by Alexey Makhrov
An expanded and revised version of this essay is published by Carol Adlam and Alexey Makhrov as 'A Russian Kaleidoscope: Shifting Visions of the Emergence and Development of Art Criticism in the Electronic Archive Russian Visual Arts, 1800-1913', Art On the Line, 1 (2004) (ISSN 1478-6818).
Russian writings on visual arts in the ninenteenth and early
twentieth centuries (1814-1909) (page 1 of
3) (Go to p. 2, p. 3)
Overview
The purpose of this web site is to make available to scholars and
students of Russian culture around the world a significant number of
texts pertaining to Russian art criticism and to encourage a
re-examination of the role which art played in Russian society in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It also aims further to
integrate previously separated areas of European cultural history by
opening up possibilities for analysis of the interchange of ideas in
art criticism between Western and Eastern Europe. The web site
includes a selection of texts
devoted to Russian visual arts and written between 1814 and 1909,
covering therefore the period from the emergence of Russian art
criticism as a distinct genre of writing at the beginning of the
nineteenth century to the early manifestations of modernism. A
number of essential sources which are translated into English for
the first time highlight the work of major writers on art and the
nature of discussions on contemporary art in Russia.
The texts are accompanied by an extensive scholarly apparatus
which comprises a research bibliographic
database of the publications used for the project, a timeline designed in order to locate writings on art
in the context of political and cultural life as well as events in
the art world, and biographical notes on major art critics of the period
under consideration. This material is complemented by a collection
of digital images taken from contemporaneous publications which
contribute to the reconstruction of the ambience in which art
critical texts were produced.
This web site attempts to demonstrate both the variety of forms
and the continuity in the development of art critical discourse in
Russia. The project applied established academic standards to the
republication of primary sources combined with the flexibility and
vast opportunities to relate pieces of information offered by the
Internet. Perhaps the most surprising result of such a combination
is that the end product seems to have acquired certain
characteristics of the primary material: the web site has gained
that complex and all-embracing quality that confronts researchers
into art criticism and at the same time it reveals an almost
infinite network of relationships between art and society.
The web site is intended to demonstrate some of the opportunities
for research into Russian culture offered by the extensive Slavonic
collection of the British
Library which was the chief resource provider for the project.
However, the project went beyond the investigation of the material
located in the British Library. A comprehensive survey of primary
texts was undertaken in the National Library of Russia, formerly the Imperial
Public Library, St Petersburg, one of the most complete holdings of
Russian periodicals. More than seven hundred documents have been
obtained from these libraries in the form of photocopies which,
together with a selection of books on Russian art, now form the
foundation of a hard-copy archive of Russian art criticism based in
the University of Exeter. The texts represented on the project web
site are drawn from this archive and indicate the scope of material
uncovered by the project.
The on-line archive of primary sources is the core element of the
web site. The selection and the presentation of texts took into
account several considerations. Several publications which affected
the development of discussions on art were not included in the
on-line archive on account of their considerable length and because
they are already well known and widely available in the West. Those
texts included, for example, Nikolai Chernyshevskii's dissertation
The Aesthetic Relationships of Art to Reality published in
1855, which provided critics with new criteria for judging works of
art by placing reality above the ideal, and Lev Tolstoi's treatise
What is Art?, which accused both professionalised art and art
criticism of being harmful to society and advocated the revival of
the spiritual mission of art.
Existing work by Russian scholars was drawn upon by the project.
For example, a thorough compilation of documents including sources
indispensable for the history of Russian art criticism by authors
ranging from Vladimir Stasov to Aleksandr Benua is contained in
Russkaia progressivnaia khudozhestvennaia kritika vtoroi poloviny
xix-nachala xx veka (Progressive Russian Art Criticism of the
Second Half of the Nineteenth to the Start of the Twentieth
Centuries) edited by V.V. Vanslov (Moscow, 1977). A number of
the articles reprinted in that book have been used for the on-line
archive. The anthology, however, may now be seen to place excessive
emphasis on texts of a certain type, namely those of Marxist writers
condemning 'bourgeois' culture, resulting in an overemphasis on the
importance of those texts which supported realist art and the
exclusion of articles published in the journals The World of
Art and The Golden Fleece at the turn of the century. On
occasion reprinted texts are truncated so as to remove sections
which do not conform to the 'progressive' image of the author. An
article written by the artist Vasilii Vereshchagin was so affected:
the text was given the title 'O realizme' ('On Realism') and
abridged to such an extent that the author's ideas on art became
entirely separated from his political beliefs, which were excluded,
thereby distorting the meaning of the text. In the present project
it has not always been possible to obtain complete versions of all
the texts represented on the web-site, but we have attempted to
represent the sources objectively: thus the full version of
Vereshchagin's article is reproduced under its original title 'Realism'.
A comprehensive survey and an in-depth investigation of primary
sources related to Russian art criticism is essential, since a
history of this subject is yet to be written. The approach to the
selection of the original documents aimed therefore to create a
balanced overview of the discussions on art by including texts
regardless of whether or not their authors have been previously
designated as 'progressive', 'retrograde', 'modernist',
'conservative', 'decadent', etc. Instead, the task of the editors
was rather to represent the texts as much as possible in the context
of their time, bearing in mind that the public debates, particularly
those in the periodical press, reflected the views of significant
segments of Russian society. It is the way Russian people thought
about art, notwithstanding their political persuasions and
ideological commitments, that the project attempted to represent.
However, a strategy had to be devised in order to guide the user
through a largely unknown and extensive body of writing made
available by the project both in English translation and in original
Russian versions. A number of texts fall into broad categories which
reflect peculiarities of Russian culture and its chronological
development, such as exhibition reviews, the relationship between
literature and art criticism, professional art criticism and the
Russian art press. For instance, the focus on the reviews of
exhibitions of Russian art makes it possible to establish the
grounds for research into the evolution of art criticism. Two main
exhibiting organisations dominated the Russian art world during the
greater part of the nineteenth century: the Academy of Arts in St
Petersburg (founded in 1757) and the Association of Itinerant Art
Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki) established in 1870. Their
periodic exhibitions were representative of the state of art in
Russia and attracted the attention of major art critics.
These categories, however, did not mean the exclusion of other
types of writing pertaining to visual arts. Such a limitation would
not only have left the texts themselves without sufficient context,
but also have impoverished our understanding of the variety of ways
in which art was interpreted. Essays on individual paintings,
reflections on the meaning and function of art criticism, editorials
of art journals, lectures on aesthetics, public recriminations
between supporters of opposing ideologies, statutes, petitions,
published documents and private correspondence - all of these
sources contribute to the reconstruction of the atmosphere in which
art existed in nineteenth century Russia.
The texts
The images,
database and timeline
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