thu 28/03/2024

theartsdesk in Moscow: Isaac Levitan at the Tretyakov Gallery | reviews, news & interviews

theartsdesk in Moscow: Isaac Levitan at the Tretyakov Gallery

theartsdesk in Moscow: Isaac Levitan at the Tretyakov Gallery

Chekhov's great friend is celebrated on his 150th anniversary

The Tretyakov Gallery is currently housing a landmark exhibition to mark the 150th anniversary of Isaac Levitan. His glorious “mood landscapes” catch the understated beauty of provincial Russia, with an often gloomy philosophical perspective behind them, as he considers man’s insignificant place in time and history. But the show reveals lesser-known sides to his work too, and reminds us again that his close friendship with Chekhov was a remarkable artistic-literary alliance.

How little we know in the West of Russian art. The gaps are huge between the ancient icons and early-20th-century Modernism that most people will be familiar with, and nowhere are they more evident than the late 19th century. Despite the valiant efforts of the likes of Andrew Graham-Dixon's The Art of Russia for the BBC, ask an arts enthusiast what they know of the Peredvizhniki - or “the Wanderers” as they are usually termed in English - and you’re likely to get a blank response.

portrait_of_Levitan_by_SerovLevitan (pictured right: portrait by Valentin Serov, 1893), who many would see as the supreme Russian landscapist of the 19th century, is a case in point. Practically the first time the UK had the chance to see this kind of work was at the National Gallery’s 2004 show Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy, drawn from the Treytakov, itself the quintessential home of the Wanderers. Few artistic patrons have exerted such an influence on the artists of a generation than Pavel Tretyakov, the merchant who started collecting the works of his contemporaries in the 1850s, and bequeathed the collection to the city of Moscow in 1892, six years before his death. Of course it’s been added to since then in every way and now crosses every other century, but without Tretyakov’s own acquisitions, and principally from the Wanderers, no history of Russian art would be even near complete.

portrait_of_Chekhov_by_LevitanThe National Gallery took its timeline from Tolstoy, but in Levitan’s case his closeness was to Chekhov (pictured right in Levitan’s portrait of 1885-86) is remarkable. Their creative consonance resides more in Chekhov's short stories than the plays for which he is better known. The National’s show included from 1890 Levitan’s Quiet Abode (pictured below). Chekhov’s story Three Years (1895) finds the heroine visiting an exhibition: “In the foreground was a stream, over it a little bridge; on the further side a path that disappeared in the dark grass; a copse on the right; near it a camp fire – no doubt of watchers by night; and in the distance there was a glow of the evening sunset. Yulia imagined walking herself along the little bridge, and then along the little path further and further, while all around was stillness, the drowsy landrails calling and the fire flickering in the distance. And for some reason she suddenly began to feel that she had seen those very clouds that stretched across the red part of the sky, and that copse, and that field, many times before. She felt lonely, and wanted to walk on and on along the path; and there, in the glow of sunset was the calm reflection of something unearthly, eternal.”

Tretyakov scholar Galina Churak relates the story of their friendship in a fascinating catalogue essay. It began in 1879 when Chekhov moved to Moscow, where his brother Nikolai was a student with Levitan at the Moscow School of Painting, Scultpure and Architecture (Levitan and Chekhov were born a few months apart in 1860). The Moscow school was in reaction against the academicism of St Petersburg’s Academy of Fine Arts, and the Wanderers – the group was formally established in 1870 and is so named because they would take their shows around the country – were at their peak.

Quiet_Abode2

The friendship deepened in the mid-1880s, as they spent summers in merry company outside Moscow, and gradually made their first mark in their fields; there was a questing intelligence around the school and its teachers, including the likes of Vasily Polenov, who created, in Levitan’s words, a “Moscow tradition of painting”. For Levitan, who had come from a poor Jewish background in the Baltics, and entered the school at the age of only 13, the atmosphere of the Polenov family salons would prove a revelation, as was the chance to visit major private art collections and meet with their patrons.

The Moscow exhibition also shows another, lesser-known side to Levitan’s work, as the artist illustrated popular Moscow magazines, where Chekhov would work as literary editor (effectively both were jobbing journalists). The two then quarrelled in the mid-1890s over Chekhov’s story The Grasshopper, which depicted the relations between the artist and his lover Sofya Kuvshinnikova in a very recognisable manner. They didn’t make up for three years. How much pleasure they would have together out hunting, or playing games and music in company, and how sensitive Chekhov was to the recurring depressive, melancholy moods of his friend, and how their sheer love of nature, which both celebrated in their own forms, shone through everything. As Levitan wrote to Sergei Diaghilev of spending summer days in the forests, reading the then-fashionable Schopenhauer: “You probably think that my future landscapes will be soaked in pessimism, so to speak? Don’t worry, I love nature too much.”

Click to open the gallery: Eternal Peace (left) and Lake (right)

[bg|/ART/tom_birchenough/Levitan]

And yet nature also troubled Levitan deeply, especially on his early visits to the Volga river. The immensities of the Volga (“which can simply kill”) produced a negative response on his first visit in 1889: “I expected the Volga would give me powerful artistic impressions, but instead it looked to me so dull and dead that my heart ached and I thought, maybe I should go back?” In 1890 Chekhov set off on his own much longer journey to Sakhalin and saw “the flood plains, the monasteries brightly lit by the sun, the town of Plyos where the languid Levitan used to live”. He added that Levitan "ought not to live on the Volga. It lays a weight of gloom on the soul”. But in 1894 the river would be the scene of Levitan's absolute masterpiece, Eternal Peace (see gallery): “In this picture all of myself," he wrote to Tretyakov, "all of my psyche, all that I consist of is laid bare.” The small riverbank town of Plyos has had a museum dedicated to the artist for almost 40 years.

Levitan to Chekhov: "I like the North now more than ever, only now have I appreciated it"

Levitan is also a master of the delicately lit, luminous summer scene. And what strikes the viewer of his final large-scale work Lake (see gallery) is surely the serenity of its atmosphere, the sense of our being inside something eternal rather than insignificant against it.

Churak writes, so rightly, that “poetic perception of nature and an utmost compactness of creative vocabulary are the qualities that Chekhov’s prose and Levitan’s landscape art share in common”. The artist visited Chekhov in Yalta in January 1900, less than six months before his own death, and sketched the small landscape Stacks of Hay on a Moonlit Night in half an hour, while talking with the writer (it remains a part of the mantlepiece in the Chekhov house museum in Yalta). They were discussing Chekhov’s sense of exile in the Crimea, away from Russia, how the evergreen plants around seem artificial - “one gets no joy out of them”. The sentiment echoes an earlier letter of Levitan's on his own first trip to Yalta: “The nature here astounds you only in the beginning, and then you feel awfully bored and want to be back in the North… I like the North now more than ever, only now have I appreciated it.” When you consider the attraction of the exotic south to the great number of artists from Northern Europe at the time, with such feelings Levitan was in a minority. His interaction with Chekhov was a rare meeting of artistic temperaments, and one that says a great deal about the Russian spirit.

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