REVIEWS 755 King,Averil.IsaakLevitan:LyricalLandscape.Thirdedition.AntiqueCollectors’ Club, Woodbridge, 2011. 159 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Select bibliography. Index. £35.00. Averil King’s beautifully illustrated monograph on Russian landscape painter Isaak Levitan (1860–1900) is the first Western study on this important artist. The book was first published to coincide with the ‘Russian Landscape Painting’ exhibition that opened in Groningen in 2004 and travelled on to the National Gallery in London. For this third edition, the text and illustrations have been expanded and the layout reoriented to a horizontal format more conducive to the landscapes that are its primary subject. That the book has now sold out of its third printing shows how successfully the author has engaged a broad, nonspecialist audience in Levitan’s life and work. As David Jackson writes in his Foreword, Levitan was Russia’s ‘national painter par excellence’ his haunting landscapes evoking a host of associations — historical, literary, political, social — unique to the Russian experience. Yet he was also very much a man of his time, whose works convey poetic introspection and often a fin-de-siècle melancholy. It is this duality that King captures in her book. Coming from a background in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European painting (her previous book was on the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker), she presents Levitan as simultaneously part of Russian and European art history. King paints in broad strokes, assembling the most diverse range of references and vignettes to bring Levitan’s world to life. The result is both panoramic in scopeandkaleidoscopic,evendizzying,indetail.Thebarefactsofhischildhood, in an impoverished Jewish family in Kibarty (misspelled in the text), are set against a lengthy description of Russian serfdom and a history of Lithuania. In following his early years as an aspiring artist at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, we meet both the Russian artists who influenced him (Perov, Savrasov, Polenov) and the Barbizon painters who inspired them all, followed up with a short history of landscape painting in Russia. The text is shot through with details of local colour (the fashions worn at court balls, Dostoevskii’s near escape from execution, a short history of Russian music, the urban growth of Vienna) that make for lively, occasionally distracting reading. The goal is not scholarly depth (the author relies almost entirely on Englishlanguage sources), but an immersive experience that transports the reader into an entire epoch. Her use of Russian literary and musical parallels will resonate with a broad lay audience, binding Levitan into an already family world of evocative associations; the treatment of his life-long friendship with Anton Chekhov is especially well handled. The writing is lyrical and evocative, with deeply felt descriptions of Levitan’s paintings. SEER, 92, 4, OCTOBER 2014 756 What makes the book more than a skilful synthesis of the English-language sources is its ability to situate Levitan within a larger, inclusive history of latenineteenth -century European painting. Readers familiar with the canonical history of this period will readily appreciate King’s efforts to link Levitan with a host of artists whose works may already be familiar: Odilon Redon’s pastels, GustavKlimt’ssquare-formatlandscapes,thelandscapesoftheWorpswedeand Dachau communities, and especially Claude Monet, whose views of the Seine are interestingly paired with Levitan’s Volga paintings. These comparisons often involve a certain amount of imaginative hypothesizing (‘It is tempting to think that Klimt and Levitan made each other’s acquaintance’ p. 114), and sometimes they seem forced, as when comparing the capacity of Monet and Levitan for braving winter weather (p. 89) or the former’s love of poplars, the latter’s of birches (p. 92). But the larger point that Levitan’s paintings express the Zeitgeist of his time while remaining quintessentially Russian is persuasively made. It is this quality that endeared him to Sergei Diaghilev and the World of Art group, to which an excellent chapter is devoted. Chapters on the Vienna and Munich Secessions (Levitan exhibited with the latter beginning in 1896) reinforce these aesthetic and emotional affinities. Those already familiar with Russian art will probably not find new insights on that subject here. And there are points on which one can quibble: Ivan Kramskoi was...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jan 13, 2018
Wojciech Kruszewski + 1
