Itinerant Exhibition

Today it is hard to imagine someone who has never seen, for instance, the smile of the Mona Lisa, even among those who have not visited Paris or set foot in the Louvre. Works of art from all epochs and countries surround us. We see them on the internet and on television; we can easily buy postcards of famous paintings and art books with high quality reproductions. Even those artists just starting their careers already have their own websites, so that as many people as possible can see their work.

But what was it like a hundred and fifty years ago? You could see paintings in museums, but only in the few cities where museums existed. There was no such thing as a major collection of Russian art – the Moscow merchant Pavel Tretyakov was only just starting to assemble one. Most paintings were in private collections, so they could only be seen by those fortunate enough to receive an invitation from the owner. The only ways to learn about the world’s greatest masterpieces was to embark on a lengthy and expensive trip or to buy an etching or drawing that reproduced the canvas with some degree of accuracy.

Up to a certain point in time, artists were perfectly satisfied with this situation. The artist-client relationship somewhat resembled the relationship between servant and master (indeed, in pre-emancipation Russia, artists were often serfs or former serfs of the subjects of their portraits). But times were changing. Artists were developing self-respect and a growing sense of their audience.

In the mid-nineteenth century, artists – be they poets, musicians, or painters – no longer thought of themselves as servants entertaining their masters and, as an afterthought, their venerable public, but as Creators, prophets, who, in the words of Pushkin, “set people’s hearts on fire.” Alexander Ivanov, one of the best painters of the mid-nineteenth century, devoted several decades of his life to the creation of a single canvas, The Appearance of Christ to the People, and was convinced that his painting would transform Russian life. This, alas, did not come to pass, but the painting did cause quite a stir.

All this was in the air during the formative years of the young artists who, in 1863, were so bold as to rebel against the seemingly omnipotent Academy of Arts and refuse to paint a scene from Scandinavian mythology required for graduation. The serfs had been liberated two years earlier and Russian public life was in a state of tumult. Artists yearned to select their own subjects and they wanted to take them from the real world all around them and not from the world of ancient legends.

The Academy, of course, did not meet them halfway. The fourteen rebels left without their degrees.

In order to make a living, they created an Artel of Free Artists, an enterprise that was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times, which welcomed every conceivable artel, cooperative, and commune as heralds of a future, more just order. In 1870, a new idea was born: to create the Association of Itinerant Exhibitions. A few months later the first Itinerant Exhibition traveled to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kharkov.

Many, who before this had only heard about the new type of art dreamed up by some young artists, were now able to see these paintings with their own eyes. The effect was tremendous. For several decades the Itinerants were the most popular and beloved of Russian artists.

As a historical coincidence, at approximately the same time, artists in France who would eventually come to be known as the Impressionists were beginning to exhibit their work. They also had broken free of the confines of their Academy, and they were also subject to ridicule by official culture, but the comparisons end there – the paths taken by the followers of Claude Monet and Ivan Kramskoy could not have been more different. The Impressionists were looking for new forms. They were interested in the glare of sunlight on the trembling leaves of water lilies and the play of light and shadow on the walls of the Rouen Cathedral, the living, ever-changing beauty of the world.

The Itinerants were also looking for new forms, at least that is what they said. But in essence what mattered most of all to them was new content: not stilted and grandiloquent mythological subjects, but the life of the people; not the landscapes of classical antiquity, but Russian copses; not historical heroes, but contemporary figures. It was this, first and foremost, that created their audience, an audience for whom, during the unsettled times that followed the reforms of the 1860s, the life of the people was perceived as the only subject worthy of art. They did not want art to celebrate the female foot, as Pushkin’s poetry had done, however brilliantly, but to depict the real, arduous life of the people, and to illuminate and point the way forward.

This is not to say that the Itinerants did not depict history, but if they did paint a historical scene it would certainly not feature Odin or Zeus, but rather Peter the Great engrossed in a painful discussion with his recalcitrant son, as did Nikolai Ge. If they painted a landscape, it would not be the stunning verdure of Italy, but black rooks perched above melting snow, as did Alexei Savrasov, who managed to transform a scene that would seem to have little artistic appeal into one of the finest Russian landscape paintings. Everyday subjects were no longer the stuff of second-rate art. Quite the contrary, this subject matter lent itself to depictions of the simple people – peasants, fieldworkers, children engaged in backbreaking labor, a religious procession joining all strata of Russian society, and so much more.

The Soviet government was unrestrained in its glorification of the Itinerants and designated them the “best Russian artists,” filling popular magazines and school textbooks with poor reproductions of the works of Repin and Perov. They appropriated these honest and noble people for their own purposes and attempted to make them their allies. But it is hard to imagine Perov depicting the building of the White Sea-Baltic Canal or Kramskoy painting flattering portraits of members of the party and government.

Naturally, the fact that we were all “supposed” to love the Itinerants wound up having the opposite effect. The sense that they were a bit dull became more intense, especially after, beginning in the 1960s, art lovers began to have some access to the amazing works of the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, a movement the somewhat passé Itinerants were fated to oppose and by which they were superseded.

At some point the Itinerants were turned into laughingstocks, into kitsch, and were relegated to candy wrappers that showed Shishkin’s Morning in a Pine Forest or pendants featuring the face of Kramskoy’s Unknown Woman, who was mistakenly perceived as symbolizing “the genius of pure beauty,” when actually the painter was depicting a “demimonde” – not exactly a member of respectable society. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was hardly a worse faux pas you could make at a student party than admit to a love for the Itinerants. Anyone who did so would be dismissed as lacking all taste and knowing nothing of true art.

From today’s perspective, it is easier to see that the Itinerants were in fact a diverse bunch. Some of them, such as Ge or Savrasov, were truly outstanding artists. Others (including, alas, the movement’s founder and talented organizer Kramskoy) were less impressive. And by the early twentieth century some truly dreadful artists were joining the Association of Itinerant Exhibitions. After the revolution, some of these relished the opportunity to exploit the movement’s state support to destroy personal enemies in other artistic camps.

But today one thing is clear. Russian art would not be what it is today without the Itinerants. You cannot understand the entirety of Russian culture of the late nineteenth century, with its flashes of genius and occasional mediocrity, its strong and weak aspects, unless you understand the Itinerants. Like it or not, they are a part of us.

No More Wandering: The final Itinerant exhibition, the 43rd, was held in 1923.