The Pushkin Museum of Art, Moscow

The Pushkin Museum is devoted to European Fine Arts, and is the most amazing place, containing many paintings which are familiar to me but I had assumed they were in the Louvre, or somewhere in the UK. Paying particular attention to the nineteenth century (of course!), I managed to get lost here, but it was worth it!

Goya, Monet, Manet, Corot, Whistler, Seurrat, Van Gogh, Cezanne – so many big names here, but the gallery proved a useful reminder that it’s not the names but the sheer amazingness of seeing the paintings, in the flesh (so to speak) that is important. For example, Corot’s Diana Bathing is so sculptural, so cold and yet lifelike, erotic and shadowy, and it’s hard to get a sense of that in a reproduction (see right). It should be a cliche, but somehow it isn’t.

It amused me somewhat to see Alma Tadema’s Queen Fredegonda at the deathbed of Bishop Praesextatus, so English, quasi-Pre-Raphaelite, and somehow unexpected! I was also pleased to see Toulouse-Lautrec’s Yvette Gilbert singing “Linger Longer Loo” (1894) (left) – it should be a caricature, almost silly, but it isn’t – such expression, it appeals to me. Oh, and so many Degas’ – ballet dancers, nudes – always less chocolate-box and more moving in the flesh, especially Dancer posing for a photographer – an interesting set-up. Of course, there were many artists I hadn’t heard of, such as Jean-Louis Forain, whose 1880 painting Leaving the Masquerade Ball at the Grand Opera particularly interested me – it should be just a society picture, but seemed much more than that, with a mysterious twist in that the women’s faces were obscured, not by masks.

Other highlights were Sisley, who manages to make French landscapes look so English (to my Anglicised eyes!), and Monet’s White Water Lilies, so verdant and much less clicheed than I usually think of Monet. Also, while I’m not usually than keen on Renoir, Girls in Black (1880) is contemplative, quiet, while his 1876 Nude (right) seems to me a triumph of female sexuality over the male viewer (discuss!) Van Gogh, always so exuberant and somehow surprising, managed to surprise me again – Red Vineyard is great but The Sea at Saintes-Maries (1888) I love – such thick paint, so reminiscent of the movement of the sea. Another delight was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes The Companion (1887), which seemed almost medieval in style, perhaps reminiscent of Burne Jones’s medievalism, while the male presence seems to contain a threatening sexuality despite the anodyne title of the painting. I hadn’t seen before, but liked, Buffet’s drawings of Notre Dame de Paris, which had an appealing symmetry, seeming to reference th draughtsmanship of an earlier age, reducing perfect architecture to a few lines without losing their beauty.

The Fauvist painter Albert Marquet was someone I hadn’t come across before (more info here). His industrial cityscapes have an amazing beauty all there own – it’s very much about “the painter’s eye” here – and he paints water – from sea to canal – amazingly, with a visible, believable thickness.

The highlight of the museum, though, must be the Matisses. There’s a whole room of them, wonderfully vivid still lifes, which test one’s perception of perspective. I still can’t work out why I find them so visually satisfying, but I do. The ones here were Corner of an Artist’s Studio (1912), The Pink Studio (1911) (left), Nasturtiums, La Danse II (both 1912), Goldish (1911) and Arums, Iris and Mimosa (1912) – a blaze of colour and movement. It’s worth going to Moscow just for these.

The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

I know virtually nothing about Russian art – well, I know a bit more now. We had amazingly informative guides in Russia, who seem to be as knowledgeable about art criticism and history as they are about restaurants, palaces and everything else. The Old Tretyakov gallery gives a taste of Russian art up to the nineteenth century, and there’s too much there for me to do more that give a synopsis. This is a very shortened version of my notes!
The first painting I saw was a portrait of Pushkin by Orev Kiprensky, which immediately reminded me of Byron (the hair and swathed tartan) – it turns out that indeed this was Pushkin’s homage to Byron and Burns, who were his heroes (Byron I can understand; not so sure about Burns). I must explore the Pushkin-Byron connection – Onegin and Don Juan, anyone? In fact this is the only portrait for which Pushkin ever sat; other images were taken from memory or other pictures. Pushkin liked it so much he wrote a poem about it.
I was interested to hear about a serf, Argunov, who painted well, and thus was allowed by the family to have lessons and learn to paint professionally. After painting a remarkable portrait of the family – surprisingly sympathetically, I thought – Argunov was freed from serfdom and permitted to establish a career as an artist. This story, it seems, was repeated throughout history; many serfs were cruelly treated and died as a result of malnutrition and overwork, but some were also trained in various arts, and given their freedom as a tribute to their skill.
One of the central pieces in the gallery was Ivanov’s The Appearance of Christ before People. This is a huge painting, which took ten years to paint (1837-1857) in Italy. In its realist detail it’s both fascinating and slightly alarming! – Ivanov felt that he wanted to paint the most important event that had ever happened, and chose the appearance of Christ to ordinary people, taking in their responses, which range from overjoyed to sentimental to what looks like sceptical. In the foreground a man is sorting out clothes, perhaps foreshadowing the soldiers dicing for Christ’s clothes after the Crucifixion. In fact, that man is a self-portrait by the artist. John the Baptist also features, carrying a cross. It’s the kind of painting you can look at dozens of times and still see different things.
A painting which particularly appealed to me was Zelentsov’s Indoors Drawing Room, which I can’t find an image of but showed a typically Russian interior, reminding me that though there are some obvious parallels with European art of the same time, Russia was – and is – a very different place, and therein perhaps lies its attraction for me.
Speaking of European parallels, though, there were a surprising number of narrative paintings from the 1840s which are highly reminiscent of paintings frequently used to illustrate the covers of Victorian novels nowadays! The titles tell you all you need to know: The Major’s Proposal, The Fastidious Bride, The French Cavalier, The Young Widow, all by Fedotov, and almost Hogarthian in their sequential depiction of social life. Other paintings, such as Troika (Perov, 1866) are akin to nineteenth-century sentimentalisation of children.
I was pleased to see what is apparently the best portrait of Dostoevsky (left), also by Perov. This portrait, so sombre and muted, seems in its interiority to be as much a portrait of the writer’s mind as his face – as are all the best portraits. Actually I was rather taken with Perov’s work – Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane was also an interesting painting.
Another artist who appealed to me was Aivazovsky – follow this link to see more! He painted the Black Sea in all its moods and changes, as well as wonderful almost naïve paintings of St Petersburg showing the five buildings of the Hermitage. Many of these mid-19th century paintings of Russia are amazing – archetypal images such as cityscapes, sledging on the frozen Neva, battles, countrysides. There was a room devoted to war – the futility of it, the pointless loss of life, and in today’s political climate this was no less moving than when they were first displayed.

Finally, we saw many ikons – from the fourteenth century until the seventeenth century, since between those periods they were the only form of artistic expression permitted in Russia. Many of them are immediately identifiable as Russian Orthodox – the colours, the jewels, they might not appeal to everyone, but they are fabulous!

From Russia with love…

I have recently returned from a lovely week in Russia. After visiting St. Petersburg on my honeymoon, I’ve been hoping for another chance to visit, and it didn’t disappoint. We had a few days in Moscow first, which I loved, and was very impressed by Moscow State University (picture right). A friend said that although Petersburg was beautiful, she preferred Moscow because it’s more Russian, and I agree, I think. The city smells of fuel and fried potatoes; it was unfeasibly warm when we arrived, and the traffic is appalling, but it’s just such an amazing city, and has an indefinable buzz about it – much as I find in London. We did the usual tourist stuff – the Kremlin (see photo left), the Tretyakov gallery of Russian art (which I’ll post seperately), the Novodevichiy convent, Red Square etc. I think the convent was one of my favourite places, actually: such peace in the heart of the city (yes, a cliché, I know, but it’s true) and the architecture and colours of the Russian Orthodox church, with the gilding, the icons, the faint smell of incense – to me it seems so utterly foreign and exotic, and very appealing. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is particularly beautiful, brilliantly-gilded and adorned with ikons inside, and is apparently where Medvedev attends services, yet there were young women in headscarves standing in front of the ikons in genuine devotion, ignoring the tourists.
The Russians certainly revere their artists and writers, which the cemetery next to the convent displays; there are extravagent monuments to Russian writers, artists, actors, dancers (see grave of Galina Ulanova, right), as well as politicians, surgeons and scientists. The reverence for Pushkin is also striking, and admirable – it seems less aimed at tourists than, say “Shakespeare’s Stratford” and “Jane Austen’s Hampshire”, as British tourist boards clunkily define them, and more about a deep local respect for their own. I read some of Eugene Onegin whilst travelling, since my knowledge of Pushkin is limited, and it’s incredible – the facility of expression, the sparkling, butterfly nature of the subject matter – and that’s reading it in translation, which I gather is almost impossible since Pushkin’s fluid use of Russian not only forged a new poetic sensibility in the nineteenth century but also made him extremely difficult to translate. I am working on my Russian now with the aim of one day reading himin the original! (On the left is a pic of a statue of Pushkin.)
St. Petersburg seems (as Jonathan Dimbleby says) to be more Western-facing, somehow superficial city – the facades of the palaces along the Neva seem to be part of the display put on for the tourists. However, I’m reluctant to see the city as only the playground of socialites (despite Onegin’s propensity to do so) because it has had a much more complex history than this; thousands of serfs died during the founding of the city; and more recently, as Leningrad it was besieged by the Nazis during World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians term it). Our guide told us a great deal about the damage done to palaces and historic monuments by the Nazi occupiers as they attempted to close in on the city, and about the starvation and bravery of the citizens (“Some people froze to death but would not burn their libraries”, she said; “This is how they looked to the future, and preserved their heritage”.) Many palaces, such as Pavluvsk, Catherine’s Palace and even the Peterhof, are still undergoing restoration more than sixty years later. The staff at the palaces took photographs and hid artefacts before the Nazis took over, and from these they are still gradually rebuilding and restoring. Life is, perhaps, cheaper in Russia than in Europe, but heritage is precious, and highly valued. Holding onto the past for the sake of the future is clearly important, and not just for the tourist industry; Russians genuinely feel their history in a way that not even the British do, I think.