Distorted Portrait of an Artist

Ilya Repin, born August 5, 1844

One of the most striking things about Ilya Repin is how much he managed to accomplish over his long life. He was born in 1844 in the Eastern Ukrainian town of Chuguyev, where his family lived in a military settlement. By the time he died in the Finnish town of Kuokkala, in 1930 – in a different country and an entirely different era – he was a world-renowned artist.

It is a bit of a cliché that great artists do not live long, but Repin defied the stereotype, living a life that was not only long but amazingly energetic. Everything he did – paint, discuss art, swim in the cold waters of Finland, listen to music – he did with an energetic spirit that endured for 86 years.

Repin was extremely prolific. It would probably be hard to find another artist who left behind as many paintings. His close friend Korney Chukovsky wrote a eulogy in his honor that ended with the following summary:

Repin glorified Russian music through his portraits of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Glazunov, Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov and Russian literature with portraits of Gogol, Turgenev, Lev Tolstoy, Pisemsky, Garshin, Fet, Stasov, Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Korolenko, and many others. Russian painting was represented in Repin’s work by an entire gallery of portraits: Surikov, Shishkin, Kramskoy, Vasnetsov, Kuindzhi, Chistyakov, Myasoyedov, Ge, Serov, Ostroukhov, and many others. He glorified Russian science with his portraits of Sechenov, Mendeleyev, Pavlov, Tarkhanov, and Bekhterev, and Russian surgery with portraits of N.I. Pirogov and Ye.V. Pavlov (the latter of whom is depicted in a surgical ward performing an operation) – in a word, he captured the best that Russia had to offer for posterity.

This list is far from complete. People were eager to be painted by Repin, and he produced dozens upon dozens of portraits. He liked to address historical themes and also his own time, including in the grandiose Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council and They Did Not Expect Him, a painting about a young man’s return from forced labor, as well as many portraits of prominent Russian dignitaries. Of course, not every painting in an oeuvre of this size will be brilliant, but Repin did produce many masterpieces, especially among the portraits.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire (1891).

However Repin’s legacy came to be shaped by an historical irony. He celebrated the Russian Empire’s ethnic and cultural tapestry, as in his Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and produced works expressive of compassion for the hardships of the poor, such as Barge Haulers on the Volga. Furthermore, a number of his works betrayed a sense of sympathy for revolutionaries, such as The Propagandist’s Arrest or Refusing Confession. Yet after the revolution he did not once return to Soviet Russia, remaining in Kuokkala despite overtures by the authorities, beckoning friends, and a flattering proposal from the People’s Commissar for Defense, General Kliment Voroshilov. This man, who himself had emerged from society’s lower depths, who understood the suffering of the poor, and who had helped his wife establish a cooperative to feed the hungry in Kuokkala, immediately sensed that he would be better off steering well clear of the Bolsheviks.

The feeling was far from mutual. During the thirties, after Repin’s death, the Bolsheviks proclaimed this emigrant who never accepted the revolution to be a great genius of Socialist Realism. They exploited his tragedy, and the fact that Repin outlived the period of his ascendance – the era of the Itinerant artistic movement in which he played a central role – and was never able to find a common language with the artists of the Silver Age was, indeed, a tragedy for him. But in terms of communist ideology, this failure to fit in with the decadent Silver Age was a badge of honor.

It was not exactly a secret that Repin spent the last 30 years of his life in emigration, but this inconvenient truth was not openly discussed. What mattered was his devotion to Realism. Repin was officially crowned the “greatest Russian painter in history,” greater than Serov, Savrasov, or Korovin, and, of course, of much greater importance than any member of the despicable and semi-banned formalists. What good were the bizarre and incomprehensible paintings of Chagall or Malevich? Now, Repin’s paintings – chuckling Cossacks writing their irreverent response to the Turkish sultan or salt-of-the-earth types straining to pull a barge up the Volga – those were topics anyone could understand. His works were the subject of countless classroom essays, they illustrated history textbooks, and they provided generations with images of the artist’s renowned contemporaries.

After this Repin overload, is it any wonder that in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, when previously suppressed art of the early twentieth century from the World of Art and other Silver Age movements began to be taken out of museum storerooms and given limited showings, Soviet intellectuals began to view Repin with disdain, seeing in him nothing more than a sterile tool of Soviet propaganda?

The Surgeon Ye. Pavlov in the Operating Theater (1888).

In fact, Repin was a marvelous artist with a brilliant and lively mind. Chukovsky left an intimate portrait of his exuberance:

His temperament was pure Repin. From his letters we know that he once almost launched an inkwell at the landscape painter [Arkhip] Kuindzhi. And what an abundance of exclamation points there were in those letters! Never satisfied with a single exclamation point, he would put three or four in a row.

His passionate temper came through in his memoirs. Here, for example, is how he wrote about the state of ecstasy he experienced from music:

“I wanted to jump, to shout, to laugh and cry, careening crazily down the road… Oh, music! It always penetrates me to the bone.” It was in that same temperamental style that he described his first love:

“I was head over heels in love and was ablaze with passion and shame... An inner fire set me aflame. Awestricken, I was burning and suffocating.”

More often than not, his passion manifested itself in hyperbolic excesses of praise.

Here, for example, are some typical excerpts from his letters to me, mostly about some minor and long-forgotten newspaper and journal articles:

“I am thrilled by your phenomenal perspicacity…”

“You are inexhaustible as a man of genius…”

“If I was a beautiful young woman, I would throw my arms around you and kiss you till I fainted…”

“You are a man of such supernatural beauty and talent; you so profusely emanate the aroma of honey…”

Repin was a living, breathing man with huge talent and great energy and enthusiasm who transformed himself from a lower class and little educated provincial boy into a prominent intellectual and friend of Lev Tolstoy, a man whom those at the pinnacle of culture were proud to call their friend.

Perhaps he clung for too long to outdated ideas about art and struggled unsuccessfully to reinvent himself during the final decades of his life, but the real Repin was never the two-dimensional stalwart of Realism he was made out to be by Soviet propaganda. The image of Repin as the “greatest Russian artist” that was foisted on generations of Soviet schoolchildren and the endless reproductions of his works found throughout Soviet society did him an injustice.

He was not, of course, Russia’s “greatest artist.” He was just an artist and a man, and it will take some time before Russians can see him for what he was, without their view being skewed by propaganda and counter-propaganda.