Alexey Makhrov, Introduction to Mikhailov, 'Art exhibition in Petersburg'

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The journal of the radical intelligentsia The Contemporary became the centre of Russian intellectual life in the period of the Great Reforms of Alexander II at the end of the 1850s and beginning of the 1860s. Edited by poet Nikolai Nekrasov, philosopher and publicist Nikolai Chernyshevskii and literary critic Nikolai Dobroliubov, it was also in the vanguard of the development of democratic art criticism. This form of criticism had a crucial influence on the views of Vladimir Stasov and the art critics of the Sixties.

This review of the Academy exhibitions of 1859 is a re-examination of the state of Russian art and challenges the idea of the beneficial role of the Academy in the development of Russian art. The article is indicative the rapidity of the change of attitude towards art in the circles of the intelligentsia. This is demonstrated by the contrast with Vasilii Botkin's appreciative review in the same journal of the Academy exhibition of 1855, which belongs to the tradition of art criticism of the reign of Nicholas I. Mikhailov's article is one of the first essays in Russian art criticism which applies the criteria of literary criticism such as Dobroliubov's 'real criticism' to the analysis of painting. The overall result of such a transfer is that the works by Academic artists, which would have been received with approval only a few years before, fell short of the new standards. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Russian literature had acquired unprecedented importance: the works by Gogol', Goncharov, Turgenev and Tolstoi reflected Russian reality and responded to the concerns of the intelligentsia. Painting, however, still remained under the sway of cosmopolitan Academic aesthetics, and the lack of freedom of the Academy's students in the choice of subjects hindered the development of original talent. Against this background of superficial Academism Mikhailov indicates glimpses of hope in the works by the genre painters A. Popov and Grigorii Miasoedov, but most importantly in The Appearance of Christ to the People by Aleksandr Ivanov, which, he predicts, would change the course of Russian art. The article ends with a plea to Russian artists to turn to contemporary life and address the concerns of Russian society.