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Painting Light Scientifically: Arkhip Kuindzhi's Intermedial Environment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2019
Abstract
In art historical scholarship, inasmuch as he is considered at all, the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi has long been viewed as a peculiar outlier. His landscapes, with their coloristic drama, light effects, and simplified forms, hardly fit the accounts of Russian nineteenth-century painting that focus on the development of the realist school. Questioning the artist's anomalous status, this essay discusses his canvases from the 1870s and 1880s within the broader framework of nineteenth-century popular visual amusements, discourses on realism, and the physiology of vision. Considered through this wider lens—beyond the institution of easel painting and beyond Russia—Kuindzhi is revealed to be an innovator whose approach to painting was profoundly modern and aligned with the aesthetic preoccupations of many west European artists. His painterly pursuits and exhibition practices, furthermore, force a reconsideration of the biases associated with the established narrative of modern art in the west.
- Type
- Visions of Russian Modernism: Challenging Narratives of Imitation, Influence, and Periphery
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019
Footnotes
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and Harriet Murav for her sustained interest in this piece. Thanks to Allison Leigh for brilliantly spearheading the cluster and to Raisa Sidenova for her help with research in the Russian State Library in Moscow. Lastly, I am very grateful to Molly Brunson for her comments on different iterations of this article and steady encouragement.
References
1. Polonskii, Iakov, “Kartina Kuindzhi,” Strana no. 88 (November 9, 1880): 2Google Scholar.
2. Presently, the painting is known as Moonlit Night on the Dnepr (Lunnaia noch΄ na Dnepre).
3. My description of the exhibit setup is derived from contemporary press accounts rather than any official documentation. All consulted accounts corroborate controlled near-darkness, the presence of the screen, or shirma, lamps and their careful, and somehow concealed, placement. The exact number of lamps is unknown, but it appears there were more than one; the Society’s new building on Bolshaia Morskaia Street was the first in the capital to install electric lighting, Blakesley, Rosalind P., The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757–1881 (New Haven, 2016), 82Google Scholar; however, the lamps illuminating the painting could have still been kerosene.
4. Polonskii, “Kartina Kuindzhi,” 2. Polonskii’s reporting of visitors’ social status implies that the lower classes were not part of the crowd. This, however, requires further research.
5. The scandals caused by Gustave Courbet’s and Edouard Manet’s work in France are well documented. In the United States, Frederic Church showed his major landscapes, such as The Heart of the Andes (1859), alone, charging an admission fee and attracting large crowds. See Raab, Jennifer, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail (New Haven, 2015), 7Google Scholar. At home, Aleksandr Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ to the People (1837–57), exhibited at the Academy of Arts in 1858, created a sensation among the Russian public and critics.
6. The original, 1880 version of the painting darkened significantly due to the unstable mix of paints Kuindzhi had used. The painting is currently at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. I am basing my description on eyewitness accounts and partially on the 1880 version and the second version he painted two years later, which is at the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow.
7. M.P. Nevedomskii, I.E. Repin, A. I. Kuindzhi, (Moscow, 1997, prev. St. Petersburg, 1913), 111.
8. Artists trained at the Academy had classes with the chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev and physicist Fedor Petrushevskii. According to Repin, in these classes they used “an instrument that measured the sensitivity of the eye to subtle nuances of tones; Kuindzhi’s sensitivity was ideally precise, beating all records.” I. E. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe (Moscow, 1937), 321; Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), as analyzed by Michael Holquist, appropriated the language of the emerging field of physiology for its novelistic project: Michael Holquist, “Bazarov and Sečenov: The Role of Scientific Metaphor in Fathers and Sons,” Russian Literature 16, no. 4 (November 1984): 359–74.
9. V. G. Belinskii and Iu. Kirilenko, Sobranie sochinenii v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 2011), 3:597
10. Ol΄ga Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge (Leningrad, 1986), 89; For more on Shishkin and Russian landscape more generally, see Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002) and Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Realist Art. The State and Society: The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1977), 76–86; Incidentally, Shishkin’s aesthetic, with its focus on botanical particulars, prompted Kramskoi to remark that the painter missed “those spiritual nerves (dushevnye nervy), which are so sensitive to the noise and music of nature.” Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 50.
11. Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757–1881 (New Haven, 2016), 3.
12. Scholars of nineteenth-century Russian painting rarely refer to his work. Valkenier’s foundational English-language monograph Russian Realist Art mentions five principal landscape painters, a list from which Kuindzhi is missing. He is noted briefly by Rosalind P. Blakesley in The Russian Canvas, 266–67. Soviet scholar Dmitrii Sarabianov references Kuindzhi once in relation to the Romantic tradition in Russkaia zhivopis΄ XIX veka sredi Evropeiskikh shkol (Moscow, 1980), 71.
13. Numerous anecdotes about his boorish conduct emphasize his un-Russianness: he was of Greek descent and came from southern Ukraine. Nevedomskii, A. I. Kuindzhi, 22–26.
14. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 56–62.
15. Ibid., 57. For more on the development of Russian landscape, see Ely, This Meager Nature.
16. Carol Adlam, “Realist Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art Writing,” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 83, no. 4 (October 2005): 641.
17. No definitive evidence exists that Kuindzhi studied with Aivazovskii.
18. Aleksandr Benois, Russkaia shkola zhivopisi, ed. N. Dubovitskaia, 90. (St. Petersburg, 1904; reprint, Moscow, 1997). Elsewhere he called Kuindzhi a Russian Monet of sorts, who brought the importance of paint and color to the Russian canvas. See Benois, Istoriia russkoi zhivopisi v XIX veke (St. Petersburg, 1902; reprint, Moscow, 1999), 314.
19. The Peredvizhniki came out of the reformist spirit of the 1860s, which summoned artists to serve social causes and effect change, in other words, to depict tendentious subject matter. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 17–23.
20. A typical appraisal of Kuindzhi during the Soviet era rehearses variations of Stasov’s opinions and those of conservative critics. Here is O. A. Liaskovskaia’s characterization: “In the picture The Birch Grove the artist achieved the impression of strong sunlight, but its theater-curtain-like composition [kulisnoe postroenie], generalized form, uniform [odnoobraznyi] green color that has only two tones, one in the shade, the other in the sun, give the picture an extreme static quality and create a purely decorative effect.” Importantly, in Soviet art historiography, Kuindzhi’s paintings attempted but consistently failed to measure up to their “realistic orientation [napravlennost΄].” O. A. Liaskovskaia, Plener v russkoi zhivopisi XIX veka (Moscow, 1966), 81–82.
21. John. E. Bowlt, “A Russian Luminist School? Arkhip Kuindzhi’s Red Sunset on the Dnepr,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 10 (1975): 121.
22. While it is difficult to place Kuindzhi in the Russian painting tradition as outlined by Stasov, he fits rather comfortably in the narrative of western art, alongside someone like Turner, for example. I thank Molly Brunson for pointing this out. That narrative, as is well known, has been heavily biased towards French art and a specific modernist trajectory.
23. Bowlt, 121.
24. For recent scholarship on nineteenth-century Russian painting and on the Peredvizhniki that interrogates and greatly expands the narrow, long-held view, see Molly Brunson, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–90 (DeKalb, Ill., 2016) and “Painting History, Realistically: Murder at the Tretyakov,” in Rosalind P. Blakesley and Margaret Samu, eds., From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture. Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier (DeKalb, Ill., 2014), 94–110; Rosalind P. Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757–1881 (New Haven, 2016) and “‘There Is Something There … ’: The Peredvizhniki and West European Art,” Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 14, no. 1 (2008): 18–56; Andrei Shabanov, Peredvizhniki: mezhdu kommercheskim tovarishchestvom i khudozhestvennym dvizheniem (St. Petersburg, 2015); David Jackson, The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin (Schoten, Belgium, 2006) and Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Painting (Manchester, Eng., 2006).
25. Nevedomskii, A. I. Kuindzhi, 25. This biography, however, contains inaccuracies and must be taken with a grain of salt.
26. In the catalog published in conjunction with the Kuindzhi retrospective at the Tretiakov Gallery, October 4, 2018–February 17, 2019, the curator Galina Churak notes: “Kuindzhi virtually did not study at the Academy of Arts, as he could not pass general [obshcheobrazovatel΄nye] exams.” G.S. Churak, “Charuiushchii mir Kuindzhi,” in Arkhip Kuindzhi, 1842–1910 (Moscow, 2018), 14.
27. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 10.
28. Ibid.
29. Vladimir Stasov, I zbrannye sochineniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1952), vol. 2, 23.
30. Stasov, I zbrannye sochineniia, 2:23
31. Nevedomskii, A. I. Kuindzhi, 28.
32. Ibid., 326.
33. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 26.
34. I. E. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe (Moscow, 1964), 317.
35. The art collector Pavel Tretiakov bought the painting for his gallery.
36. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 29.
37. F.M. Dostoevskii, “Po povodu vystavki,” Grazhdanin no. 13, March 13, 1873, 424.
38. This painting is presently known as Vecher na Ukraine (Evening in Ukraine).
39. Ivan Kramskoi, Pis΄ma, stat΄i v dvukh tomakh, ed. S. N. Gol΄dshtein (Moscow, 1965), 1:453.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
42. Pavel P. Chistiakov, Pis΄ma, zapisnye knizhki, vospominaniia, 1832–1919 (Moscow, 1953), 87.
43. Nina M. Moleva, Vydaiushchiesia russkie khudozhniki-pedagogi (Moscow, 1962), 263.
44. Izabella Ginzburg, P. P. Chistiakov i ego pedagogicheskaia sistema (Leningrad, 1940), 170–71.
45. Considering color when approaching composition on a canvas had not been practiced at the Academy, where composition was subject to a set of predetermined rules, and color was secondary, if not tertiary. Chistiakov changed this: he taught his students tonal unity in painting by the example of coloristic virtuosity by Venetian Renaissance painters, above all by Paolo Veronese, who, the pedagogue noted, was “a colorist both in color and composition.” Chistiakov’s system of teaching color developed from his observations in his own and others’ practice and from studying painters he regarded to be masters, such as Veronese, Tintoretto, and Velazquez, among them. Learning how to handle color in his class began with painting a still life because he considered it to be the most expedient in training students to pay attention to color and form simultaneously. Ginzburg, 170–71. For more on Chistiakov’s pedagogical methods, see Ginzburg, P. P. Chistiakov.
46. Chistiakov was known to say: “art is not science but must use science to its own ends.” Moleva, 280.
47. Moleva, 294–95.
48. On one occasion Chistiakov described Kuindzhi’s 1876 Ukrainian Night as painted in a “striking manner [effektno], however, not artistically [khudozhestvenno] but artificially/puppet-theatrically [kukol΄no].” Chistiakov, Pis΄ma, 77.
49. Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe, 318.
50. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 97.
51. Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861–1917 (Stanford, 1970), 474.
52. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 74.
53. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 89–90.
54. Ibid., 124–25. Kuindzhi may have met Sechenov at the Mendeleevs’.
55. Dmitrii Mendeleev, “Pered kartinoiu Kuindzhi,” Zavetnye mysli: polnoe izdanie: vpervye posle 1905 g. (Moscow, 1995), 247–48.
56. In her monograph, Voronova talks of the friendship and professional relationship between the two men as an undisputed fact, however, she does not provide any interpretive analysis nor does she supply bibliographic evidence. For her discussion of Kuindzhi and Petrushevskii, see Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 89–92. G. I. Novikov, a scientist or student at the Pavlov Institute of Physiology at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, in the brief conference paper “Colorimetric Research in Painting,” surveys the history of color studies and painting, focusing mostly on Russian late nineteenth-early twentieth-century painting. He devotes two pages to Petrushevskii’s research and the connection between him and Kuindzhi. Novikov mentions that Petrushevskii was called “the first Russian color scientist [pervyi russkii tsvetoved].” See G. I. Novikov, “Kolorimetricheskie issledovaniia v zhivopisi,” at http://www.oop-ros.org/maket/part6/6_6.pdf (accessed August 13, 2016.)
57. Upon graduating from St. Petersburg University in 1851, the young scientist was dispatched to the Kherson district under the guidance of an astronomer to observe a solar eclipse. Reportedly, this event led Petrushevskii to pursue optics. V. L. Chenakal, “Fedor Fomich Petrushevskii i ego raboty po optike i tsvetovedeniiu,” Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, vol. 36, no. 2 (1948): 212–14.
58. Svet i tsveta sami po sebe i po otnosheniiu k zhivopisi, shest΄ publichnykh lektsii and Kraski i zhivopis΄, respectively.
59. Hermann von Helmholtz, Populӓre wissenschaftliche Vortrӓge (Braunschweig, 1865–76). His Ueber das Sehen des Menschen (1855) came out in Russia in 1866 in translation. Hermann von Helmholtz, trans. V. Rozenberg, O zrenii cheloveka: Izlozheno populiarno po Gelmgol΄tsu (Odessa, 1866). In the 1860s, Helmholtz became a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 72.
60. Hermann von Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures: Viz.: on the Relations of Optics to Painting, on the Origin of the Planetary System, on Thought in Medicine, on Academic Freedom in German Universities (New York, 1881), 606.
61. Fedor Petrushevskii, Svet i tsveta sami po sebe i po otnosheniiu k zhivopisi: Shest΄ publichnykh lektsii (St. Petersburg, 1883), 69–70.
62. Ibid., 88. Emphasis in the original.
63. For more on the competing regimes of modern vision, see Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, 1988).
64. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 79.
65. Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures, 611.
66. Ibid.
67. Petrushevskii, Svet i tsveta, 73.
68. F. Petrushevskii, Kraski i zhivopis΄: Posobie dlia khudozhnikov i tekhnikov (St. Peterburg, 1901), 32–33.
69. A duplicitous attack of the fellow Peredvizhnik landscape painter Mikhail Klodt prompted Kuindzhi to abandon his membership in the Association in 1879, which he had joined in 1875. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 102–5.
70. Chenakal, 214. During the late 1850s and through the 1860s, Petrushevskii was chiefly preoccupied with magnetism and electricity.
71. Mikhail Iampolski, Nabliudatel΄: Ocherki istorii videniia, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg, 2012), 49–50.
72. Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, 1990), 285. For more on the rivaling color theories and their application from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, see Kemp, The Science of Art, 259–322.
73. Iampolski, Nabliudatel΄, 55.
74. Ibid., 58.
75. On the English Romantics and the problem of painting light, see Iampolski, Nabliudatel΄, 80. For Turner’s and John Martin’s association with the theater, and light as an intermediary between art and the stage, see Martin Meisel, “The Material Sublime: John Martin, Byron, Turner, and the Theater,” in Karl Krober and William Walling, eds., Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities (New Haven, 1978), 211–32.
76. Stasov, I zbrannye sochineniia, 1:475; Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 83.
77. Stasov, I zbrannye sochineniia, 1:474–75.
78. Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York, 1997), 77–79.
79. Ibid., 77.
80. Ibid.
81. In the Russian language, there are two words for “screen”: ekran and shirma. Kuindzhi used the latter in mounting his nocturne. Shirma is less of a flat construction than ekran; it also implies, largely due to its greater depth and the genealogy in interior decoration, the game of hide-and-seek.
82. For more on the history of screens, see Erkki Huhtamo, “Screen Tests: Why Do We Need an Archaeology of the Screen?” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (2012): 144–48. The multiple functions of the screen, including its culture-shaping aspect, were at the heart of the interdisciplinary seminar series “Genealogies of the Excessive Screen” at Yale University in spring and fall 2017; see http://dev.screens.yale.edu/ (accessed April 10, 2019); for more on phantasmagoria and the magic lantern, see Oliver Grau, MediaArtHistories (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 137–61.
83. John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (Chicago, 2012), 130.
84. Ibid., 138–40. For more on Daguerre’s career as a painter and inventor, see Stephen Pinson, Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L.J.M. Daguerre (Chicago, 2012).
85. Oksana Chefranova notes that viewers may have thought that the surface of the painting itself was translucent. See “From Garden to Kino: Evgenii Bauer, Cinema, and the Visual of Moscow Amusement Culture, 1885–1917” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), 648. I propose that the screen on which the landscape was hung contributed to the ontological confusion.
86. Magic lantern shows peaked in popularity, both as entertainment and an educational tool, in the period between 1870 and 1914. For the history of the magic lantern in Russia, see Anna Kotomina, “Svetovye i tenevye kartiny i ‘iskusstvo proektsii’ v Rossii kontsa XIX-nachala XX vv.,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski no. 99 (2011/2012): 135–70.
87. For more on the changes in science and technology as related to art and vision, see: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Suspensions of Perception : Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993); Gillian Beer, “Authentic Tidings of Invisible Things,” in Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay, eds., Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (New York, 1996).
88. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 109.
89. Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (2012): 499–500. Emphasis in the original.
90. Ibid., 513. I also want to emphasize the distinction: while a painting is a technological image, that is, an image made with the technology of paint and brush, here I refer to optical technologies employed in mass amusements.
91. This definition of the technological image is of course haunted by Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura and its loss in the age of mechanical reproducibility. I thank Julia Chadaga for pointing this out.
92. Nevedomskii, A. I. Kuindzhi, 118. It was common in the circular panorama to place in the space in front of the painting appropriate realia—a soldier’s boot in a battleground scene, for example—to enhance the illusion.
93. Quoted in Nevedomskii, A. I. Kuindzhi, 113.
94. Ibid.
95. Valkenier links these dismissals of the Impressionists with the Russian artists’ overall lack of education and sophistication since most of them came from the lower classes. Repin seems to have been an exception. He immersed himself in Parisian life in the early 1870s, painting A Parisian Café, a work that caused consternation with his Peredvizhniki colleagues and Stasov. Valkenier, Elizabeth, “Opening up to Europe: The Peredvizhniki and the Miriskusniki Respond to the West,” in Blakesley, Rosalind P. and Reid, Susan E., eds., Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts (DeKalb, Ill., 2007), 59Google Scholar.
96. Emile Zola, “Dve khudozhestvennye vystavki v mae,” Vestnik Evropy no. 6 (June 1876): 873–903.
97. Kramskoi, Pis΄ma, stat΄i, 1:359–60.
98. Ibid., 360.
99. Kramskoi, Pis΄ma, stat΄i, 1:360. Emphasis in the original.
100. In 1873, for the first time, Kuindzhi travelled to Europe, including France. He financed his extensive trip by the sale of his work. He went to Paris repeatedly throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Unlike Kramskoi and others, however, Kuindzhi did not leave written testimony about the Impressionists. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 32, 50, 86.
101. Stasov, I zbrannye sochineniia, 3:118. Kramskoi probably saw the landscape “under all light conditions” in the artist’s studio. Kuindzhi opened his studio to visitors for two hours on Sundays. Voronova, Kuindzhi v Peterburge, 106. Turgenev, too, reportedly, saw Night before the spectacular show at the Society. Polonskii, “Kartina Kuindzhi,” 2.
102. Holquist, “Bazarov and Sečenov,” 366–67.
103. Sechenov, I. M., “Refleksy golovnogo mozga,” Meditsinskii vestnik no. 47 and no. 48 (1863): 461–84Google Scholar; 493–512.
104. For Sechenov’s explication of these mechanisms, see Sechenov, I., Reflexes of the Brain (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 12–13Google Scholar.
105. Kuindzhi painted several pieces, which he titled The Birch Grove. It is unclear whether he exhibited the painting from 1879 or a new work in 1881. There is no painting with this title that is dated definitively to 1881.
106. Chistiakov, Pis΄ma, 111.
107. Ibid., 499. Although Kuindzhi never studied with Chistiakov, the two kept in contact, as Chistiakov often served as a mediator between the painter and wealthy art buyers.
108. Polonskii, “Kartina Kuindzhi,” 2.
109. A comparison with the Austrian artist Gabriel Max’s painting Jesus Christus is appropriate. The portrait’s effect of Christ’s eyes appearing either open or closed, depending from where the portrait was observed, generated a sensation when exhibited in Russia in 1879. Kramskoi, however, panned it as courting sensation and profit. Sternin, G., Khudozhestvennaia zhizn΄ Rossii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka: 70–80-e gody (Moscow, 1997), 199Google Scholar.
110. Greenberg, Clement, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O’Brian, John (Chicago, 1988), 1:34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
111. Jones, Caroline A., “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Jones, Caroline A., ed., Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 8Google Scholar. The other bias is, of course, geographical: if Kuindzhi’s contemporaries, the Impressionists, constitute the core of the established narrative of modern art in the west, his status as a “Russian” painter has long prevented him from being counted, let alone among the vanguard.
112. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” 8.