The Artist Beside Himself

1901: Isaac Levitan gains posthumous acclaim

in february 1901, a few months after the artist’s death, an exhibit of several hundred paintings by Isaac Levitan opened in Moscow and later moved to St. Petersburg. By then it was clear how great was the artist who had painted these landscapes and how important was his place in Russian art.

However, for much of Levitan’s short life (he died at age 40) he lived in grinding poverty. Most of his youth was endured in hunger, and, having no place else to stay, he often spent the night in the School of Painting and Sculpture, where he was a student. When he reached adulthood and became an established artist, he at times went barefoot in summer for lack of shoes and paid his landlady with what were then worthless sketches. In addition to hunger, he was plagued by disease, which took his father and mother to an early grave and brought his own end before his genius was fully realized.

During his life and after his death, Levitan was an object of controversy, and to some degree he remains so today. A Jewish boy who came to Moscow from a remote Lithuanian shtetl, he naturally was subjected to constant insults and humiliation. Given the artist’s rather Semitic features, it is easy to imagine that he often encountered hostility on the street, in taverns, and even at school. Levitan was twice forced to leave Moscow, in 1879 and 1892, during periodic mass expulsions of Jews from the ancient capital, and it was only thanks to the intercession of friends that he was able to return. By then, the fact that Levitan primarily painted Russian nature had already made him a contentious figure. How dare a Jew take the beauty of Russia as his subject matter? What could he possibly understand about it?

But Levitan harbored an absolutely amazing appreciation of nature. Portraits, historical treatments, genre paintings – none of these styles interested him. He did not even want to put any people or animals in his paintings. This occasioned the rather silly misconception that the artist did not paint portraits because he was observing some Jewish prohibition. The reason he did not paint people was simply that he did not feel human character the way he felt nature (he did, however, paint his own self-portrait). Furthermore, after spending time in France, Switzerland, and Italy, the artist, unlike a huge number of artists before and after him, remained more or less indifferent to the beauty of those far-off lands. As for gloomy Finnish landscapes, which did appear on his canvases, they afflicted Levitan with an unbearable sorrow, indeed he was subject to fits of melancholy throughout his short life.

The landscapes of central Russia, on the other hand, served as his main source of inspiration and joy. And this thrust him, like it or not, into the mainstream of a passion coursing through Russian life and culture.

In 1891 Levitan became a member of the Association of Itinerant Exhibitions, one of the best-known Russian cultural groups. The Itinerants made it their mission to create a truly democratic art that would meet the needs of the people, and they strove to make their works accessible to as many ordinary people as they could. That was the idea behind making the exhibitions “itinerant” (i.e. roving). As an artist who depicted simple Russian nature, rather than the beauty of Italy or grandiose historical events, Levitan had seemingly excellent Itinerant “credentials.” On the surface, the Itinerants and Levitan appeared to share the same outlook, since their subject matter certainly overlapped – central Russia, fields, forests, birches. But there was a difference. For the Itinerants it was always important to deliver a particular message to the audience, to relate the hard life of the people, to marvel at the laborers in the field, to bemoan the lot of the unfortunate child. Even when Christ appeared in their art, he served to represent the revolutionary.

But Levitan had no intention of delivering any messages. He simply wanted to capture the beauty of nature. Up to a certain point in time his paintings really did fit the Itinerant “agenda,” but the artist was developing, and as far as his friends in the Association were concerned, he was developing in the wrong direction. Levitan was increasingly captivated by the idea of “beauty for beauty’s sake.” In his later paintings the influence of the French Impressionists is increasingly evident. These were not naïve representations of familiar Russian nature, but intricate masterpieces in which, as in the grandiose Over Eternal Peace, the sky and water come together in a mysterious unity, conveyed by a style unfamiliar to the nineteenth century eye.

It is therefore not surprising that Levitan attracted the attention of the up-and-coming generation of artists, the founders of the World of Art («Мир Искусства»), for whom beauty was art’s ultimate goal, putting them in a state of irreconcilable conflict with the politicized Itinerants. Suffering from poor health and by nature averse to controversy, Levitan participated in the exhibitions of both groups, but this gave rise to misunderstandings and strife. The passions that roiled Russian culture around the dawn of the twentieth century were taken very seriously. The prominent critic Vladimir Stasov called one World of Art exhibition a “Nest of Lepers.” Could the creator of Golden Autumn and The Vladimirka really associate with “lepers”? Who knows where this conflict would have ended had not Levitan’s life been tragically cut short. Judging by his late works, he was moving farther and farther away from simple realism and toward a more modern style, which would have placed him firmly in the World of Art camp. We can only speculate how that would have affected the artist’s relationship with his old friends.

Sergei Diaghilev, one of the ideologues for the World of Art side, begged Chekhov to write about Levitan for his journal, but the writer hedged and finally refused. He never did write about Levitan. Perhaps this was because of the conflict that had clouded their friendship. As much as Levitan loved Chekhov, he could not forgive him for using his personal life as fodder for the story “The Grasshopper.” Perhaps the very private Chekhov simply did not want to write about someone of such personal significance. His friendship with Levitan had lasted many years and was important to both of them. Or perhaps he himself was not sure which artistic camp best represented his friend and had no desire to speculate.

Levitan’s early death spared him from an even more treacherous ideological tug-of-war. When the Soviets took over, they recognized in him a “true realist” and even forgave him his Jewish origins, at a time when paintings associated with the World of Art were proclaimed decadent and stashed safely away in the storerooms of the Tretyakov Gallery. We see the extent to which Levitan was posthumously revered in the fact that his ashes were moved to Novodevichy Cemetery in 1941, to be buried close to the remains of his friend Chekhov. The graves of those who had eternally reposed with Levitan, in the Jewish cemetery where he was originally laid to rest, have since disappeared beneath the high-rise buildings of Kutuzovsky Prospect (a fate shared by those buried in the Christian cemetery nearby).

Reproductions of Golden Autumn have adorned the covers of countless Russian language textbooks and the love Levitan felt for the nature of his native land has been held up as an ideal to generations of Russian schoolchildren. Perhaps this overexposure prevented Levitan from acquiring the popularity later enjoyed by the artists of the World of Art and the Russian avant-garde, once they were “permitted” during the more liberal periods of Soviet history. Levitan was ubiquitous, he was praised by the Powers That Be, and children were bombarded with his paintings starting in first grade, so it was sometimes difficult to truly appreciate the genuinely amazing subtlety and elegance of his paintings, or to understand the degree to which he surpassed his contemporaries.

By now, Soviet-era stereotypes are well forgotten, but Levitan’s ethnic origins are again becoming an issue. He is occasionally categorized as a “Jewish artist,” which for some is a plus and for others a minus.

Who “holds the rights” to Levitan? Did he belong to the realists or the avant-garde? Was he Russian or Jewish? The question, of course, is ridiculous. Levitan himself, a lonely, world-weary, sickly artist, whose demonic good looks had women fighting one another tooth and nail for the honor of his attentions, wrote of himself, “Why am I alone? Why haven’t the women who’ve been in my life brought me calm or happiness? Perhaps because even the best of them are proprietary. They must have everything or nothing. I cannot do things that way. I can only belong to my quiet, outcast muse. Everything else is vanity of vanities.”