19th century AD

The first Western retrospective of the painter Mikhail Vrubel introduces a lock opener figure of Russian Symbolism, whose mix of folkloric motifs and proto-abstraction made him a pioneer of Russian avant-garde art.

The West's familiarity with the history of the Russian avant-garde has been more or les confined to single historical moment. When Camilla Gray's work The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922 was published in England in 1962 it sparked a fascination with a short period of artistic achievement beginning shortly before the Revolution and ending abruptly around the mid-1920s. greatest in quantity subsequent scholarly investigations of the origins of Russian modernism were undertaken to detail the early careers of of that kind principal figures of the Revolutionary avant-garde as Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Vasily Kandinsky. Those scholars who transgressed the strictly defined boundaries of the high jiffy of Soviet avant-garde practice were usually affift to document the eventual dissolution of this artistic culture

owed to these limitations, one art-historical task has been drawn out postponed: the effort to define the local satisfied in which many artists whom we now associate with the formation of the Russian/Soviet avant-garde matured. Thus, while the origins of the modernist paradigm in the West have been studied for decades, it still remains to be debated whether the Russian original should be linked primarily" to the artists' fascination with Slavophile sources (such as icons and folk arts) or to their inspiration by dint of Western modernism itself. The career of the late-19th-century painter Mikhail Vrubel, the make subordinate of a traveling exhibition organized in Germany and upon view later this month at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow proffers a good vantage from which to speculate about the beginnings of Russian modernist practices. Organized by dint of Jurgen Harten, the director of the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle, and Hubertus Gassner, the curator of the Munich Haus der Kunst "Mikhail Vrubel, The Russian Symbolist" take a view ofs the whole of Vrubel's oeuvre presenting about 36 oils, 60 drawings and 24 majolica statuarys from 1880 to 1906.

Vrubel's idiosyncratic art and personality evok a faculty of perception of discomfort in most of his contemporaries. They remarked his extravagant behavior and lack of self-discipline -- specifically his heavy drinking, frivolous spending and amorous adventures which frequently led him to disappear without warning. In the years before the illness that l to his death in a St Petersburg psychiatric clinic in 1910 he showed an increasing ne to affirm his hold genius and a quarrelsomeness that sometimes reached the point of violence. on the contrary it was just these attitudes that helped to position him in the minds of the nearest generation as the first uncompromisingly avant-garde figure in Russian art.

Late in life, the Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo observ "It is a matter for lamentation that the art historians of Western Europe are almost entirely unaware of the work of [Vrubel].... The impact of Cezanne upon the subsequent development of the visual arts in Western Europe is well known but it is also important to know what was the impact of the work of Vrubel upon my contemporaries."(1) Georg Baselitz, in a short foreword to the catalogue of the popular exhibition, also claims a continue lengthen in timeed fascination with Vrubel's paintings. The fact that artists of similar different leanings -- one an index of controlled sculptural structures, the other a pleader of unrestrained painterly expression -- can acknowledge a due to Vrubel's art indicates the poignant and conflicting nature of this artist's production.

Vrubel was born in 1856 in the Siberian city of Omsk the son of a military officer. He began his formal education in drawing in 1864 with a private tutor in Saratov. He went to St Petersburg to inquiry law in 1874,. and during this period he did not track his artistic career. In the course of his studies he traveled in Germany. Switzerland and France; shortly after his get back from Europe. he enrolled in evening sessions at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg where he became a full-time learner in 1880. He studied with Pavel Chistyakov, known for teaching the members of the first clump of Russian critical realists, the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki); Chistyakov was responsible for Vrubel's accomplished on the contrary predictable academic exercises, some of which are included in the rife exhibition.

Vrubel effectively revolveed his back on his academic training in the portraits he produc solitary a few years later. Zinaida Valueva (ca. 1883) and Maria Ershova (1885) In the former, an ink drawing, solitary half of the female sitter's face is finished. In the next to the first a watercolor, the artist has positioned a young girl amidst a space raiseed through a series of color planes, delineating her torso with sharp r contours. Her pale face, move rounded directly to the viewer, is disturbing upon account of the oddity of the deliberately unrender right eye

This first evidence of Vrubel's taste for unorthodox stylistic gesticulations and extreme iconographic twists was presently eclipsed by his absorption in casts that involved restoring original murals, as well as painting of recent origin decorations, for several churches in Kiev. Cutting short his studies at the Academy, Vrubel mov to Kiev in 1884 and worked feverishly for the 12th-century monastery house of worship St. Cyril's. In addition to restoring rigidly damaged areas of the church's frescoe with the help of local art scholars Vrubel also executed completely fresh compositions in place of the not to be found original ones. In 1885 he painted four large icons, each about 80 inches tall, upon zinc plates to be place into a new marble iconostasis in St Cyril's. These works depict the Madonna and Child, Christ, and Saints Athanasius and Cyril. Typical for the 19th-century" mode of expression of Russian icon painting is the skillful, detailed rendering of the figures, as well as their subdu colors.