Abstract
In art historical scholarship, inasmuch as he is considered at all, the painter Arkhip Kuindzhi has long been viewed as a peculiar outlier. His landscapes, with their coloristic drama, light effects, and simplified forms, hardly fit the accounts of Russian nineteenth-century painting that focus on the development of the realist school. Questioning the artist's anomalous status, this essay discusses his canvases from the 1870s and 1880s within the broader framework of nineteenth-century popular visual amusements, discourses on realism, and the physiology of vision. Considered through this wider lens—beyond the institution of easel painting and beyond Russia—Kuindzhi is revealed to be an innovator whose approach to painting was profoundly modern and aligned with the aesthetic preoccupations of many west European artists. His painterly pursuits and exhibition practices, furthermore, force a reconsideration of the biases associated with the established narrative of modern art in the west.
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