
day life of its dwellers, yielded rich aesthetic impressions to the future artist. An important
event in the life of Kustodiev and his native city was an arrival in
1887
of the Travelling
Exhibition of the Wanderers Art Society that included many famous works, such as Boyarynia
Morozova by Vasily Surikov, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery by Vasily Poienov, por-
440
traits
by Ivan Kramskoy and llya Repin, and landscapes by ivan Shishkin. Between
1887
and
І
896
Boris Kustodiev studied at the Theological School followed by the Theological
Seminary and continued to practice drawing. After a visit to St Petersburg in the summer of
1893
and a tour of the Hermitage where he was struck by works of Rembrandt, Rubens and
Van Dyck, his engagement in art grew more intense and purposeful. Between
1893
and
1896
he took drawing lessons from the local professional artist Pavel
Vlasov.
His success was so
remarkable that in
1896
he easily entered the Higher Art School attached to the St Petersburg
Academy of Arts. At the Scandinavian Exhibition arranged by Sergei
Diaghilev in
St
Petersburg
(1897)
the beginning artist was amazed by the highly expressive paintings of the
famous Swedish artist Anders
Zorn.
His influence upon Kustodiev s painting would reveal
itself in the early 1900s, but at that time Kustodiev, still a student of the Academy, did not
allow his brushwork to be either sweeping or florid; he drew much in his classes and readily
created compositions. His sketches devoted to Early Russia and bearing an imprint of the
then well-known Neo-Romantic painters Andrei Riabushkin and Mikhail Nesterov never
failed to won awards of the Academy s Council. In
1898
Kustodiev was transferred to llya
Repin s personal studio.
The greatest Russian artist and his pupil met at an important phase in the history of nation¬
al culture
—
the turn of the century saw a notable flowering in the fields of philosophy, litera¬
ture, music, the theatre and all kinds of fine arts. That was the time of Anton Chekhov and
later Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov
and Sergei Rakhmanmov, Fiodor Chaliapin and
the energetic activity of the art patrons
Sawa
Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the
newly founded Moscow Art Theatre headed by
Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko, the pioneering magazine World of Art edited by Sergei
Diaghilev
and
Alexander Benois. Students of the Academy witnessed the heated debate of the World of Art
with Vladimir Stasov, a prominent art and music critic of the previous age; their tutor llya Repin
at first got close to the editorial board of the magazine but then scandalously broke with it. The
new Art
Nouveau
style was gaining ground in architecture and applied art, and Symbolism
came to the forefront in literature, the theatre and fine arts. The young students of the Academy
became interested visitors to exhibitions of the World of Art Society where they could see works
by Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel,
Konstantin
Korovin,
Isaac
Levitán
and other Russian artists
of the period remarkable for their innovatory quests in art.
Kustodiev reached creative maturity and earned public and professional recognition at an
early age. In the first years of the twentieth century he produced a series of painted and graph¬
ic portraits of his fellow students at the Academy and of some prominent figures in Russian cul¬
ture
-
the draughtsman Ivan Bilibin, the sculptor Dmitry Stelletsky, the engraver Vasily
Matné
and the writer Daniil Mordovtsev. Kustodiev s portraits are notable for a keen insight and care¬
ful attitude to the individual features of his sitters. Every time the specific features of his sitter s
character and appearance brought into being a new, original artistic solution. Thus, the por¬
trayal of the refined and stylish Bilibin, who had become well-known by that time for his illus¬
trations to Russian fairy-tales, is marked by the elegant manner of sweeping, generalized brush-
work, a restrained and elegant gamut of silvery-black shades highlighted by a red spot in the
buttonhole of his frock-coat.
441
Kustodiev s
successful work in the field of portraiture accounts for Repin s choice of him as
an assistant in the large-scale project of those years -the group portrait The Ceremonial Session
of the State Council
(1901-03).
Within a brief period the young artist produced twenty-seven
portraits and painted, under the guidance of his tutor, about a third of the giant canvas. He
revealed himself as a mature painter keenly feeling the characters of his high-ranking models
and the specific features of commissioned formal portraiture, as an artist capable to work in a
team . His portrait studies, sustained in sonorous and majestic gamut of black-red-golden
tones, were painted, like Repin s analogous works, in a sweeping generalized manner.
Diaghilev
displayed the best of these works at the prestigious Exhibition of Russian portraits held in the
Tauride Palace
(1905).
The year
1903
was an important period in the young artist s life. Kustodiev completed his
work on the group portrait. He married Yulia Proshinskaya
(1880-1942)
and she gave him a
son, Kirill
(1903-1971).
In the summer, on the estate Vysokovo near Kostroma, he painted one
of the most poetic portraits of his wife, soon to be acquired by the Russian Museum in St
Petersburg. In the autumn the first monographic essay about the artist (written by Nikolai
Breshko-Breshkovsky) was published. For his diploma painting Market in the Village he
received the Large Gold Medal and a grant for going abroad.
The painter stayed abroad merely for five months: he studied the collections of the Louvre,
attended exhibitions of modern art and the studio of
Rene Ménard in
Paris and copied canvas¬
es by Velazquez at the
Prado
in Madrid. Rich artistic impressions evoked in him a thirst for
independent creative work and he returned to his homeland. His canvas Morning, recording a
scene of Yulia s bathing their first son and permeated with light and happiness, was a recollec¬
tion of their life in Paris. This painting also soon became the property of the Russian Museum.
The period from
1904
to
І910
was for Kustodiev the time of looking for himself , of work¬
ing out his individual style. His work of those years are marked by their genre variety
-
he paint¬
ed portraits, including numerous commissions (which was a sign of his recognition), and chil¬
dren s likenesses, his first pictures about Russian provincial life, worked in the fields of book
illustration and sculpture.
1905
and
1906
were the years of his intense work in the field of polit¬
ical graphics. He was experimenting much to attain a desirable effect, often changing canvas for
cardboard and oils for gouache, pastel or tempera.
Kustodiev belonged to those St Petersburg artists, members of the World of Art group and
of the New Society, who worked much for the satirical magazines Zhupel (Bugaboo) and
Adskaya pochta (Devil s
Магђ
during the revolution of
1905-07.
He produced a series of cari¬
catures Olympus, depicting the rulers of Russia
(Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, Sergei
Witte)
and
Introduction
(1905),
one of the most expressive drawings of those days that featured the image
of death strangling revolutionary Moscow after the defeat of the December uprising. No less
impressive was his drawing After the Dispersal of a Demonstration
((1906)
from the Calendar of
the Russian Revolution destroyed by the police. The motif of workers demonstrations appeared
several times in Kustodiev s drawings executed in coloured crayons and marked by the features
of Art
Nouveau, decorativeness
and energy of form.
in the same year Kustodiev brilliantly executed the canvas Church Parade of the Life-Guards
Finland Regiment on
Ì2
December
1905
representing the Emperor and Tsesarevich Alexis, the
442
heir, as well as the top officials of the army and state. Simultaneously he produced formal por¬
traits of major state officials
-
Peter Bark and Count Dmitry Solsky, Chairman of the State
Council, the old aristocrats Alexandra
Romanova
and Prince Ivan Saltykov. Endowed with
great expressiveness and subtle psychological quality are his portraits of the provincial clergy
-
Nun, Portrait of a Priest and a Deacon; portraits of members of the creative intelligentsia
—
the
writers Fiodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, whose books educated Russians avidly read in
those years, the singer Ivan Yershov, who won fame in Wagner s repertory,
Janko
Lavrin, a man
of letters from Slovenia, who after
1917
would settle in England and become a prominent
Slavicist scholar and an author of works on Pushkin and Gogol. At the same time Kustodiev s
likenesses of Alexandra
Romanova
and
René
Notgaft earned him the reputation of a master of
elegant female portraits. In the field of sculpture, in which Kustodiev seriously worked from the
late 1900s, he created penetrative portraits of the Romantic singer Ivan Yershov, the writer
Alexei Remizov absorbed in dramatic feelings and the graphic artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky lis¬
tening, as it were, to the quiet rhythms of life.
Kustodiev often portrayed members of his family, lovingly capturing them in different situ¬
ations
—
e.g. In a Room or On the Terrace. With warmth and tenderness he recorded the features
of his wife Yulia changing over the years, the physical and mental growth of their children Kirill
and
Irina (1905-
Ï9S1)
-
Portrait of
Irina
Kustodieva with a Toy, Portrait of Yulia Kustodieva with
Her Daughter
Irina,
Children in Masquerade Costumes.
ín 1906
Kustodiev stepped on the path of stylistic experiments, having discovered for him¬
self, simultaneously with the pioneers of the Russian avant-garde, the treasures of folk culture
and the provincial world as a wholesome aesthetic phenomenon. For Mikhail Larionov and
Natalia Goncharova an acquaintance with naive art of the lubok (popular prints), hand-
painted shop signs and trays served as an impetus for the re-evaluation of values, for a revolt
against traditions and aesthetics of the school and for experiments aimed at finding a new
artistic idiom. For Kustodiev, who began his art studies with icon-painting in the theological
seminary and later worked under the great Repin and copied pictures by Rembrandt and
Velazquez, that was a process of innovating the imagery of his painting. He evolved a distinct
manner of his own, natural for him, by combining the traditions of low culture of the lubok,
shop signs and carved toys with professional art. The natural character of this innovation was
largely due to the artist s sincerity and his preference to a definite circle of themes and motifs.
The world of the Russian village
-
a simple and sound mode of life, untouched by ills of con¬
temporary urban civilization, a strict taste, an interest of rural dwellers in vivid colourful pat¬
terns of their clothes and a free fantasy in the decor of their houses and objects of everyday use
-
exerted an important influence upon the artist s style enriching his quests. Kustodiev s spe¬
cial approach to the rural world can be vividly illustrated by versions of his paintings Fair
( 1906
and
1908)
and Feast in a Village
(1907
and
1910),
in which his infatuation with the lubok is
whimsically combined with Art
Nouveau
stylistic devices. The influence of folk art is clearly
sensed in a certain idealization of the images and an absence of melancholy.
In
1905
the artist built a studio-house,
Terem,
near the town of Kineshma in Tver Province.
At the end of the 1900s Kustodiev translated his impressions of Kostroma and remote provin¬
cial towns, together with the indelible reminiscences of his Astrakhan childhood, into a series
443
of pictures featuring Russian, provincial life. He started the series with the canvases Province and
Merry-Making on the Volga created from life in the town of Romanov-Borisoglebsk on the
Volga. After them, in
1910,
he painted the carefully composed canvas Merry-Making, an exam¬
ple of Kustodiev s mature manner with its organic blend of life impressions and conventional
motifs,
plein-air
quality and stylization in the lubok manner.
Kustodiev worked much in book graphics creating illustrations to the stories The Carriage
and The Overcoatby Gogol, to poems by Nikolai Nekrasov and short stories by Ivan Turgenev
and Leo Tolstoy.
Kustodiev s art became widely known. There appeared reviews of his work written by the
poet Alexander
Blok,
the critics Alexander Benois and Anatoly Lunacharsky; the Academy of
Arts grants him the title of Academician of Painting
(1909).
Kustodiev s talent reached maturity between
1911
and
1917.
He linked his lot with the
World of Art Society revived in the autumn of
1910
and contributed many works to its exhibi¬
tions. In
1911
it was discovered that the artist had
agrave
disease of the spinal cord and his fur¬
ther life passed in a permanent struggle with the mortal illness. From
1916
to the end of his days
he was bound to an invalid chair. Owing to a succession of operations Kustodiev could not work
for months, but it was in this period that he created his most significant, classical works. In that
period Kustodiev was especially successful in the fields of easel painting and graphic art; his
work for the theatre also began. His essays in sculpture, especially intense in
1911
(work on the
busts of Nicholas II) were cut short by his illness.
At the beginning of the
1910s
Kustodiev turned for a while to the sphere of monumental
painting
-
he created an impressive, energetic panel Peter the Great for the Peter the Great
Municipal School in St Petersburg. Together with his colleagues from the World of Art (Benois,
Serebriakova,
Lanceray
and Dobuzhinsky) he worked on sketches for the painted decor of the
interiors of the Kazan Railway Station built by Alexei Shchusev in Moscow, but the plans were
not realized owing to the outbreak of the October Revolution in
1917.
The artist realized himself in the theme of provincial life by creating a distinct
Kustodiev genre
-
a largely conventional and ideal, self-dependent realm, with an unusu¬
al mode of life, with the aesthetics of its own, the Russia of his own . This sunlit land,
devoid of sorrow, dull days or the autumnal time of bad roads, devoid of poor people earning
their living by hard toil or unlucky people, devoid of everyday routine and social turmoil and
limited by typically Russian lands
—
the villages and towns of the Middle Russian Plain and
the Volga Basin. Life has arrested there back in the middle of the nineteenth century; archi¬
tecture whimsically combines the seventeenth century and the Empire style and a respect to
traditions is mixed in people s clothing with the newest examples of Parisian fashion. There
is no place to St Petersburg or Moscow in this world. Kustodiev was capable to depict his spe¬
cific Russia endlessly, showing its placid inhabitants of all social estates, mostly merchants,
each of them well known to him, its beauties, its summer and winter festivals in towns and
villages. The entire abundance of subjects had significance for him and he now and again
turned to them never repeating himself in represented details or situations. He endlessly var¬
ied his characters, always marked by individuality and at the same time forming one large
family living in peace and harmony.
444
Synthetic in their nature, Kustodiev s works are permeated with lofty humanism. His
province , good-natured, sincere and just, is invariably an athithesis to St Petersburg and
industrial cities. They are dreams about the patriarchal world, full of harmony and beauty. His
pictures do not admit the existence of poverty and overdrinking, miserliness and greediness,
cmdeness and ignorance. Cleaned from all negative aspects of life, they are kind and poetic,
they do not edify anybody and are full of respect to the spectator and to the depicted life, quiet,
balanced life arranged according to traditions for ages, somewhat narrow-minded and therefore
calling forth the painter s ironic smile. They appreciate health and beauty here and lead a little
showy life, they life bright-coloured, genuine, a bit too fanciful and excessive, mercilessly rein¬
terpreting innovations from the capital. Kustodiev s characters harmoniously exist in the natu¬
ral medium. It is invariably depicted in a bright moment of its being
-
in midday sunlight, on a
hoary day or in an ornate autumn decor. Like in paintings of the Old Masters, the landscapes are
densely, up to the distant horizon, are inhabited with human figures. Common days never occur
here. Most often he depicts festivals or pleasant moments of
dolce far niente
before evening. His
characters are strolling, meeting one another, talking frankly, flirting or enjoying views
—
Merry-
Making
(1910),
Merchant Wives
(1912),
A Bridge: Astrakhan
(19Í8),
Autumn in a Province
(1926).
He depicts large families with many children, loving couples and companies of friends.
He has an interest in the demonstrations of vital energy, he feasts his eyes upon portliness and
grace (Merchant Wives,
1912,
Merchant Wife with Purchases,
1920),
healthy and robust bodies of
bathing women (Bathing,
1912),
admires dashing cabmen (Frosty Day,
1913).
His work was
enriched with series of colourful, dynamic festivals (versions of Shrovetide,
1916,
Show-
Booths,
1917)
remarkable for the monumental features of beauties (Merchant s Wife,
1915;
Belle,
1915).
Kustodiev, who knew about real problems of life, thought it his duty, as his col¬
leagues, members of the World of Art did, to create in the name of man s best features, in the
name of positive ideals. His dynamic festivals , with their joyful and vivid colours, smiling
ruddy faces and diverse movements are perceived as an apotheosis of popular life, as a reflection
of people s eternal dream about beauty and joy of living that is vividly reflected in folklore and
handicrafts. Kustodiev s pictures are permeated with the idea of authentic choir quality about
which dreamed Viacheslav
Ivanov,
a theoretician of Russian Symbolism. Kustodiev s most
crowded festivals are harmonious not only because they are perfectly arranged by the artist,
but also due to the harmony, the idea that all people are members of a single immense family
underlying their concept. Therefore the artist chose panoramic compositions with an elaborate
development of space (versions ofShrovetide,
1916),
perfect, close to a square formats of his can¬
vases (Show-Booths,
1917,
Trinity Day,
1920)
and depicts warm winter days with hoarfrost and
abundant fluffy snow or cool clear days in the middle of summer. He rarely showed real cities or
towns (The Palm-Sunday Bazaar near the Saviour
Gote in
Moscow,
1917)
preferring to general¬
ize his impressions based on the treasures of his visual memory.
His works, marked by monumental forms, are fancifully and wittingly combine the tradi¬
tions of the lubok and lofty, classical art of museums, principally the legacy of his favourite
Venetians of the Renaissance. This can be seen not only in the enrichment of colour range in
his paintings, in the enamel iridescence of their surfaces, but in the very principles of the con¬
struction of compositions
-
now panoramic, now frieze-like and now growing upwards.
445
Sometimes, like with
Pieter
Brueghel, the second and third plans sharply break down enrich¬
ing the composition and making the image more complicated (Merchant s Wife,
1915;
Shrovetide,
1916).
The peculiar feature of Kustodiev s work is that two streams were developing within it, only
sometimes approaching each other
-
a special, Kustodiev s genre in painting and graphic art
-
and traditional kinds of art that also had importance for him. He was successful when turn¬
ing to the landscape and still life and in the sphere of interior scenes he created works that
inherited the best traditions of the
Biedermeier.
By the early
1910s,
he was already a prominent portrait painter, although working next to
him were Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov,
Konstantin
Somov and Leon
Bakst.
In
1911
Kustodiev
created the Tsar s plaster portrait in a military uniform
-
rapidly growing old, but full of digni¬
ty and not devoid of majesty. The works, approved by Nicholas II, served as models for the por¬
trait in bronze that decorated the Russian Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Rome
(1911)
and
a number of marble versions. In
1915
Kustodiev painted a portrait of the Emperor with the
Moscow Kremlin in the background for the Nizhny Novgorod Bank. The portrait became very
popular during the First World War and was spread around the country in numerous colour
reproductions and postcards. The artist produced many mastery representations of Russian
high officials, portraits of the well-known businessman and art collector Nikolai
von
Mekk,
the
art scholar and restorer Alexander Anisimov, the family s friend
Renée
Notgaft, a characteris¬
tic example of his Neo-Classical experiments, his self-portrait for the
Uffizi
Gallery and also a
series of sketchy representations of his fellow artists for the Group Portrait of the World of
Árt
Association.
It was Kustodiev s love for the theatre since his childhood that he shared with the founder
members of the society (Alexander Benois, Leon
Bakst, Mstislav
Dobuzhinsky and Nicholas
Roerich). Kustodiev was friendly with actors of the opera and drama theatres
-
Ivan Yershov
and Vasily Luzhsky, was well acquainted with Vsevolod
Meyerhold, Konstantin
Stanislavsky
and Fiodor Chaliapin. His interest in the festive aspect of the Russian past, his knowledge of
provincial everyday life, an entertaining and somewhat theatrical treatment of subject-matter
inherent to his easel paintings were realized by Kustodiev in his work for Moscow theatres that
started in
1911.
His sketches of costumes and stage sets for plays by Alexander
Ostrovsky
and
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are close to his paintings
ofthat
period and are distinguished by a
picturesque quality and clear-cut characters. It was in his theatrical works that Kustodiev
resorted for the first time to characteristics with grotesque features.
The last decade of Kustodiev s creative career
(1917-27),
marked by the creation of a large
number of life-asserting and full-blooded images in painting and graphic art, successful work in
the spheres of the theatre, poster, book illustration and his turn to the mediums of linocut and
lithography, was also the most tragic period in his life as he was paralyzed and bound to his
invalid s chair. There was written much in the press about him in those years; his first one-man
show was held in
1920
and Vsevolod Voinov s monograph devoted to him appeared in
1925.
Kustodiev enthusiastically met the February Revolution in
1917
and created one of the most
valuable artistic evidences of those days
-
the canvas
27
February
1917,
suffused with sunlight
and, as it were, the rejoicing of all natural forces. He naturally entered the Soviet period con-
446
tributing
to the creation of new culture. In
1918
he participated in the decoration of
Petrograd
for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, designed the decoration of Ruzheinaya
(now Austrian) Square on the
Petrograd
Side. His set of panels was distinguished by the clarity
of forms, precise drawing and vivid, ornate impression of the whole. It agreed with the idea of
universal brotherhood proclaimed by the revolution and served as a model for numerous simi¬
lar projects of the Soviet era.
Kustodiev s canvas The Bolshevik became, alongside works by Arkady Rylov,
Konstantin
Yuon and Sergei Konionkov, a recognized classic of Soviet art. This picture was inspired by the
artist s vivid imagination, his understanding of important contemporary processes. His festive
series of works
—
Celebration on the Field of Mars in Honour of the
2nd
Congress of the Communist
International
(1920),
Celebration on Uritsky Square in Honour of the Opening of the
2nd
Congress
of the Third international
(1921)
and Night Gala on the Neva
(1923) -
reflected the artist s keen
perception of how the once haughty, elegant bourgeois capital of the Empire was trans¬
formed by crowds of rejoicing common people of different races, nationalities and professions.
Perhaps what he saw seemed to him the implementation of a dream of the members of the
World of Art and theoreticians of Symbolism about mass-scale theatricalized performances.
Genetically related to Kustodiev s genre works of the previous decade, these works founded the
tradition of pompous and decorative panels of the Soviet period featuring processions and
rejoicing of the masses .
Commissioned works for publishing houses were burdened by ideological demands. Like all
members of the World of Art, who dreamed to educate by art, to improve morals by beauty, he
now not only painted pictures, designed stage productions and books, but also worked much
directly in the field of ideological propaganda
—
he illustrated books about Lenin {To Children
about Lenin, Lenin and Young Leninists), designed covers for books and brochures, produces a
design for postal paper with portraits of Party leaders and posters
(
The Union of the City and the
Village, The Peoples of the USSR Earlier and Now, The Union of the Chinese and Russian
Workers), covers and back panels for wall calendars (The Worker with a Book near a Machine-
Tool, The Electrification of the Village, Physical Culture and Electrification) that brought
Bolshevik slogans into the masses and explained them helping to introduce new principles of
human relations in the country. His individual stylistic manner was comprehensible to common
people and therefore was in demand by the new life. At his own will he designed a project for
the decoration of a resting hall with a panel devoted to the theme of labour, with portraits of the
best workers in medallions, which would later degenerate into propagandist panels and posters,
into standardized red corners1 and Lenin s rooms . Kustodiev died while working on a
sketch for the triptych The Joy of Labour and Rest, the central part of which was treated in the
spirit of
Pieter
Brueghel.
In
1917-23,
in parallel to works on Soviet themes, Kustodiev continued to paint pictures
about provincial life enriching painting by a number of depictions of Shrovetide merry-making
and beauties . In
1918
he created a consummate work
-
Merchant s Wife at Tea and in
1926,
Russian Venus. Panoramic views showing the distance began to prevail in his work and life is
treated like an incessant cycle, where everything is nearby
-
old and new, labour and repose,
natural calamities and harvesting
-
Summer
(І918),
Afferà
Thunderstorm
(1921).
447
In that period he created the formal Portrait of Fiodor Chaliapin
(1921),
in which the famous
singer is represented against the background of a vivid scene of a festive provincial town on a
hoarfrost day. The entire scope of Kustodiev s portraits, on which he energetically worked with¬
in a decade in painting, drawing and engraving, bears an imprint of his experiments along the
lines of Neo-Classicism. They are characterized by a striving towards a grand , lapidary form,
a sort of sculptural quality, the cult of concise line marking the outlines of volumes, smooth
texture reminiscent of painting of the early nineteenth century. These include painted portraits
of the archaeologist Tatyana Chizhova, the poet Maximilian Voloshin and the artist s daughter
[rina
Kustodieva. In his drawings Kustodiev used the combination of graphite, thoroughly
scumbled sanguine or coloured crayons. His portrayals of the artists Dmitry Kardovsky and
Piotr
Neradovsky, the musicians
Konstantin Igumnov
and Maria Shostakovich are filled with
calm and harmony.
His activity in the theatre, both dramatic and musical, became more intense than before. In
1920
he designed Alexander Serov s opera Enemy s Power staged by Chaliapin in the former
Mariinsky Theatre. The repertory of the Academic Drama Theatre included Alexander
Ostrovsky s classical play Wolves and Sheep with his costumes and scenery, as well as a contem¬
porary play, Virinea by
Lydia Seifuliina.
The performances of Yevgeny Zamiatin s Flea created
after motifs of Nikolai Leskov s story Left-Handed Smith held in Moscow and Leningrad were
met with a ready response. Kustodiev s vivid, colourful designs for it were based on the devices
of the luboky naive and grotesque in its characterization.
The intense rhythm of creative work weakened the artist s organism. At the beginning of
May
1927,
during a visit to the writer Alexei Tolstoy in the town of Pushkin, he caught cold that
resulted in influenza.
Boris Kustodiev died on
26
May
1927.
In
1928-29
his posthumous exhibitions were held in Leningrad and Moscow with a great
success. In
1929,
however, official critics denounced Kustodiev s art from vulgar sociological
positions and recognized it to be ideologically harmful. Kustodiev passed into oblivion for three
decades, until Khrushchev s thaw , when his exhibitions began to be held again and the first
books about him were issued.
|
| adam_txt |
SUMMARY
The name of Boris Kustodiev
(1878-1927)
is associated with the sunny and variegated world of
the Russian province as it appeared in his numerous paintings, drawings and engravings. His
canvases Shrovetide
(1916),
Merchant's Wife
(1915),
Belle
(1915),
Show-Booths
(1917)
and
Merchant's Wife at Tea
(1918)
became classics of Russian art and an integral part of the Russian
people's national memory. A brilliant graduate of the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg
(1896-1903),
Kustodiev studied under the great painter Ilya Repin and was his assistant in the
creation of the group portrait The Ceremonial Session of the State Council
(1901-03).
His por¬
trait of Ivan Biiibin, painted within the walls of the Academy, won the young artist the Gold
Medal at the international Exhibition in Munich
(1901).
A prominent portraitist of his age,
Kustodiev created a whole gallery of images of children, women and men representing all social
groups of Russian society in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Among them are portraits
of Emperor Nicholas II, the Chairman of the State Council Count Dmitry Solsky, the engraver
Vasily
Mathé,
the artist's wife Yulia Kustodieva, the singers Ivan Yershov and Fiodor Chaliapin,
the actor and stage director Vasily Luzhsky, the writers Fiodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, the
poet Maximilian Voloshin and the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, as well as Group Portrait of
the Members of the World of Art Union. In
1913
Kustodiev's Self-Portrait was acquired by the
Uffizi
Gallery in Florence. Besides painting and graphic art, Kustodiev distinguished himself
as a talented sculptor, was active in the fields of poster and book graphics and worked much for
the theatre. Kustodiev's works enjoyed success at exhibitions in Russia and abroad. In addition
to Russian art collections, they can be found in museums of Vienna, Cambridge, Kiev,
Malmö,
Minsk, Odessa, Riga and Florence as well as in private collections of France and America and
of the Emperor of Japan.
The development of Kustodiev's art and the highly individual artistic system he evolved
reflect general tendencies in the evolution of Russian art in the first quarter of the twentieth
century.
Boris Kustodiev was born on
7
March
1878
in Astrakhan. His parents were Yekaterina
(née
Smirnova,
1854-1919)
and Mikhail
(1841-1879)
Kustodiev. His father, Candidate of
Theology, taught literature and logic at the Astrakhan Theological Seminary. He died in a year
after the future artist's birth leaving his 25-year-old wife alone with two daughters, Alexandra
(1871—1941)
and Yekaterina
(1873-1941),
and two sons, Boris
(1878-1927)
and Mikhail
(1879-1942).
Their uncle,
Stepán Nikolsky,
an official of the Department of Railway Accounts
of the State Control in St Petersburg, became their custodian.
At five Boris began to draw and went to an opera performance for the first time. The
appearance of Astrakhan, a rich ancient merchant city in the estuary of the Volga and a meet¬
ing point of routes from Europe and Asia, the Caucasus and Persia, with the colourful every¬
day life of its dwellers, yielded rich aesthetic impressions to the future artist. An important
event in the life of Kustodiev and his native city was an arrival in
1887
of the Travelling
Exhibition of the Wanderers Art Society that included many famous works, such as Boyarynia
Morozova by Vasily Surikov, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery by Vasily Poienov, por-
440
traits
by Ivan Kramskoy and llya Repin, and landscapes by ivan Shishkin. Between
1887
and
І
896
Boris Kustodiev studied at the Theological School followed by the Theological
Seminary and continued to practice drawing. After a visit to St Petersburg in the summer of
1893
and a tour of the Hermitage where he was struck by works of Rembrandt, Rubens and
Van Dyck, his engagement in art grew more intense and purposeful. Between
1893
and
1896
he took drawing lessons from the local professional artist Pavel
Vlasov.
His success was so
remarkable that in
1896
he easily entered the Higher Art School attached to the St Petersburg
Academy of Arts. At the Scandinavian Exhibition arranged by Sergei
Diaghilev in
St
Petersburg
(1897)
the beginning artist was amazed by the highly expressive paintings of the
famous Swedish artist Anders
Zorn.
His influence upon Kustodiev's painting would reveal
itself in the early 1900s, but at that time Kustodiev, still a student of the Academy, did not
allow his brushwork to be either sweeping or florid; he drew much in his classes and readily
created compositions. His sketches devoted to Early Russia and bearing an imprint of the
then well-known Neo-Romantic painters Andrei Riabushkin and Mikhail Nesterov never
failed to won awards of the Academy's Council. In
1898
Kustodiev was transferred to llya
Repin's personal studio.
The greatest Russian artist and his pupil met at an important phase in the history of nation¬
al culture
—
the turn of the century saw a notable flowering in the fields of philosophy, litera¬
ture, music, the theatre and all kinds of fine arts. That was the time of Anton Chekhov and
"later" Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov
and Sergei Rakhmanmov, Fiodor Chaliapin and
the energetic activity of the art patrons
Sawa
Mamontov and Princess Maria Tenisheva, the
newly founded Moscow Art Theatre headed by
Konstantin
Stanislavsky and Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko, the pioneering magazine World of Art edited by Sergei
Diaghilev
and
Alexander Benois. Students of the Academy witnessed the heated debate of the World of Art
with Vladimir Stasov, a prominent art and music critic of the previous age; their tutor llya Repin
at first got close to the editorial board of the magazine but then scandalously broke with it. The
new Art
Nouveau
style was gaining ground in architecture and applied art, and Symbolism
came to the forefront in literature, the theatre and fine arts. The young students of the Academy
became interested visitors to exhibitions of the World of Art Society where they could see works
by Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel,
Konstantin
Korovin,
Isaac
Levitán
and other Russian artists
of the period remarkable for their innovatory quests in art.
Kustodiev reached creative maturity and earned public and professional recognition at an
early age. In the first years of the twentieth century he produced a series of painted and graph¬
ic portraits of his fellow students at the Academy and of some prominent figures in Russian cul¬
ture
-
the draughtsman Ivan Bilibin, the sculptor Dmitry Stelletsky, the engraver Vasily
Matné
and the writer Daniil Mordovtsev. Kustodiev's portraits are notable for a keen insight and care¬
ful attitude to the individual features of his sitters. Every time the specific features of his sitter's
character and appearance brought into being a new, original artistic solution. Thus, the por¬
trayal of the refined and stylish Bilibin, who had become well-known by that time for his illus¬
trations to Russian fairy-tales, is marked by the elegant manner of sweeping, generalized brush-
work, a restrained and elegant gamut of silvery-black shades highlighted by a red spot in the
buttonhole of his frock-coat.
441
Kustodiev's
successful work in the field of portraiture accounts for Repin's choice of him as
an assistant in the large-scale project of those years -the group portrait The Ceremonial Session
of the State Council
(1901-03).
Within a brief period the young artist produced twenty-seven
portraits and painted, under the guidance of his tutor, about a third of the giant canvas. He
revealed himself as a mature painter keenly feeling the characters of his high-ranking models
and the specific features of commissioned formal portraiture, as an artist capable to work in a
"team". His portrait studies, sustained in sonorous and majestic gamut of black-red-golden
tones, were painted, like Repin's analogous works, in a sweeping generalized manner.
Diaghilev
displayed the best of these works at the prestigious Exhibition of Russian portraits held in the
Tauride Palace
(1905).
The year
1903
was an important period in the young artist's life. Kustodiev completed his
work on the group portrait. He married Yulia Proshinskaya
(1880-1942)
and she gave him a
son, Kirill
(1903-1971).
In the summer, on the estate Vysokovo near Kostroma, he painted one
of the most poetic portraits of his wife, soon to be acquired by the Russian Museum in St
Petersburg. In the autumn the first monographic essay about the artist (written by Nikolai
Breshko-Breshkovsky) was published. For his diploma painting Market in the Village he
received the Large Gold Medal and a grant for going abroad.
The painter stayed abroad merely for five months: he studied the collections of the Louvre,
attended exhibitions of modern art and the studio of
Rene Ménard in
Paris and copied canvas¬
es by Velazquez at the
Prado
in Madrid. Rich artistic impressions evoked in him a thirst for
independent creative work and he returned to his homeland. His canvas Morning, recording a
scene of Yulia's bathing their first son and permeated with light and happiness, was a recollec¬
tion of their life in Paris. This painting also soon became the property of the Russian Museum.
The period from
1904
to
І910
was for Kustodiev the time of "looking for himself', of work¬
ing out his individual style. His work of those years are marked by their genre variety
-
he paint¬
ed portraits, including numerous commissions (which was a sign of his recognition), and chil¬
dren's likenesses, his first pictures about Russian provincial life, worked in the fields of book
illustration and sculpture.
1905
and
1906
were the years of his intense work in the field of polit¬
ical graphics. He was experimenting much to attain a desirable effect, often changing canvas for
cardboard and oils for gouache, pastel or tempera.
Kustodiev belonged to those St Petersburg artists, members of the World of Art group and
of the New Society, who worked much for the satirical magazines Zhupel (Bugaboo) and
Adskaya pochta (Devil's
Магђ
during the revolution of
1905-07.
He produced a series of cari¬
catures Olympus, depicting the rulers of Russia
(Konstantin
Pobedonostsev, Sergei
Witte)
and
Introduction
(1905),
one of the most expressive drawings of those days that featured the image
of death strangling revolutionary Moscow after the defeat of the December uprising. No less
impressive was his drawing After the Dispersal of a Demonstration
((1906)
from the Calendar of
the Russian Revolution destroyed by the police. The motif of workers' demonstrations appeared
several times in Kustodiev's drawings executed in coloured crayons and marked by the features
of Art
Nouveau, decorativeness
and energy of form.
in the same year Kustodiev brilliantly executed the canvas Church Parade of the Life-Guards
Finland Regiment on
Ì2
December
1905
representing the Emperor and Tsesarevich Alexis, the
442
heir, as well as the top officials of the army and state. Simultaneously he produced formal por¬
traits of major state officials
-
Peter Bark and Count Dmitry Solsky, Chairman of the State
Council, the old aristocrats Alexandra
Romanova
and Prince Ivan Saltykov. Endowed with
great expressiveness and subtle psychological quality are his portraits of the provincial clergy
-
Nun, Portrait of a Priest and a Deacon; portraits of members of the creative intelligentsia
—
the
writers Fiodor Sologub and Alexei Remizov, whose books educated Russians avidly read in
those years, the singer Ivan Yershov, who won fame in Wagner's repertory,
Janko
Lavrin, a man
of letters from Slovenia, who after
1917
would settle in England and become a prominent
Slavicist scholar and an author of works on Pushkin and Gogol. At the same time Kustodiev's
likenesses of Alexandra
Romanova
and
René
Notgaft earned him the reputation of a master of
elegant female portraits. In the field of sculpture, in which Kustodiev seriously worked from the
late 1900s, he created penetrative portraits of the Romantic singer Ivan Yershov, the writer
Alexei Remizov absorbed in dramatic feelings and the graphic artist Mstislav Dobuzhinsky lis¬
tening, as it were, to the quiet rhythms of life.
Kustodiev often portrayed members of his family, lovingly capturing them in different situ¬
ations
—
e.g. In a Room or On the Terrace. With warmth and tenderness he recorded the features
of his wife Yulia changing over the years, the physical and mental growth of their children Kirill
and
Irina (1905-
Ï9S1)
-
Portrait of
Irina
Kustodieva with a Toy, Portrait of Yulia Kustodieva with
Her Daughter
Irina,
Children in Masquerade Costumes.
ín 1906
Kustodiev stepped on the path of stylistic experiments, having discovered for him¬
self, simultaneously with the pioneers of the Russian avant-garde, the treasures of folk culture
and the provincial world as a wholesome aesthetic phenomenon. For Mikhail Larionov and
Natalia Goncharova an acquaintance with "naive art" of the lubok (popular prints), hand-
painted shop signs and trays served as an impetus for the re-evaluation of values, for a revolt
against traditions and aesthetics of the "school" and for experiments aimed at finding a new
artistic idiom. For Kustodiev, who began his art studies with icon-painting in the theological
seminary and later worked under the great Repin and copied pictures by Rembrandt and
Velazquez, that was a process of innovating the imagery of his painting. He evolved a distinct
manner of his own, natural for him, by combining the traditions of "low culture" of the lubok,
shop signs and carved toys with "professional" art. The natural character of this innovation was
largely due to the artist's sincerity and his preference to a definite circle of themes and motifs.
The world of the Russian village
-
a simple and sound mode of life, untouched by ills of con¬
temporary "urban" civilization, a strict taste, an interest of rural dwellers in vivid colourful pat¬
terns of their clothes and a free fantasy in the decor of their houses and objects of everyday use
-
exerted an important influence upon the artist's style enriching his quests. Kustodiev's spe¬
cial approach to the rural world can be vividly illustrated by versions of his paintings Fair
( 1906
and
1908)
and Feast in a Village
(1907
and
1910),
in which his infatuation with the lubok is
whimsically combined with Art
Nouveau
stylistic devices. The influence of folk art is clearly
sensed in a certain idealization of the images and an absence of melancholy.
In
1905
the artist built a studio-house,
Terem,
near the town of Kineshma in Tver Province.
At the end of the 1900s Kustodiev translated his impressions of Kostroma and remote provin¬
cial towns, together with the indelible reminiscences of his Astrakhan childhood, into a series
443
of pictures featuring Russian, provincial life. He started the series with the canvases Province and
Merry-Making on the Volga created from life in the town of Romanov-Borisoglebsk on the
Volga. After them, in
1910,
he painted the carefully composed canvas Merry-Making, an exam¬
ple of Kustodiev's mature manner with its organic blend of life impressions and conventional
motifs,
plein-air
quality and stylization in the lubok manner.
Kustodiev worked much in book graphics creating illustrations to the stories The Carriage
and The Overcoatby Gogol, to poems by Nikolai Nekrasov and short stories by Ivan Turgenev
and Leo Tolstoy.
Kustodiev's art became widely known. There appeared reviews of his work written by the
poet Alexander
Blok,
the critics Alexander Benois and Anatoly Lunacharsky; the Academy of
Arts grants him the title of Academician of Painting
(1909).
Kustodiev's talent reached maturity between
1911
and
1917.
He linked his lot with the
World of Art Society revived in the autumn of
1910
and contributed many works to its exhibi¬
tions. In
1911
it was discovered that the artist had
agrave
disease of the spinal cord and his fur¬
ther life passed in a permanent struggle with the mortal illness. From
1916
to the end of his days
he was bound to an invalid chair. Owing to a succession of operations Kustodiev could not work
for months, but it was in this period that he created his most significant, classical works. In that
period Kustodiev was especially successful in the fields of easel painting and graphic art; his
work for the theatre also began. His essays in sculpture, especially intense in
1911
(work on the
busts of Nicholas II) were cut short by his illness.
At the beginning of the
1910s
Kustodiev turned for a while to the sphere of monumental
painting
-
he created an impressive, energetic panel Peter the Great for the Peter the Great
Municipal School in St Petersburg. Together with his colleagues from the World of Art (Benois,
Serebriakova,
Lanceray
and Dobuzhinsky) he worked on sketches for the painted decor of the
interiors of the Kazan Railway Station built by Alexei Shchusev in Moscow, but the plans were
not realized owing to the outbreak of the October Revolution in
1917.
The artist realized himself in the theme of provincial life by creating a distinct
"Kustodiev" genre
-
a largely conventional and ideal, self-dependent realm, with an unusu¬
al mode of life, with the aesthetics of its own, the Russia "of his own". This sunlit land,
devoid of sorrow, dull days or the autumnal time of bad roads, devoid of poor people earning
their living by hard toil or unlucky people, devoid of everyday routine and social turmoil and
limited by typically Russian lands
—
the villages and towns of the Middle Russian Plain and
the Volga Basin. Life has arrested there back in the middle of the nineteenth century; archi¬
tecture whimsically combines the seventeenth century and the Empire style and a respect to
traditions is mixed in people's clothing with the newest examples of Parisian fashion. There
is no place to St Petersburg or Moscow in this world. Kustodiev was capable to depict his spe¬
cific Russia endlessly, showing its placid inhabitants of all social estates, mostly merchants,
each of them well known to him, its beauties, its summer and winter festivals in towns and
villages. The entire abundance of subjects had significance for him and he now and again
turned to them never repeating himself in represented details or situations. He endlessly var¬
ied his characters, always marked by individuality and at the same time forming one large
family living in peace and harmony.
444
Synthetic in their nature, Kustodiev's works are permeated with lofty humanism. His
"province", good-natured, sincere and just, is invariably an athithesis to St Petersburg and
industrial cities. They are dreams about the patriarchal world, full of harmony and beauty. His
pictures do not admit the existence of poverty and overdrinking, miserliness and greediness,
cmdeness and ignorance. "Cleaned" from all negative aspects of life, they are kind and poetic,
they do not edify anybody and are full of respect to the spectator and to the depicted life, quiet,
balanced life arranged according to traditions for ages, somewhat narrow-minded and therefore
calling forth the painter's ironic smile. They appreciate health and beauty here and lead a little
showy life, they life bright-coloured, genuine, a bit too fanciful and excessive, mercilessly rein¬
terpreting innovations from the capital. Kustodiev's characters harmoniously exist in the natu¬
ral medium. It is invariably depicted in a bright moment of its being
-
in midday sunlight, on a
hoary day or in an ornate autumn decor. Like in paintings of the Old Masters, the landscapes are
densely, up to the distant horizon, are inhabited with human figures. Common days never occur
here. Most often he depicts festivals or pleasant moments of
dolce far niente
before evening. His
characters are strolling, meeting one another, talking frankly, flirting or enjoying views
—
Merry-
Making
(1910),
Merchant Wives
(1912),
A Bridge: Astrakhan
(19Í8),
Autumn in a Province
(1926).
He depicts large families with many children, loving couples and companies of friends.
He has an interest in the demonstrations of vital energy, he feasts his eyes upon portliness and
grace (Merchant Wives,
1912,
Merchant Wife with Purchases,
1920),
healthy and robust bodies of
bathing women (Bathing,
1912),
admires dashing cabmen (Frosty Day,
1913).
His work was
enriched with series of colourful, dynamic "festivals" (versions of Shrovetide,
1916,
Show-
Booths,
1917)
remarkable for the monumental features of "beauties" (Merchant's Wife,
1915;
Belle,
1915).
Kustodiev, who knew about real problems of life, thought it his duty, as his col¬
leagues, members of the World of Art did, to create in the name of man's best features, in the
name of positive ideals. His dynamic "festivals", with their joyful and vivid colours, smiling
ruddy faces and diverse movements are perceived as an apotheosis of popular life, as a reflection
of people's eternal dream about beauty and joy of living that is vividly reflected in folklore and
handicrafts. Kustodiev's pictures are permeated with the idea of authentic "choir" quality about
which dreamed Viacheslav
Ivanov,
a theoretician of Russian Symbolism. Kustodiev's most
crowded "festivals" are harmonious not only because they are perfectly arranged by the artist,
but also due to the harmony, the idea that all people are members of a single immense family
underlying their concept. Therefore the artist chose panoramic compositions with an elaborate
development of space (versions ofShrovetide,
1916),
perfect, close to a square formats of his can¬
vases (Show-Booths,
1917,
Trinity Day,
1920)
and depicts warm winter days with hoarfrost and
abundant fluffy snow or cool clear days in the middle of summer. He rarely showed real cities or
towns (The Palm-Sunday Bazaar near the Saviour
Gote in
Moscow,
1917)
preferring to general¬
ize his impressions based on the treasures of his visual memory.
His works, marked by monumental forms, are fancifully and wittingly combine the tradi¬
tions of the lubok and lofty, classical art of museums, principally the legacy of his favourite
Venetians of the Renaissance. This can be seen not only in the enrichment of colour range in
his paintings, in the enamel iridescence of their surfaces, but in the very principles of the con¬
struction of compositions
-
now panoramic, now frieze-like and now growing upwards.
445
Sometimes, like with
Pieter
Brueghel, the second and third plans sharply "break down" enrich¬
ing the composition and making the image more complicated (Merchant's Wife,
1915;
Shrovetide,
1916).
The peculiar feature of Kustodiev's work is that two streams were developing within it, only
sometimes approaching each other
-
a special, "Kustodiev's" genre in painting and graphic art
-
and traditional kinds of art that also had importance for him. He was successful when turn¬
ing to the landscape and still life and in the sphere of interior scenes he created works that
inherited the best traditions of the
Biedermeier.
By the early
1910s,
he was already a prominent portrait painter, although working next to
him were Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov,
Konstantin
Somov and Leon
Bakst.
In
1911
Kustodiev
created the Tsar's plaster portrait in a military uniform
-
rapidly growing old, but full of digni¬
ty and not devoid of majesty. The works, approved by Nicholas II, served as models for the por¬
trait in bronze that decorated the Russian Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Rome
(1911)
and
a number of marble versions. In
1915
Kustodiev painted a portrait of the Emperor with the
Moscow Kremlin in the background for the Nizhny Novgorod Bank. The portrait became very
popular during the First World War and was spread around the country in numerous colour
reproductions and postcards. The artist produced many mastery representations of Russian
high officials, portraits of the well-known businessman and art collector Nikolai
von
Mekk,
the
art scholar and restorer Alexander Anisimov, the family's friend
Renée
Notgaft, a characteris¬
tic example of his Neo-Classical experiments, his self-portrait for the
Uffizi
Gallery and also a
series of sketchy representations of his fellow artists for the Group Portrait of the World of
Árt
Association.
It was Kustodiev's love for the theatre since his childhood that he shared with the founder
members of the society (Alexander Benois, Leon
Bakst, Mstislav
Dobuzhinsky and Nicholas
Roerich). Kustodiev was friendly with actors of the opera and drama theatres
-
Ivan Yershov
and Vasily Luzhsky, was well acquainted with Vsevolod
Meyerhold, Konstantin
Stanislavsky
and Fiodor Chaliapin. His interest in the festive aspect of the Russian past, his knowledge of
provincial everyday life, an entertaining and somewhat theatrical treatment of subject-matter
inherent to his easel paintings were realized by Kustodiev in his work for Moscow theatres that
started in
1911.
His sketches of costumes and stage sets for plays by Alexander
Ostrovsky
and
Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin are close to his paintings
ofthat
period and are distinguished by a
picturesque quality and clear-cut characters. It was in his theatrical works that Kustodiev
resorted for the first time to characteristics with grotesque features.
The last decade of Kustodiev's creative career
(1917-27),
marked by the creation of a large
number of life-asserting and full-blooded images in painting and graphic art, successful work in
the spheres of the theatre, poster, book illustration and his turn to the mediums of linocut and
lithography, was also the most tragic period in his life as he was paralyzed and bound to his
invalid's chair. There was written much in the press about him in those years; his first one-man
show was held in
1920
and Vsevolod Voinov's monograph devoted to him appeared in
1925.
Kustodiev enthusiastically met the February Revolution in
1917
and created one of the most
valuable artistic evidences of those days
-
the canvas
27
February
1917,
suffused with sunlight
and, as it were, the rejoicing of all natural forces. He naturally entered the Soviet period con-
446
tributing
to the creation of new culture. In
1918
he participated in the decoration of
Petrograd
for the first anniversary of the October Revolution, designed the decoration of Ruzheinaya
(now Austrian) Square on the
Petrograd
Side. His set of panels was distinguished by the clarity
of forms, precise drawing and vivid, ornate impression of the whole. It agreed with the idea of
universal brotherhood proclaimed by the revolution and served as a model for numerous simi¬
lar projects of the Soviet era.
Kustodiev's canvas The Bolshevik became, alongside works by Arkady Rylov,
Konstantin
Yuon and Sergei Konionkov, a recognized classic of Soviet art. This picture was inspired by the
artist's vivid imagination, his understanding of important contemporary processes. His festive
series of works
—
Celebration on the Field of Mars in Honour of the
2nd
Congress of the Communist
International
(1920),
Celebration on Uritsky Square in Honour of the Opening of the
2nd
Congress
of the Third international
(1921)
and Night Gala on the Neva
(1923) -
reflected the artist's keen
perception of how the once haughty, elegant "bourgeois" capital of the Empire was trans¬
formed by crowds of rejoicing common people of different races, nationalities and professions.
Perhaps what he saw seemed to him the implementation of a dream of the members of the
World of Art and theoreticians of Symbolism about mass-scale theatricalized performances.
Genetically related to Kustodiev's genre works of the previous decade, these works founded the
tradition of pompous and decorative panels of the Soviet period featuring "processions" and
"rejoicing of the masses".
Commissioned works for publishing houses were burdened by ideological demands. Like all
members of the World of Art, who dreamed to educate by art, to improve morals by beauty, he
now not only painted pictures, designed stage productions and books, but also worked much
directly in the field of ideological propaganda
—
he illustrated books about Lenin {To Children
about Lenin, Lenin and Young Leninists), designed covers for books and brochures, produces a
design for postal paper with portraits of Party leaders and posters
(
The Union of the City and the
Village, The Peoples of the USSR Earlier and Now, The Union of the Chinese and Russian
Workers), covers and back panels for wall calendars (The Worker with a Book near a Machine-
Tool, The Electrification of the Village, Physical Culture and Electrification) that brought
Bolshevik slogans into the masses and explained them helping to introduce new principles of
human relations in the country. His individual stylistic manner was comprehensible to common
people and therefore was in demand by the new life. At his own will he designed a project for
the decoration of a resting hall with a panel devoted to the theme of labour, with portraits of the
best workers in medallions, which would later degenerate into propagandist panels and posters,
into standardized "red corners1 and "Lenin's rooms". Kustodiev died while working on a
sketch for the triptych The Joy of Labour and Rest, the central part of which was treated in the
spirit of
Pieter
Brueghel.
In
1917-23,
in parallel to works on Soviet themes, Kustodiev continued to paint pictures
about provincial life enriching painting by a number of depictions of Shrovetide merry-making
and "beauties". In
1918
he created a consummate work
-
Merchant's Wife at Tea and in
1926,
Russian Venus. Panoramic views showing the distance began to prevail in his work and life is
treated like an incessant cycle, where everything is nearby
-
old and new, labour and repose,
natural calamities and harvesting
-
Summer
(І918),
Afferà
Thunderstorm
(1921).
447
In that period he created the formal Portrait of Fiodor Chaliapin
(1921),
in which the famous
singer is represented against the background of a vivid scene of a festive provincial town on a
hoarfrost day. The entire scope of Kustodiev's portraits, on which he energetically worked with¬
in a decade in painting, drawing and engraving, bears an imprint of his experiments along the
lines of Neo-Classicism. They are characterized by a striving towards a "grand", lapidary form,
a sort of "sculptural" quality, the cult of concise line marking the outlines of volumes, smooth
texture reminiscent of painting of the early nineteenth century. These include painted portraits
of the archaeologist Tatyana Chizhova, the poet Maximilian Voloshin and the artist's daughter
[rina
Kustodieva. In his drawings Kustodiev used the combination of graphite, thoroughly
scumbled sanguine or coloured crayons. His portrayals of the artists Dmitry Kardovsky and
Piotr
Neradovsky, the musicians
Konstantin Igumnov
and Maria Shostakovich are filled with
calm and harmony.
His activity in the theatre, both dramatic and musical, became more intense than before. In
1920
he designed Alexander Serov's opera Enemy's Power staged by Chaliapin in the former
Mariinsky Theatre. The repertory of the Academic Drama Theatre included Alexander
Ostrovsky's classical play Wolves and Sheep with his costumes and scenery, as well as a contem¬
porary play, Virinea by
Lydia Seifuliina.
The performances of Yevgeny Zamiatin's Flea created
after motifs of Nikolai Leskov's story Left-Handed Smith held in Moscow and Leningrad were
met with a ready response. Kustodiev's vivid, colourful designs for it were based on the devices
of the luboky naive and grotesque in its characterization.
The intense rhythm of creative work weakened the artist's organism. At the beginning of
May
1927,
during a visit to the writer Alexei Tolstoy in the town of Pushkin, he caught cold that
resulted in influenza.
Boris Kustodiev died on
26
May
1927.
In
1928-29
his posthumous exhibitions were held in Leningrad and Moscow with a great
success. In
1929,
however, official critics denounced Kustodiev's art from vulgar sociological
positions and recognized it to be ideologically harmful. Kustodiev passed into oblivion for three
decades, until Khrushchev's "thaw", when his exhibitions began to be held again and the first
books about him were issued. |
| any_adam_object | 1 |
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| author | Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 |
| author_GND | (DE-588)119203871 (DE-588)1053295928 |
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| building | Verbundindex |
| bvnumber | BV023276686 |
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| format | Book |
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| id | DE-604.BV023276686 |
| illustrated | Illustrated |
| index_date | 2024-07-02T20:38:06Z |
| indexdate | 2024-07-09T21:14:45Z |
| institution | BVB |
| language | Russian |
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| physical | 478 S. überw. Ill. |
| publishDate | 2007 |
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| spelling | Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 Verfasser (DE-588)119203871 aut Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev V. F. Kruglov Boris Kustodiev B. M. Kustodiev Sankt-Peterburg "Zolotoj Vek" [u.a.] 2007 478 S. überw. Ill. txt rdacontent sti rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier In kyrill. Schr., russ. - Zsfassung in engl. Sprache Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 (DE-588)119203871 gnd rswk-swf (DE-588)4145395-5 Bildband gnd-content (DE-588)4006804-3 Biografie gnd-content Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 (DE-588)119203871 p DE-604 Kruglov, Vladimir Fedorovič 1941- Sonstige (DE-588)1053295928 oth Digitalisierung BSB Muenchen application/pdf http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016461569&sequence=000002&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA Abstract |
| spellingShingle | Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 (DE-588)119203871 gnd |
| subject_GND | (DE-588)119203871 (DE-588)4145395-5 (DE-588)4006804-3 |
| title | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev |
| title_alt | Boris Kustodiev B. M. Kustodiev |
| title_auth | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev |
| title_exact_search | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev |
| title_exact_search_txtP | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev |
| title_full | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev V. F. Kruglov |
| title_fullStr | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev V. F. Kruglov |
| title_full_unstemmed | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev V. F. Kruglov |
| title_short | Boris Michajlovič Kustodiev |
| title_sort | boris michajlovic kustodiev 1878 1927 boris kustodiev b m kustodiev |
| title_sub | [1878 - 1927] = Boris Kustodiev = B. M. Kustodiev |
| topic | Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 (DE-588)119203871 gnd |
| topic_facet | Kustodiev, Boris Michajlovič 1878-1927 Bildband Biografie |
| url | http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=016461569&sequence=000002&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA |
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