Money, Love, and Friendship in the Late Imperial Artistic World Sarah Badcock Serge Vladimir Gregory, Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan. 264 pp. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015. ISBN-13 978-0875807317. $33.95. Andrei Shabanov, Peredvizhniki: Mezhdu kommercheskim tovarishchestvom i khudozhestvennym dvizheniem. St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet v Sankt-Peterburge, 2015. Published in English as Andrey Shabanov, Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists. 208 pp. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. ISBN-13 978-1501335525. $135.00. The two books under consideration both explicitly explore the relationship between the creative process of writers and painters and personal, financial, and commercial concerns and contexts. Gregory's book does this through a richly personal account of the relationship between Anton Chekhov and Isaak Levitan, while Shabanov's work explores these themes through the prism of the commercial partnership of artists that came to be known as the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers. The two books under consideration here are connected by Levitan, who himself exhibited with the Peredvizhniki, and the theme of making a living from art. Gregory's work is primarily a work of literary studies, although it intersects with historical disciplines. Its key sources are letters, memoirs, and diaries. Shabanov's work is a piece of historical scholarship. Its core primary sources are the catalogues produced to accompany the Peredvizhniki exhibitions. ________ Shabanov's book explores the Peredvizhniki movement from its founding in 1870 up until its 25th anniversary album in 1897. The Peredvizhniki [End Page 199] were represented by Soviet scholarship as an idealist and politically progressive group of artists and as the founding fathers of Socialist Realism. This position has already been robustly rebuffed by the 1989 work of Elizabeth Valkenier, who deconstructed the Stalinist-era falsification of the movement, and David Jackson's 2006 monograph, whose work reshaped the ways in which the Peredvizhniki's visual legacy is seen.1 Shabanov argues, in contrast to these two key works, that the Peredvizhniki cannot be seen as a realist art movement at all. He stresses the role of the association as primarily a commercial enterprise, which did not articulate overarching intellectual or ideological conflict with the state or with the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, and was not an "art movement," committed to "the promotion of a definable aesthetic agenda" (3). Richard Pipes made the same argument, though without the evidence base pulled together by Shabanov, in a lengthy article published in 2011.2 While Pipes is in Shabanov's bibliography, it is surprising that he does not engage directly with Pipes in this work. Shabanov's distinctive contribution in this work is his methodological emphasis on judging the Peredvizhniki first and foremost by studying their exhibitions. His book is divided into two parts, the first exploring how the Peredvizhniki saw themselves, and the second looking at how the Peredvizhniki presented themselves to the outside world, through a series of case studies of specific exhibitions and their reception. The prominent art critic Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906) is given significant responsibility for their subsequent characterization as a radical social and artistic movement; "Stasov was entirely ignoring the economic raison d'etre and enduring business agenda of the group" (80). In 1863, 14 students at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, led by Ivan Kramskoi, rejected the officially chosen theme for a competition, because they wanted free choice of subject, and sought to challenge the domination of classical themes in the Academy. These 14 went on to become members of the Peredvizhniki, a factor which has closely associated the Peredvizhniki with an ideological rift from the Academy. Shabanov argues that the Academy was unwilling to host the Peredvizhniki exhibitions because they threatened to undermine its own annual show, not because of any ideological rift. The exhibitions were widely advertised in conservative as well as in progressive publications; the [End Page 200] artists were more interested in circulation and artistic sales than they were in political color. The Peredvizhniki exhibitions were presented in their own advertising material both as spaces for individual cultured contemplation and as collective spaces, for socializing and public entertainment. This broad approach emphasized the commercial...
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Aug 23, 2023
Regina Esiovwa + 7
Open Access
