Painting. Russian artists. Ivan Kramskoy (1837-1887)

Ivan Kramskoy was born to a lower-middle-class provincial family. He first worked as a copyist clerk, then as a retoucher with an itinerant photographer. From 1857 to 1863 Kramskoy attended the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Then for five years he studied at the School of Drawing run by the Society of the Promotion of Fine Arts. In November 1863 while a student of the Academy Kramskoy organised a protest against prescribed mytho¬logical themes in the competition for the Great Gold Medal that gave a six-year scholarship to study abroad. This courageous act liberated Russian artists from the influence of the Imperial Court and the state bureaucracy that controlled their work and lifestyle. It also marked a decisive break with the Academy's outdated form of Neo-classicism patterned on Western models which lost popularity with the educated public but continued to be taught and favoured at the official level. After the break with the Academy Kramskoy sustained a group of thirteen independent painters both organisationally and intellectually in keeping with the spirit of the reform and renovation that swept Russia during the 1860s after the emancipation of the serfs. He set up a communal workshop (artel), the precursor of the first independent group of artists in Russia, the Wanderers. At the same time Kramskoy defined for them ideological underpinnings of the new art: a combination of civic, moral and national goals, which infused Russian realism with its crystal-clear ideal of service. Kramskoy believed that in the Western understanding of "art for art's sake" was not appropriate for autocratic Russia. He asserted that as painters in Russia were not free, they had to take a firm standing on the urgent problems of the day.

As a painter Kramskoy is best known for his portraits of outstanding literary, artistic, civic and academic figures such as Lev Tolstoy, of 1873, Ivan Shishkin, of 1880, Sergey Botkin, of 1880. One of Kramskoy's best portraits is that of Nekrasov at the Time of his Last Poems, of 1877-88. In this portrait the poet is shown on his deathbed still engaged in writing.

The figure of Christ represented as a moral rather than a divine force, occupies an important place in Kramskoy's oeuvre. In Christ in the Wilderness, of 1870, the Teacher with thoughtful face sits on a rock, his hands clasped. As Kramskoy asserted, he wanted to bring to the observer a sense of Christ's moral choice M a model applicable to their own lives when torn between serving the ideal or adhering to private concerns.
During the last decade of his life Kramskoy was working on the enormous painting which was not finished. In the Derisive Laughter (1877-82) Kramskoy shows Christ being mocked by the crowed. Probably this painting reflects the artist's disappointment and bitterness at the failure of his generation to reform society.

 

Literature: Book "Russian art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva