Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of Arts

Abstract

On November 9, 1863, a minor incident in the Council Hall of the Russian Imperial Academy of Arts marked the professional and public debut of a group of artists—some of whom would dominate the Russian arts scene in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Although this incident, popularly called the “Revolt of the Fourteen,” posed a direct challenge to the monopolistic authority of the Academy of Arts to bestow commissions, ranks, and monetary awards upon artists, these “democratic” artists (often misleadingly called the Itinerants or Wanderers) had no desire to fundamentally alter society. Instead, they sought an independent avenue to achieving professional and economic success within existing social parameters. This article will explore the sociocultural situation of the Petersburg Cooperative of Artists (Artel) and the Peredvizhniki—or what I call the “Kramskoi generation,” after their most representative member, Ivan Kramskoi (1837–87)—and in doing so will interpret the nature of Russian realist (in many respects, populist) art through the prism of the new reality artists of the time faced: the commodification of art and the commercialization of art’s circulation and distribution. From the first appearance of the Peredvizhniki, and throughout the course of the Soviet regime, scholars and critics of Russian art of the 1860s–1890s have used such expressions as “democratic cause,” “national motifs,” “social responsibility,” “condemnation of the tsarist regime,” and so on, more often than they have evaluated the artistic merits of artworks. In this respect, Soviet authors followed the trail blazed by Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906), an ardent supporter of Russian “national” art from the very onset of the Peredvizhniki “movement” in the early 1870s. The tenacious “Peredvizhniki myth” is basically his creation.1 After the collapse of the USSR, the artistic culture of the 1860s–1890s had