Alexandre Benois Research Articles

Художник и его круг. Мастер русского зарубежья Евгений Климов

The article is devoted to the artist of the Russian emigre artistic circle Eugene E. Klimoff (1901–1990). A committed realist, as a painter and graphic artist, Klimoff worked in the field of landscape and portrait. The artist’s creative heritage includes many portraits of representatives of Russian artistic emigre circles, cultural and scientific figures, as well as landscapes of those places in which he happened to live during his life. These landscapes are autobiographical and belong to the category of historical evidence, acquiring special value after a hundred of years. A significant part of the landscapes is executed in the technique of lithography, and the attention of this article is focused on them. At the same time, the landscapes by Klimoff are analysed not only from the point of view of a modern art critic but also from that of his contemporaries. This perspective became possible due to Klimoff’s extensive correspondence with many famous Russian artists in exile, including Alexandre Benois, Zinaida Serebryakova, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and others. Klimoff’s activities in various fields of art pursued a specific goal — the promotion of Russian art in its entirety in those cities and countries where he happened to stay. He became one of the founders of the cultural and educational society “Akropol” in Latvia, and in 1932 became its executive secretary; in 1940, he headed the Russian Department at the Riga Art Museum. In different countries of the world, Klimoff painted churches and restored church murals; he also gave public lectures on ancient Russian icon painting, subsequently expanding a variety of lecture topics and including Russian fine art of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including the work of his Russian contemporaries. At the same time, Klimoff’s activities as an educator began to spread in another direction — towards homeland, for which he carefully preserved not only his and his circle artists’ works but also memories of them in a form of correspondence with famous Russian culture and art personalities.

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and Byt

Laboratories for Organizing People: Selected Essays on Art and <i>Byt</i>

Alexandre Benois and Denis Diderot

The article is the first to consider the influence of the views of Denis Diderot (“Salons”) on the works of Alexandre Benois — as an art historian, first of all — on his “The History of painting of all times and peoples”. As a result of a comparative analysis of the texts by two authors, it was established that both Benois and Diderot paid the greatest attention to the works of J. B. S. Chardin, F. Boucher, C. (Sh. A.) Vanloo, J.-B. Greuze, J.Robert. It has also been established that Benois described the art of Chardin and Boucher practically in the words of Diderot. The source study analysis of Benois’s article “The Collection of Drawings by Stepan Yaremich”, as well as Benois’s “Art letters” of different years, made it possible to find out his own attitude to Busher. The source study analysis of Benois’s memoirs “My Memories” and the work of R. Muther “The History of Painting in the 19th Century” made it possible to find out the source of Benois’s negative assessment of narrative and edifying in the art of Dreams — precisely those qualities that Diderot especially appreciated in the works of this artist. Comparative analysis of the text of Benois’s article “On Narrative in Painting”, his work “History of Russian Painting in the 19th Century” with the text of “Salons” by Diderot made it possible to find out that Benois used at the beginning of his activity the Diderot’s method of an expanded description.

Особенности эстетической рефлексии в мемуарно-автобиографической прозе А.Н. Бенуа

The aim of the study is to determine the specifics of the chronotope of St. Petersburg in the memoir-autobiographical work Moi Vospominaniya [My Memories] (1934-1960) of the Russian emigrant artist Alexandre Benois and to identify the relationships between the aesthetic settings of his paintings and their reflection in his perception of the city in the verbal text. The work uses an integrated approach based on historical and literary, comparative-typological, phenomenological and cultural methods. Moi Vospominaniya by Benois is considered as an egotext about art, in which the author represents the concept of his own creativity. This work has been studied in the aspect of implementing the idea of synthesizing the arts through the interaction of pictorial and verbal artistic imagery, relevant to the culture of the turn of the 20th century. Moi Vospominaniya is characterized by a multi-level structure of the spatio-temporal organization of the narrative: the chronotope is embodied both in real-historical, “open” time and in an imaginary space, subjective “closed” time, the space of art, the mystical chronotope. The space in the text is modeled by art, but represents the real world, restored by the author's memory. Sometimes elements of another being dangerous to humans penetrate into it: the mystical atmosphere of Oranienbaum and Pavlovsk, white nights, the oneiric chronotope - terrible prophetic dreams, life-giving pictures. The author concludes that in Benois' memoir-autobiographical narration the images of the artistic space are modeled, in which elements characteristic of his pictorial and theatrical-decorative works, the combination of realistic and fantastic beginnings are realized. The space-time of St. Petersburg in the text is polysemantic, it incorporates various cultural and spiritual phenomena. The real and the surreal mutually influence and condition each other, the conscious and unconscious spheres of life and art are intertwined. Hoaxes in the narrative are exposed to cultural monuments, artifacts, family relics, symbolizing the connection of the life of the autobiographical hero with previous eras, the merging of dreams, fantasies and reality, conveying his attitude. By turning to the art of the past, the alarming symptoms of the future are discerned: dispersal of anxiety and fear in the narrative becomes evidence of the hero's fears of the invasion of something hostile, a sign of human doom, the death of a peaceful way of life, old life, culture, a forerunner of new disasters. Mystical and everyday life exist together not only in the life of the hero himself, but also of his contemporaries, the author pays special attention to this, foreseeing a negative and dangerous trend in the overconcentration of infernal manifestations (growing religious mystical searches, the spread of sectarianism in various layers of Russian society).

Drawings by Gustave Doré in M.V. Dobuzhinsky’s Works

The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that drawings by Gustave Doré, one of Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s favorite artists, reproduced in various publications, have never been the object of special research as artistic sources of this artist’s works.The scientific novelty of this article lies in the fact that it is the first attempt to analyze the influence of Doré’s drawings on Dobuzhinsky’s works. The author applies a complex method that combines a source analysis of the artist’s memoirs and letters and a comparative formal analysis of his works with Doré’s works. The article compares the pictorial motifs in Dobuzhinsky’s drawings with similar motifs in Charles Dickens’ novels “The Old Curiosity Shop” and “Little Dorrit”. These works by Dickens, as well as the motifs that could have attracted Dobuzhinsky’s attention in them, were identified on the basis of an analysis of the artist’s letters. The article reveals that a significant influence on Dobuzhinsky’s works “Barbershop Window” (1906), “Vilna. Nocturnal Scene” (1910), “A Night in St. Petersburg” (1924) and the etching “Roofs” (1901) was rendered by Doré’s drawings “Whitechapel. A Hiding Place”, “Bluegate Fields in Shadwell” and “Over London — by Rail”, made for the book “London. A Pilgrimage” by W.B. Jerrold. The author also finds that Doré’s drawing “Inside the Docks” from this publication influenced Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s woodcut “Tackles” (1917). The article identifies the books with illustrations by Gustave Doré, based on which Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Alexandre Benois became acquainted with this artist’s work.

Alexandre Benois and Eugene Lanсeray, uncle and nephew: friends and artistic associates

The article is devoted to the history of friendship and cooperation between Alexandre Benois (1870–1960) and his elder nephew Eugene Lanceray (1875–1946). Being like-minded, they explored St Petersburg, its suburbs and France. Since 1898, they were participating at group exhibitions and at magazine and book projects. In the 1900s, they worked on the design of theatrical performances, created the interior of the dining room for the exhibition “Contemporary art” (1903). They were helping each other on commissioned artworks. In 1915–1916, they developed monumental panels for the Kazansky railway station in Moscow. Their last meeting took place in France in 1927, but the correspondence continued until 1946 (many fragments of their correspondence were never published before).

The books of Alexandre Benois in the Research library of The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts

In 2019, in the collection of the Research Library of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts twenty five books were identified as having previously belonged to Alexandre Benois. They were sоld to the Museum by Evgeny Lanceray in 1935. Most of the books have marginalia, made by A. Benois in German and French. The notes show the manner of Benois reading, his high erudition and creative comprehension of the text. In autumn 2020, the collection of Benois books was enhanced by “Aus Meinem Leben” of W. Tischbein (Berlin, 1922) bought especially for the Pushkin Museum by M. Karisalov. There are numerous marks in it as well. Now all the books with margin notes are digitalized. The studying of the books and the deciphering of the marginalia is going on.

Петербургский текст в «Воспоминаниях» М.В. Добужинского

Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957) was one of the members of the artistic movement Mir Iskusstva, a cityscape painter, book illustrator, scene designer, and also wrote memoirs. He had been writing his Vospominaniya [Recollections] for over 30 years, from the mid-1920s to his death in 1957. Emigration, home-sickness, author’s intention to relive the foretime stipulate the specificity of the text’s chronotope, which is mainly related to Petersburg. Dobuzhinsky idealized the image of Petersburg in Vospominaniya. I determine the specificity of Petersburg’s chronotope and describe the interconnections between the delineation of Petersburg and its verbal image in the text. The theme of depicting Petersburg highlights Dobuzhinsky’s artworks. Dobuzhinsky perceived Petersburg as a piece of art and focused on his own visual interpretation of the city. His attitude to Petersburg metamorphosed with the autobiographic main character’s acquisition of new art techniques and artistic devices from works of Alexandre Benois and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Petersburg’s chronotope is multifaceted in the text: it is a real historical cityscape, a happy childhood time, an object of visual art of the autobiographic main character, and also a space of author mystification. The main character perceives Petersburg and the Petersburg text through the prism of works of Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The city becomes the author’s ideal. It is the space that combines the features of the beautiful and the ugly, which determined the antinomy of the Petersburg text. Petersburg is fantastic, it has an infernal theme, an evil principle inherent in the city: in inclement weather, the main character had nightmares in the streets and petty demons coming out of the cracks. The narrator recognizes the city as an inspired creature hostile to man, the main character himself is confronted with a peculiar manifestation of Petersburg’s metaphysical fear. In the narration, Petersburg reflected the various features inherent in the image of the city in Dobuzhinsky’s artworks with their aestheticism, tragedy, lyricism, irony, philosophy, and sentimentality. Petersburg in Vospominaniya concentrates different real and unreal meanings. The autobiographic main character teeters on the brink of his historical real-life time and space and unreal time and space created by literature texts and pieces of visual art that compensate the need for comprehending the city’s soul. Petersburg in the text is a complex ambivalent space, saturated with cultural codes, reflected by the cognizing consciousness that acts systematically and transforms the main character’s inner world. The theme of depicting Petersburg allows the author-narrator to reveal the general approach to his pictorial art, rethink some aspects of artistic activity, and verbalize the visual representation of the city. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

Guest Editor's Introduction: The Ballets Russes in North America

Guest Editor's Introduction: The Ballets Russes in North America

НЕТВАРНЫЙ СВЕТ И ОСЛЕПИТЕЛЬНЫЙ МРАК: ВИЗАНТИЯ АВАНГАРДА

Avant-Garde painters were amazed by fifteenth to sixteenth century “old style” Russian icons, which saw the light of the day in the early twentieth century after two centuries of prohibition. In the seventeenth century, ascetic had been replaced by “Western” mimetic images. Icons had a massive impact on Mikhail Larionov, the founder of Rayonism, who wrote that “Russian icon painters &lt;…&gt; were strongly drawn towards abstraction”. In 1913 he organized an exhibition of his Rayonnist paintings with rays of light reflected from objects. Kazimir Malevich was also influenced by icons. In his theoretical writings, he refers to Gospels. Launching his Suprematism at the “0,10 Exhibition” in 1915, Malevich placed his masterpiece in the “beautiful corner”, as an icon. Alexandre Benois said that the Black Square is a “cult of emptiness, darkness, ‘nothing’”. It will be justified that it was another type of darkness, connected to the concepts of “uncreated light” and “dazzling darkness” in Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palamas’ theology. I refer to Pavel Florensky and Sergey Bulgakov’s philosophy to demonstrate how an application of Palamas’ theory, hesychasm, was reflected in fifteenth-sixteenth-century icon-painting and later in Avant-Garde theory and paintings, in particular by those of Larionov and Malevich.

Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in the work of Alexandre Benois: images and sources

The article considers the question of the genesis of the image of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in the perception and art of Alexander Benois. The author used a complex method which combined the source analysis of artist’s works and memoires, his articles on the history of architecture, and traditional formal analysis of his works and data of historiography of the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. It was found out the official portraits of Louis Caravaque and portrait of G.C. Grooth influenced the image of Elizabeth in Benois works. Benois views on the work of F.B. Rastrelli whose work he considered the embodiment of the reign of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

EL GRECO IN RUSSIAN POETRY

The name El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) is rarely found in Russian poetry, although French romanticism included him in the canon of world classics. This article assumes that El Greco’s reception in Russian poetry is due not so much to the infl uence of French romanticism or Spanish surrealism as to the stylistic features of the artist himself, who inherited Cretan icon painting, while in his mature period he followed the Renaissance principles of life-like and rivalry. As a result, El Greco is perceived in Russian culture as a classic imitating nature, and stylistic features are then interpreted as existentially signifi cant rather than a strange and bizarre artist. El Greco is then compared with the characters of his paintings, such as the apostles and evangelists, and is considered to be an artist, communicating something existentially signifi cant about fate. His landscape style was then interpreted as the transformation of artistic conventions into ontologically signifi cant constructions. A close reading of poetic texts dedicated to El Greco (Konstantin Balmont, Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Viktor Krivulin, Bella Akhmadulina, Svetlana Kekova), and taking into account the theoretical statements about El Greco (Alexandre Benois, Dmitry Likhachov) allows us to show that El Greco was not perceived within the framework of expressionism or surrealism, but in the key of icon-painting ontologism. The techniques of El Greco were then understood in Russian poetry as plotsignifi cant: chiaroscuro and colour turned out to be symbols of life’s upheavals, and the mission of the apostle and Orpheus was then identifi ed as a model for a poetic attitude to everyday life.

МИСТИЧЕСКИЙ ПЕТЕРБУРГ В «МОИХ ВОСПОМИНАНИЯХ» А.Н. БЕНУА

МИСТИЧЕСКИЙ ПЕТЕРБУРГ В «МОИХ ВОСПОМИНАНИЯХ» А.Н. БЕНУА

А. Н. БЕНУА ОБ ИСКУССТВЕ В НЕМЕЦКОМ СБОРНИКЕ НАЧАЛА XX В. «РУССКИЕ О РОССИИ»

The paper explores the work of A. N. Benois “Contemporary Art”, which was published in 1906 in German in Frankfurt-am-Main in the collection of articles “Russians about Russia”. It focused on the analysis of artistic situation in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, consideration of the work of Russian masters of the older, middle and new generations, and assessment of their contribution to the culture and cultural heritage of the country. Acting as a historian of art, critic and artist, Benois provided foreign readers with a rich tapestry of Russian art life with all its participants and auxiliary commentaries according to his vision of their talent, originality and value. In his lifetime his judgments about art were often subjected to accusations in bias and subjectivity, however over the course of a century they acquired exceptional significance for understanding complex historical and cultural context of the era, called the Silver Age of Russian culture. Currently the works of Alexandre Benois are included in the golden fund of the national cultural heritage, highly valued and studied all over the world. Their unique, extremely wide and diverse creative content has retained its relevance and continues to be in high demand in modern art, educational and socio-cultural practice.

Alexandre Dumas’s Works in the Art of Alexandre Benois

The article studies the problem of interpretation of literary source in visual creative work of A.N. Benois. There are identified and analyzed new sources of his works — historical novels by A. Dumas, père. The question about the role of the novels by Alexandre Dumas devoted to the history of France of the 17th and 18th centuries in creative work of Alexandre Benois has never become the object of research. The re­levance of this article is determined by this fact. The scientific novelty of this article lies in revea­ling new literary sources of creative work of A. Benois — Dumas’s novels “Joseph Balsamo (Doctor’s Notes)” (1846—1848), “Louis XIV and his Century” (1844), “Louis XV and his Epoch” (1849) — and determining parallels between them and art practice of the artist: painting, graphics and art of book. The author analyses content of the ar­tist’s memories, his literary works, diaries, as well as diaries by E. Lanceray, and complements these information details by a comparative textological analysis of Benois’s memoirs and Dumas’s no­vels in Russian translations. This method allows to deepen the formal analysis of A. Benois’s works (primarily the two Versailles series) and partially reveal the mechanism of complex figurative synthesis in the artistic consciousness at the turn of the 19th—20th centuries, on the basis of which they were created, to expand the existing perceptions about the literary sources of the artist’s creative work. The author concludes that the no­vels by Dumas “Joseph Balsamo”, “Louis XIV and his Century” had an influence on the artist’s perception of the theme of court culture and Versailles in the historical, cultural and natural aspects. It was reflected in the appeal to the plot of “fish feeding” in the late 1890s, in the formation of the images of Versailles and King Louis XIV in old age. The article also finds that the novel “Joseph Balsamo” had an influence on Benois’s creation of Trianon’s everyday image in the past. At the same time, the artist turned to the interpretation of the image of Marquise de Pompadour as “sultana” under the influence of Dumas’s novel “Louis XV and his Epoch”. In addition, the three musketeers — characters of Dumas’s novel with the same name — are placed in the drawing of the title page of Benois’s “Versailles” album. It is important that it does not come about direct illustration of the novels, but about an artistic process of creating a figurative system of images and forming the artist’s stylistics.

Иллюстрации английских художников детской книги рубежа XIX-XX вв. в русских дореволюционных изданиях: влияние и параллели

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries some Russian painters were influenced by the well-known foreign artists. Great Britain during this period became one of the countries which art was perceived and sometimes even imitatedby Russian graphics and illustrators. That was especially reflected in the work of the “Mir iskusstva” (The World of Art) artists, who loved the linear compositions of Aubrey Beardsley and his English followers.The article discusses and analyses book illustrations created by Edwardian British artists (the first decade of the XX century), whose works were seen or could be seen by Russian painters — their contemporaries. Thismaterial traces the influence of English book illustrators on Russian one’s and analyses some parallels in their work. Russian editions of A. F. Devrien and I. D. Sytin are especially important in the research. Some of them, published during the reign of Nicholas II, were reprints of English books illustrated by famous foreign illustrators — Charles Robinson (1870–1937), Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) and Edmund Dulac (1882–1953). The analysis of the works of these painters is a fundamental part of the article, because they influenced Russian graphic artists such as Alexandre Benois (1870–1960), George Narbut (1886–1920), Dmitry Mitrokhin (1883–1973) and many other illustrators during mainlypre-revolutionary period. Keywords: Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Charles Robinson, Alexandre Benois, Ivan Bilibin, Dmitry Mitrokhin, «World of Art» («Mir iskusstva»), book graphics, illustration, Edwardian era (period), British art

Complex ekphrasis in Russian poetry: basics of theory and one case

Along with a simple ekphrasis, a description of a separate work, we would like to single out a complex ekphrasis, a description of the whole museum hall or museum collection. Such a description implies an intense experience of space and is possible primarily in descriptive lyrics with intense drama. In the complex ekphrasis, one can see the infl uence not only of tastes, but also of artistic criticism ideas of the time. It is proved that the poem "The Escape to Egypt" by Nikolay Zabolotsky (1955) is a complex ekphrasis, which arose under the indirect infl uence of Charles Pierre Baudelaire’s poetry and Alexandre Benois’s artistic criticism, describing the effects of one of the Hermitage halls. The infl uence of the plots presented in this hall of the Hermitage on poetic decisions could also be traced in later poetry.

M. K. Čiurlionis and St. Petersburg: New Facts Concerning His PaintingBlack Sun

SummaryIt is a well-known fact among Lithuanian scholars of studies on Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) that Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) once owned Čiurlionis’ paintingBlack Sun(orBallad). However, it is known only by a reproduction printed in a Russian art magazineАполлон[Apollon]1, with a titleConte fantastiqueandСказка[Fairy Tale] and Stravinsky was specified as an owner of the painting and other details have not been well-researched. Even though some researchers visited St. Petersburg to find the painting several years ago, yet no trace was ever found. In this article, first we would like to look back at Čiurlionis’ visits to St. Petersburg and then, reveal new facts on concerts in which Čiurlionis’ music was performed and more over concerning Čiurlionis’ paintingBlack Sunhow Stravinsky became interested in the painting by introducing letters exchanged between Stravinsky, Alexandre Benois and Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov.

Formation of Alexandre Benois’s Views on Saint Petersburg Architecture of the 18th and the Early 19th Centuries

Traces the emergence of Alexandre Benois as a theorist of Saint Petersburg Baroque and Classicism architecture. The author analyses the role of the artist’s family and the impact of theatre and music on elaboration of Benois’s approaches to architecture.

Correspondence

Выдержки из переписки А. Н. Бенуа и Е. Е. Лансере: Март 1905—Декабрь 1906 гг. Excerpts from the 1905-1906 Benois—Lancéray Correspondence.1)Introduction—Oleg MininThe exchange of letters between Alexandre Benois and Evgenii Lancéray began after Benois left Russia for France in February of 1905.2) Preserved as a part of the Alexandre Benois archive at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, this extensive and largely unpublished correspondence offers a wealth of information about many aspects of these artists’ professional activities and private, everyday life.3) The correspondence also sheds light on the views the two artists held on