Politics in Russian Art: The Case of Repin

Abstract

Two periods when factors intruded into Russian art are generally recognized. In Stalin's time, imposition of the obligatory style of socialist realism pressed painters into service to the state. And earlier, from the 1860s through the 1880s, there was the civic-minded ethos that enjoined art to make a specific contribution to the reform movement that agitated the intelligentsia. These two periods, however, by no means exhaust the topic of in Russian art. By politics I mean intense partisanship, the adoption of extreme Left-Right polarities that, in turn, pigeonhole art and artists to the neglect of aesthetic values. This political atmosphere has permeated Russian artistic life during the last hundred years in varying degrees. Russian painting since the mid-nineteenth century, when patronage ceased to be the domain of the Court and the Imperial Academy of Arts, has been subject to passionate controversy among various interest groups that equated their interpretations of the course of art with the nation's destiny, claiming the undeviating allegiance of some painters and pronouncing anathema on others. Such attitudes often turned on the quest for total victory and the unconditional surrender of the opposition, displaying the same all-or-nothing quality that characterized the infighting among Russian nineteenth-century radicals and their revolutionary successors. The numerous controversies in the long and prestigious career of Il'ia Efimovich Repin (1844-1930) serve well to illustrate that extra-aesthetic or political quality of the Russian artistic experience which differentiates it from artistic polemics in the West. They also show that labels and rivalries, even a personality cult of sorts, flourished both before and after the October Revolution. Repin came to St. Petersburg from the provincial town of Chuguev, not far from Khar'kov, in 1863 and the following year enrolled in the Imperial Academy of Arts. His arrival in the capital coincided with the secession of a group of young artists from the Academy in protest against the set theme and its minutely prescribed rendering in the final Gold Medal competition. The defiant gesture of the fourteen graduates