Patrick Bade
Russian Portraits: From Peter the Great to the Revolution

Patrick Bade | Russian Portraits From Peter the Great to the Revolution | 05.15.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- So greetings to you from a bakingly hot Paris today. And the image on the screen is actually of Paris. It’s the sculpture court. It shows the sculpture court in an exhibition of Russian portraits that took place in Paris in 1905. And this was one of a series of cultural exchanges between Russia and France that resulted from so-called Dual Alliance. In the 1890s, Russia and France linked up to form a defensive alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary. And then of course, in the early 1900s, the Dual Alliance became the Triple Alliance, when Britain joined up with Russia and France. Now this exhibition was organised by Diaghilev, and it was designed by Léon Bakst. And it caused quite a sensation in Paris, not just because of the quality of the portraits, but the imaginativeness of the presentation. This was quite different from the way exhibitions had looked in the 19th century, where you just got sculptures in rows, or you’ve got pictures frame to frame, floor to ceiling. Now portraiture, like so many things, like opera, of course, was imported into Russia from Western Europe, and portraiture, in the sense of being a likeness of an individual person, painted portraits in Europe, they go back, of course, there had been portraits in the ancient world; but painted portraits go back to the early 15th century, Flanders and Italy.

This is a van Eyck self-portrait dating from the early 15th century. But at this time, of course, Russian artists are still working in a Byzantine tradition, very stylized, very abstracted, like the icon you see on the right-hand side. So we don’t get portraits of individual Russians until the very end of the 17th century. It comes in with all those reforms of Peter the Great, who was trying to open up Russia to the wider world. And so Peter the Great is the first Russian czar for whom we have convincing likenesses. You’ve got two rather different likenesses here. You might not recognise that this is the same man. The one on the left-hand side shows him as a young man. Famously, he came to Western Europe. He stayed in England, he stayed in Holland. And in Holland, he actually worked as a carpenter for a while in a ship-building yard. And then nearly 20 years later, he came back to Europe. And this time, he went to France, and he posed for the French artist, Jean-Marc Nattier. So that’s a rather more sophisticated and elegant image of Peter the Great. And thereafter, Russian czars in the 18th century, usually they imported their artists and they imported their architects and they imported their musicians.

This is Catherine the Great, painted by the German artist, Johann von Lampi; and two more Catherine the Great portraits, actually painted by Russian artists. The one on the left is by an artist called Dmitry Levitsky; the one on the right, by an artist called Rokotov. And apparently that, the one on the right, the one showing her in profile, is the only portrait of Catherine the Great for which she actually sat. She was unwilling to give sittings. Sittings, of course, is a very tiresome thing to have to do. Moving through to the 19th century, in the Romantic period, we have this artist, who’s called Orest Kiprensky, born 1782, died 1836, that’s his self-portrait. He seems to have been quite a character. He spent quite a large chunk of his career in Rome. He’s actually chased out of Rome when his mistress died in a mysterious fire in his studio, and it was suspected that he actually murdered her. And he went back to Russia, and in there, he painted one of the most famous of all Russian portraits, famous for its subject, although I think it’s a very good portrait, and you get a sense of what he looked like and what he was like.

This is Alexander Pushkin on the right-hand side, who’s the greatest of all Russian poets. But I’m going to concentrate today on a period of just over half a century, from the 1860s up to the early 1920s. So this is Repin’s very famous portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, I think I mentioned last week. This was painted the day before he died. He was actually in a hospital for treatment for his alcoholism, and he was supposed to be drying out. But the news reached him that the Czar Alexander II had been assassinated. But I don’t know whether he was depressed or whether he was celebrating, actually, but he fell off the waggon and had a alcoholic binge, and it was the final one. That’s the one that killed him. And on the right-hand side, a wonderful portrait by Golovin of the great playwright and theatre director, Meyerhold. So these two splendid portraits, in their very different ways, they bookend my talk today. In the 1860s, there’s a new nationalist wind that is blowing through Russian culture.

And I’ve already talked about the Mighty Handful, or The Five, the five composers: César Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Balakirev, and Rimsky-Korsakov. And from the 1860s onwards, they were trying to create a national school of music, music that would have a distinctly Russian character. It would take its melodies and its rhythms from Russian folk music. And they wanted to create operas with Russian rather than Italian texts, and on Russian subjects. And in art, we find an equivalent at exactly the same time with a group of artists, of 14 artists, who broke with the St. Petersburg Academy in 1863. And they formed a group who moved, or they exhibited around different cities in Russia. And hence, they were nicknamed either The Itinerants or The Ambulants. And this Ambulants, that is, rather than C, TS on the end, rather than CE on the end.

This is maybe the most famous of their pictures. This is by Ilya Repin. So like the composers, they want to create an art that is specifically Russian. I mean, it’s not really particularly Russian in style, because it’s really Realism with a capital R. And Realism is an international style in the middle of the 19th century; most significant, perhaps, in France, but you find it in all European countries. It’s Russian in its subject matter. It’s this, the subject matter of this picture shows the gruelling work of the barge haulers on the ridge of the River Volga. So they want to show all levels of Russian society, rural Russia, urban Russia. This is a peasant painted by the artist Surikov. Incidentally, in this talk, of course, there are masses and masses of Russian names, many of which you may not have heard before. But do not worry. I have typed, I have laboriously typed out a list of all the names that I mention in this lecture, and it will have been sent to you. If you can watch this lecture, you can find the list, because it came with the link. All you have to do is scroll down and find it. So no need to ask me. Please don’t ask me for the spellings of all the names in this lecture. This is an artist called Vasnetsov. And you can see there, not just dealing with contemporary Russia, but also this is mediaeval Russian history.

This is a very famous painting by Viktor Vasnetsov, so it’s also the same artist, showing the ghoulish episode of the execution of the Streltsy conspirators by Peter the Great in the early 18th century. And also contemporary subjects, sometimes with a political edge to them. This is another very famous image, really, often reproduced, it’s by Ilya Repin. And the title is, “They Were Not Expecting Him”. So it’s a picture where it’s telling a story, and it’s a story with a certain political relevance. It’s a man who is returning from exile in Siberia and he’s arrived unexpectedly in his rather bourgeois-looking household. Of course, it’s a painting about this very arbitrary arrest, arbitrary exiling, arbitrary punishment of so many people, famously, of course, Dostoevsky. So there are three characters who are not artists who play a very important role as movers and shakers in promoting this new Russian art movement.

And on the left is Vladimir Stasov. He was a critic of both art and music. And I mentioned him last week as a promoter of the Mighty Handful, but he’s also a promoter of the Itinerant artists. And on the right is Pavel Tretyakov. He gave his name to the gallery. And he was a wealthy industrialist who used his money to become a patron of the arts. And in the late 1850s, he went, he came to London, and in London in 1856, they’d set up the National Portrait Gallery. It was the first time that a nation had created a gallery of this kind. And he was very taken by this idea, and he thought Russia should have something of the same. And so he took it upon himself to create a collection of portraits of prominent cultural figures in Russia. A great many of the portraits I’m going to show you today were commissioned by him or bought by him and are now in the Tretyakov Gallery. That painting on, both these paintings, actually, by Ilya Repin. And the third person who’s very, very important for painting and for music too, actually, is Savva Mamontov, you can see his portrait by Vrubel on the left-hand side.

He had an immense fortune that came from railways and it also came from oil. And he created an artists’ colony at a place called Abramtseva, and, Abramtsevo, rather. And so it, every aspect of this colony was designed to promote Russianness You can see, there’s a whole village of buildings in the traditional Russian styles. And he invited artists, he invited musicians. He was a great patron of Repin, of Serov, of Vrubel. And he set up a private opera house and he presented the operas of the Mighty Handful. And he was also instrumental in promoting the early career of Feodor Chaliapin. Now the first artist I’m going to deal with, and probably the most prolific and the most important, is Ilya Repin. He was long-lived, he was born in 1844. So that makes him a slight, very slightly younger contemporary of the Impressionists. So, you know, Monet is born 1840, Renoir’s born 1841. From a very, started off very humbled background, actually initially trained as an icon painter. And then he managed to get into the academy in St. Petersburg. And he was very much helped by a slightly older artist called Ivan Kramskoi, who I’m going to talk about in a minute.

This is his self-portrait. So like everybody, of course, he had to go to Paris. It was, as in earlier periods, an artist would have to go to Rome. So he arrives in Paris in the 1870s. It’s a very exciting time. Well, it’s always exciting to be in Paris, but it’s particularly exciting to be in Paris in the 1870s. And you can see this quite ambitious painting of Paris street life, cafés, sort of dandies and ladies of ill repute. But he had, like a lot of Russians, I mean, he’s very attracted to France, very attracted to French culture. Mm, quite, I would say an ambivalent attitude towards it, thinking in some ways it was decadent and that Russia needed to do something else. But he became very famous, I suppose he became the most famous Russian artist of his day. And inevitably, of course, he was required to do some rather official portraits, like this one of Czar Nicholas II. But my guess is that this was done a bit contrecoeur. His sympathies were probably not very czarist. I think they went to somewhat more to the left.

Although eventually when the Revolution happened, he decided to leave. And even though the Soviets desperately wanted him to go back and tried to lure him back, he remained for his final years in exile in Finland. But so, and this is, you know, it’s a competent portrait. It’s pretty dull, actually. And I think the same has to be said for this quite famous portrait of Turgenev. And Ivan Turgenev was a sort of grand old man of Russian literature, but living in France in a rather strange ménage à trois with the singer Pauline Viardot and her husband. And it was Tretyakov who commissioned Repin to go to Paris in the 1870s to paint this portrait. And there was not a comfortable or relaxed relationship between artist and sitter. They really didn’t get on very well. And there is a certain sort of formality and stiffness about this portrait.

I don’t know whether it was conscious or not that the pose chosen by Repin for Turgenev is a rather papal pose, in a throne-like chair at half-length, three-quarter view. Of course, that was the standard format for papal portraits going right back to the early 16th century, the famous Raphael portrait of Pope Julius II, which you see on the right-hand side. But Repin, he’s very, he’s versatile as an artist. He paints all sorts of different subjects, historical subjects, contemporary subjects, landscapes. And he’s also very versatile as a portraitist. And I think his best portraits actually have a wonderfully relaxed, informal, intimate quality about them. These two, where you can see these two gentlemen who are sort of lulling rather than posing. And on the left is a fellow artist called Andreev, and on the right is a much more sympathetic portrait of Mamontov than the one by Vrubel, that I’ve just shown you.

And this, this is another, this is the same gentleman as the man with the red shirt. This is Andreev; what a delightful, sympathetic portrait. You really, here you really do feel, I think, a strong sense of connection and sympathy between the artist and the sitter. And you can see by this time, well, this is getting on in his career, 1904, his technique has really loosened. He has clearly learned quite a lot from Manet, he’s learned a lot from the French Impressionists. This, I don’t know who this lady is, but again, it’s a portrait with a very appealing intimacy about it, somebody who’s just been caught in an odd moment as she’s reading a book. And this, now what, before I tell you anything, what do you think about this young man? This is Repin again. And this is a well-known Russian writer of short stories called Garshin. And so of course, when you know a story about a sitter, you can sometimes read too much into it. But I feel a tremendous sadness and melancholy in this painting.

I find it a moving painting, a touching painting. And in fact, the sitter committed suicide very shortly. He was somebody with mental health problems, and he committed suicide by throwing himself down the staircase of the apartment building where he lived. So he’s engaging us, I think, with an immensely sad expression. These, I think, are once again, Tretyakov commissions. So he paints everybody. Everybody who’s anybody in Russia had to be painted by Ilya Repin. And this is the great composer and conductor and pianist, Anton Rubinstein, huge, huge figure in the 19th century. Huge figure in Russia and huge internationally, and he was generally reckoned to be the closest rival to Liszt as a piano virtuoso; and a very prolific composer, quite an interesting composer of operas. I’m going to play some excerpts of his most famous opera, “The Demon”, where they will come up later in series. But here again, he’s showing, the one on the left-hand side, I mean, he’s got this pose, of course, when you, is often these days identified as being a rather defensive pose. If somebody does that when you are talking to them, it’s often a sign that there are in a slightly defensive mode.

But again, it’s a picture which has an informality, the fact that he’s got this rather tilted pose. And on the right-hand side, of course, we see him actually engaged in conducting, with an expression of intense concentration. He paints, like a lot of portraitists, some of his most attractive portraits are of his immediate family circle. The painting on the left-hand side comes quite early in his career, so the palette is rather more subdued and conventional, and is quite tightly painted. But a very charming image of his first wife taking a little nap, rather than posing formally. And again, a delightfully informal pose and composition of his younger brother, Vasily, on the right-hand side. And as he and his wife had children, of course, he enjoyed painting his own children. That’s his son, where you get a sense of, I think these two paintings, of the son and the daughter, what strikes me about them is the very unusual viewpoints. That you have a sense of the fragility and the smallness of the boy, because you are an adult and you are looking down on him. Whereas the little girl, of course, she’s perched on a branch or a pole, and you’re looking up to her.

And this you can see is a plein-air painting. Plein air, open air. This was a very big concern of many artists in the mid to late 19th century, painting out of doors. Of course, Constable had already done it early in the 19th century, but it becomes much more feasible and is much more widely practised from the 1840s onwards, partly as a result of the invention of the collapsible metal tubes, so that you could take all your paints very conveniently out of doors with you in a little box, all in their little toothpaste tubes. This is the same girl, obviously, about 10 years later, I suppose, or more than 10 years later. This is his daughter, Vera. And from, this must be what, 1890s, you know, from the costume. And you can see what he’s learned from French painting. That’s a Renoir of the late 1860s. So there is actually a generation between, there’s a time lapse between Repin and Russian artists really taking up on the innovations of the Impressionists, posing somebody out-of-doors.

Of course, you don’t want to pose a young woman in the 19th century in the direct sunlight, ‘cause you don’t want to ruin her complexion, give her freckles or a suntan or anything like that. So she’s shaded by sunshade, parasol, and her, as in both these paintings, of course, the young woman is actually lit from below, because the light is coming, is reflected, the sunlight is reflected from below onto the face rather than hitting it directly from above. And so he’s got a huge range of interests, Repin. So you know, there we’ve seen him painting Czar Nicholas II, we see him, he doesn’t do a lot of what I would call society portraits, but he certainly paints the great and the good. He paints the famous musicians, lots of other art portraits by him of other artists, but he’s also interested in outsiders. So there are a lot of very striking portraits of people who don’t fit into the norms of society. We’ve got a hunchback on the left-hand side; and the painting on the right-hand side, the title of it is “The Man with an Evil Eye”.

And this one, again, is clearly somebody from the very, the depths or the edges of society, a very vivid portrait. This, I think, is a most incredible picture. This is actually painted in 1917, so Repin is quite an old man when he paints this. And it’s painted as the Russian armies collapsed. This is, so this could be now. This could be some poor, desperate, young conscripted soldier who has this, the title of this is “The Deserter”, and it is somebody who’s deserted from the Russian army in 1917. Has an extraordinary vividness and actuality to it. Now we move on to the teacher who, his teacher, this is Repin’s mentor and teacher, an artist he was always immensely grateful to, and his name is Ivan Kramskoi. But in fact he’s only, he’s born in 1837, so he’s only seven years older than Repin. But he already had a teaching position at the St. Petersburg Academy.

This is his self-portrait. But he’s another artist who’s very much involved in this project of memorialising Russian talent. So he paints very fine, these are two other artists by Kramskoi They are, let me see, can I, yes, Alexander Litovchenko and Ivan Shishkin. In fact, I don’t know the work of either artist, but they’re certainly very… I think artists painting other artists is always an interesting thing. I mean, going back to the 16th and 17th century. And this guy, this is also by Kramskoi, and it’s a famous actor of the time called Alexander Lensky. And he was playing, in this show, assuming the role of Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew”. Shakespeare, of course, really taken on by the Russians almost as a sort of national playwright, as he is in various countries.

Of course, there were great Shakespeare translations into pretty well every, well, every language, during, in particularly in the Romantic period, in the early 19th century. I mean, I still remember my, I was sort of adopted by an elderly couple in Munich in the early 1970s. And the husband was very keen on French literature and rather dismissive of English literature. And he said, “Oh, well the English have never really produced a really great writer like Molière or Balzac.” And I said, “Oh, well Shakespeare.” And he said to me, “Ah! Shakespeare! Yuck! Shakespeare England.” 'Cause I, you’ll find, I think pretty well every nation, they have such good translations of Shakespeare, and they sort of think of Shakespeare as being one of their own. And this is another vivid portrait of an actor, a man called Vasily Samoilov, painted by Kramskoi. And also, interested in people outside the norms of society. This is obviously a street person that he’s picked up, painted by Kramskoi.

Now we move on to Vasily Perov. This is his self-portrait. But he is really, and he’s quite a short-lived artist, but he’s particularly known for one portrait, a very extraordinary portrait of Dostoevsky. I think this is the only portrait of Dostoevsky from life. And certainly, I mean, this is the magic of portraiture, isn’t it? That you look at this and somehow you feel you know Dostoevsky, and you know what kind of a man he is, that he’s troubled and introspective, and it’s an extraordinary vivid likeness. And we move on now to Nikolai Kuznetsov. He, this is his self-portrait on the left-hand side. And his most famous portrait, and again, a portrait that like the Dostoevsky, it’s endlessly reproduced all over the place. Another very introspective and troubled character. I’m going to be talking about him of course in my next lecture.

And this is Tchaikovsky. Next to Repin, I suppose the other Russian portraitist of the late 19th century who has an international reputation is Valentin Serov, and this is his self-portrait as a young man. Even more than Repin, he came from a very, very humble and a very difficult background. He really had to struggle, and he was lucky. I mean, he obviously had an immense natural talent and gift. He was one of these people who had a really stupendous technical facility. It could be a danger, sometimes; it can lead to kind of art that can be flashy and facile. But anyway, that helped him. But he was morally and financially helped, like Repin, really more or less adopted him almost as a sort of artistic son. And he also was lucky to attract the attention and the patronage of Mamontov. And he also does portraits of prominent artists, intellectuals, writers.

The most famous portrait of Rimsky-Korsakov is this one, who seems to be in the process of correcting a score. That’s kind of telling, really, because I suppose Rimsky-Korsakov is as famous, if not more famous, for the scores by other composers that he edited, like “Prince Igor” and “Boris Godunov”, rather than his own original music. So if Mamontov helped Serov, he certainly, I think, was repaid. Serov spent lots of time living at this artists’ colony that was set up by Mamontov. And he painted this absolutely ravishing, I think, portrait of Mamontov’s daughter, Vera. A wonderful rendition of the light filtering through the window. And I think there’s, he’s making maybe not such a subtle little reference here. She’s this, how old is this girl? She’s probably mid-teens, I suppose. And she’s peachy. And you can see the peaches on the table in front of her. It’s a most enchanting and attractive portrait. He’s good at painting children too. This is a portrait of another, the son of another great collector, Morozov.

This was recently in the great exhibition at Louis Vuitton Centre. So this painting is actually now, I think, in a storeroom at the Russian Embassy in Paris. Because of the current situation, all those paintings can’t actually be returned to Russia. Now, unlike Repin, Serov took to society portrait painting like a duck to water. So Serov really became the John Singer Sargent of Russia, and the go-to artist if you wanted a really impressive, glamorous society portrait. This is the Princess Olga, what is her name? Olga Orlova on the left-hand side. And I put a Sargent on the right-hand side for comparison. You can see, I think, Serov, he’s such a skilled artist that he can give Sargent quite a run for his money in these portraits that are super elegant, super glamorous, and very impressive; but at the same time, don’t seem stiff or formal, they seem quite relaxed.

And how about this one? This is, this young man, this very beautiful young man, he was said to be the most beautiful man in Russian high society. We’re talking about the painting on the left, of course, not the image on the right. This is the young Prince Yusupov, who, a decidedly ambiguous character who was cross-dressing bisexual. There was a scandal. He used to go out at night in his mother’s clothes and wearing her jewels, and rather recklessly one time went out wearing her pearl necklace and managed to break it while in an elegant restaurant. And the, of course, the manager of the restaurant had collected all the pearls and delivered them to his father’s palace. And there was a quite a eruption about that.

But anyway, he was persuaded to get married. But I suppose he’s most famous for his part in the murder of Rasputin, who you see on the right-hand side. And there are these very, he left a very vivid account of that murder, which Rasputin was lured to the Yusupov Palace in, is it 1916, I think it was? And there was this very, these gruesome attempts to bump him off with poison and bullets and stabbings, and eventually he was drowned in a freezing canal. Now I want to finish by looking at several characters who were portrayed by many different artists. I always find this very fascinating. I love it when you get an exhibition, in other words, there was one in Paris, I suppose about 10 years ago, about Monsieur Serre, you know, and everybody in Paris painted Monsieur Serre. And it’s so interesting to see how one person is seen by different artists. And starting off, of course, with Leo Tolstoy, who’s really by the late 19th century, he is the grand old man of Russian literature.

So this is a portrait of him by Ivan Kramskoi; and this is by an artist called Nikolai Ge, G-E, actually concentrating on his writing. And there’s a self-portrait by Nikolai Ge on the right-hand side. But I suppose there’s a huge number of portraits of Tolstoy by Repin, who became an intimate and a friend of Tolstoy in his later years. Tolstoy, who became a little bit batty, I think, later on, or, well, some people say very, very sane. Because his ideas, I suppose, he would be, you know, the king of the greens today, where he was advocating, you know, going back to nature, leading a simple life, dressing as a peasant, going around, as you can see, I hope, on the left-hand side, barefoot. And here we see him reading, lying on the floor in a forest. And this is another painting by Repin of Tolstoy, as I said, really going back to the soil, literally, and ploughing the earth as though he were a peasant.

Somebody who was probably painted by even more people than Tolstoy was Chaliapin. Chaliapin was just such a spectacular, colourful character. I’m going to be devoting a whole talk to him in a couple of weeks’ time. This one, hmm, this is by Serov. I think this is not one of Serov’s most revealing portraits, and it’s a competent, elegant likeness. There are more interesting. Here, this is Golovin. And Golovin painted numerous portraits of Chaliapin in various different roles. The most famous role, of course, was Boris Godunov. So this is the full-length Boris Godunov. And here is a sketch, or head, with Boris Godunov. Mephistopheles, I think the Mephistopheles on the left is the Gounod one, from Gounod’s “Faust”. The one on the right is certainly the one from Boito’s opera, “Mefistofele”, which as we shall hear, gave Chaliapin the opportunity to show off his magnificent physique, to the delight of some audiences and to the scandal, oddly enough, of audiences in New York.

Here is Chaliapin as Holofernes in the opera, “Judith”. And this is Chaliapin by an artist called Konstantin Korovin, who was, he’s the nearest thing that the Russians had at the time to a French Impressionist. He went to France in, I think already in the ‘70s, and certainly picked up the Impressionist technique very directly from artists like Renoir and Monet, and this loose, broken brushwork, very spontaneous. So two images of Chaliapin by Korovin. And the third one, with the bright sunlight, and very much a sort of typical palette of bright, fresh colours of a French Impressionist. And then moving into the early 20th century, this is Chaliapin by an artist, this is after the First World War, actually after the Revolution.

This is an artist called Boris Grigoriev. And it’s, no, this is Kustodiev, Kustodiev painting in 1922. And then, how about this? This is Grigoriev. This is really weird stuff. I suppose, Chaliapin, he makes him look rather older than he actually was. I think he would’ve been around in his forties when this was painted. But what a pose! You know, it’s a Venus pose. So just this, it’s a typical pose for a reclining Venus. It’s very, very odd for this rather burly, middle-aged man to be taking this pose. Again, Grigoriev of Chaliapin. This is Boris Anisfeldt, Chaliapin. And how about this one? This is an artist called Alexandre Jacovleff, who moved to France and then eventually to America. There’s a very important collection of his work at the Museum of the 1930s in Paris. And he was particularly famous for his interest in different ethnic types.

But here, Chaliapin stripping off to show his magnificent torso. As I said, he caused quite a sensation by doing that in the opera, “Mefistofele”, by Boito. This is the poet Anna Akhmatova. I hope, I’m probably mispronouncing that. And I, of course, I’m not really a poetry person, and I certainly don’t read Russian poetry, but she is considered to be one of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. And you can see she had a striking, unusual beauty, with this rather strange nose with the bump in the middle of it. So, and obviously artists were and photographers, there’s a photograph of her on the left. And this is a portrait of her by a woman called Olga, no. Dear, I’m not sure what her name is, but I’d have to look that up. But here she is again, by, oh yes, this is by an artist called Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, that’s his self-portrait on the right-hand side. And that is Arkmatova on the left-hand side. And here she is by Nathan Altman.

And the last person I want to show you multiple portraits of is the great playwright Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was a revolutionary figure both politically and artistically in the history of the theatre. Initially, of course, embracing the ideals of the Revolution, but then eventually finding himself a victim of the Soviet regime. In the paranoia of the Great Trials of the 1930s, he was arrested and thrown into prison, and he was murdered in prison in 1940. And his wife, his widow, was murdered in her apartment soon afterwards. So here he is by Golovin, by Grigoriev, a rather Cubist, Futurist version of him by an artist called Vasily Shukhaev. And again, a sort of Cubo-Futurist version of him by an artist called Yuri Annenkov. So, I’m just going to show you these very lovely self-portraits by an artist called Zinaida Serebriakova.

In fact, I don’t know a lot about her, and I’ve never seen anything by her except a handful of self-portraits, this being the most famous and the most delightful. And so Russia was in the era just leading up to the First World War, of course, Russia was very, very open to new ideas. And you’ve got these great collectors, Shchukin, Merikov, who are buying the Picasso and Matisse and Paget and all these kind of things and bringing it back and allowing young artists to study these pictures in their palaces. And this is an artist called Ilya Mashkov, clearly very aware of Matisse, in particular, and early Picasso. This is his self-portrait. And the most, probably the most original, influential of the Russian avant-garde artists just before the First World War and a pioneer of Abstraction, this is a self-portrait by Kazimir Malevich. And this is a portrait of another artist by Malevich in a Synthetic Cubist style.

So this is, that this period just before the First World War, just during the war, immediately after the Revolution, it was a period of anything goes artistically, wild experimentation, very exciting. It was a real sense of elation that, you know, everything was possible. But of course, this didn’t last. Even towards the end of the Lenin period, the regime began to restrict artists and to persecute artists. And of course, you end up getting this utterly dreary and formalistic art of the Soviets. From all that excitement and experimentation, it’s really all gone by about 1925, and this is what you get instead.

So, I’ve come to an end. I’m going to see what questions we have.

Q&A and Comments

Barbara saying, “Hello.” Yes, there is a very, haunted is the right word, I think, for that portrait of Garshin. The Raphael portrait of Julius II, of course, is included in the current exhibition. I hope you all noticed I actually, well actually, initially it was by accident, but then I decided to keep it that way, that I was showing it reversed. In reality, it’s the other way around.

Q: “Are there any contemporary…?” A: I’m sure there are. I bet you Wendy knows a lot about it. Wendy’s much more up to scratch on contemporary art than I am.

Abigail, thank you. “His paintings are better than…” “I prefer to modern art anytime.” That’s Nanette, yes. Thank you. “Yusupov joined the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.” I didn’t know, that’s so perfect! That is really, that’s very funny. Thank you very much for telling, for sharing that with us. “The Russians all look very intense, rather frightening.” Mm, I think I did show you some quite relaxed and friendly people as well.

Q: “Is there a Russian who’s the equivalent of Rembrandt?” A: Did you know, one shouldn’t really kind of rate artists in this way. But I don’t, to me, Rembrandt and Velázquez, as far as portraits are concerned, are the ultimate great artists. Nobody comes quite near them. And Sargent, who’s an artist I hugely admire, I absolutely adore Sargent, and I don’t like it when people are snobby or sniffy about Sargent. Sargent said when he went to the National Gallery and he saw paintings by house, he couldn’t wait to get back to his studio to have a go. But he said when he had saw paintings by Rembrandt, he just felt like he should give up.

I’m not really the person to give you a lecture on Russian Abstract art. I do lecture sometimes on Kandinsky, of course, I know the Kandinsky collections in Munich very well. And I’m really looking forward to going back to Munich in August, and I’ll be talking about Kandinsky there. But Malevich, I’m never really quite sure I get it. I’m not sure I really understand it. So I don’t think I’m the best person to talk about Malevich. Who, I mean, anybody could have painted that style and picture at the end. There are endless pictures like that. Am I familiar with the “Boyar Wedding” by Makovsky? No, I don’t think I am.

Q: “Were Jewish artists discriminated against?” A: I don’t think they were, actually. I don’t, there, of course, it depends on the period. There, you know, both under the czars and under Stalin, of course, there were periods where Jews were discriminated against and persecuted. But I think if you had enough talent, that of the artists I showed you tonight, I’m just trying to think if any were Jewish. Kuznetsov was, I think, half-Jewish. And that’s quite interesting. And his daughter, Kuznetsov, I’m going to be talking about her, and I’ve got quite an interesting anecdote about her trying to persuade a Jewish singer to convert to Christianity. But I’ll save that for another time.

Chagall doesn’t really fit into the, I’ll be doing a whole lecture on Chagall, but it didn’t really fit into the parameters of this lecture. “Nice shine on the floor” to Nicholas. Yes, I agree with you, but not such an interesting picture, really. “Was Malevich…” Malevich, he, what did he call it? I’m just trying to think of the label that he gave to his… He went, Malevich went through a phase, a sort of Cubist phase and a Futurist phase before arriving at his version of Abstraction. Pasternak, yes, I did think that, I nearly included a portrait by him of Rachmaninoff, but you can’t include everybody.

Right, thank you all very much. And I’m moving on to, back to music and on to Tchaikovsky for my next talk.