Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Russian Canvas Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881 by Rosalind P. Blakesley Professor Rosalind Polly Blakesley MA, DPhil (Oxon) Rosalind Polly Blakesley specialises in the art of Russia and the Baltic region, with particular interests in portraiture; women artists; the history of artistic education and professionalisation; and ways in which questions of nationhood and artistic identity intersect with broader cross-cultural concerns. A Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum and Trustee of the Samuel Courtauld Trust, she has served on the boards of the National Portrait Gallery, Kettle’s Yard and the Hamilton Kerr Institute. She has also curated exhibitions in national galleries in London, Moscow and Washington DC. Blakesley’s latest book, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881 , was awarded the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize and the Art Newspaper Russia Best Book Award. She is now working on the project Russia, Empire and the Baltic Imagination , for which she holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2020-22. In 2017 Blakesley was awarded the Pushkin Medal by the Russian Federation for services to Anglo-Russian relations and Russian art. Russia and the Arts: The Russian Canvas Unveiled. Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky , the most important exhibition of Russian portraits ever to take place at a UK museum, opens today, at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The show, covering the period between 1867 and 1914, features 26 key portraits of famous Russian cultural figures and represents a dialogue between cultural forms, including music, literature and poetry. Curator and Yale author Dr Rosalind Blakesley describes how: ‘This exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate the excitements of Russian Realism, Impressionism, and Symbolism through the portraits of some of Russia’s most creative figures.’ The show, part of a pioneering cultural exchange with Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, hangs the portraits at a more accessible level than previously exhibited, putting us face to face with some of the great figures from the Russian arts, including Tchaikovsky, Turgenev and many more. Highlights from the exhibition include a portrait of Leo Tolstoy, which shows through his dress a growing engagement with the common man; Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, the only painting made of the writer from life; and a haunting painting of composer Mussorgsky by Ilya Repin. Repin painted the composer during a stay in hospital, the result of his spiralling alcoholism, and he is pictured in his dressing gown. Tragically, and in spite of a brief period of abstinence, Mussorgsky died just ten days after he sat for this portrait. This painting of Mussorgsky (above), can also be found in Rosalind Blakesley’s new book for Yale, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881, which charts the remarkable rise of Russian painting in the 18th and 19th centuries. This ground breaking study recontextualises the work of major artists – many of whose later compositions can be seen in the NPG show – reviving their reputations, and exploring the complex developments that took Russian painters from provincial anonymity to international acclaim. Together, Russia and the Arts at the National Portrait Gallery and The Russian Canvas, published this month, invite art lovers to reconsider Russia’s star-studded cultural heritage and extraordinary artistic tradition, as well as the nature of Russian painting’s relationship with other European schools. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881 by Rosalind Blakesley is available from bookshops, or you can place an order via the Yale website. Rosalind P. Blakesley, reader in Russian and European art at the University of Cambridge, is a specialist in Russian art and in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky is on at the National Portrait Gallery from 17 March to 26 June 2016. A catalogue to the show is available from the NPG. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881 by Rosalind P. Blakesley. The site is maintained by Sean Ray at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Culture at Ohio State University. If you would like to submit an article, please navigate to the "SEEJ Information" drop down menu and click "Submit Manuscript." If you have trouble accessing this page and need to request an alternate format, contact [email protected]. The content of this site is published by the site owner(s) and is not a statement of advice, opinion, or information pertaining to The Ohio State University. Neither text, nor links to other websites, is reviewed or endorsed by The Ohio State University. Professor Rosalind Polly Blakesley MA DPhil. A historian of Russian and European art from the 18 th to the early 20 th century, Rosalind Polly Blakesley (née Gray) was educated at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Moscow, and is now Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is also the co-founder of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre (www.ccrac.org.uk), a leading research centre dedicated to Russian and Soviet art, through which she has run a number of collaborative projects with museums, galleries and universities abroad. Blakesley is a Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and has curated and contributed to the catalogues of exhibitions in London, Cambridge, Moscow, Darmstadt and Washington DC. She has also served on the boards of the Hamilton Kerr Institute and Kettle’s Yard and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, where she curated the exhibition Russia and the Arts and advised on its partner exhibition at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow in 2016. For this collaboration, together with her prize-winning book The Russian Canvas , Blakesley was awarded the Pushkin Medal of the Russian Federation in recognition of her services to Anglo-Russian relations and the study of Russian art. Blakesley has received research funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, In Artibus Foundation and Association of Art Historians, among others, and was a Likhachev Foundation Cultural Fellow in St Petersburg in 2014. Media work includes Front Row and World at One on BBC Radio 4 as well as interviews for BBC Radio 3, Sky News, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Russian national television channels, Voice of Russia and the Russian Service of the BBC. Teaching and Graduate Supervision. Blakesley’s teaching encompasses European art and theory from the 18 th to the first half of the 20 th century, as well as specialist courses in Russian art and the Arts and Crafts Movement. She has supervised a range of MPhil and PhD students working on aspects of art or architectural history in Britain, Scandinavia, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including countries such as Georgia and Finland. Recent or current topics of her graduate students include printmaking and the imagery of St Petersburg; artists in emigration; cross-generational relations; defaced images in Soviet Russia; Finnish and Norwegian painting and architecture; women artists; the visual legacy of Evelyn Waugh; and many aspects of cross-cultural exchange. These projects have been funded by, among others, AHRC studentships, including an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Gates Cambridge; Cambridge International Scholarships; the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies (CEELBAS); and the Leverhulme Trust. Blakesley is unable to accept MPhil students until the 2022-23 academic year due to her Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2020-22, but she is currently accepting PhD students. Potential candidates are encouraged to get in touch by following the advice at this link: Research. Blakesley specialises in artistic dialogue and differentiation in eastern and northern Europe, with particular interests in portraiture; the history of artistic education and professionalization; women artists; and ways in which questions of nationhood and artistic identity intersect with broader cross-cultural concerns. Collectively, her various research projects have been concerned with establishing international frameworks for ambitious but often marginalised artistic endeavour; instantiating the art of Russia and the Baltic region within the European mainstream; and uncovering the transnational formation of supposedly national schools. Blakesley’s current research project, ‘Russia, Empire and the Baltic Imagination’ (funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2020-2022), examines Russia’s artistic engagement in the Baltic region throughout the imperial period, and the role of the Baltic Sea as a unique membrane for transcultural exchange. Focusing on paintings, prints and drawings, together with the key sites for their production, circulation and cross-fertilisation, it considers alternative centres of gravity and models of modernity in which a rich nexus of artistic practice still consigned to the peripheries of Europe takes centre stage. Blakesley is also developing a monograph and exhibition on Emily Shanks, a British artist resident in Russia in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. The first woman to be elected a member of Russia’s epochal Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki), Shanks’s work confounds the realist/impressionist divide, and highlights the porosity of artistic categorisations in the twilight of imperial rule. Publications. Previous Research Projects, Exhibitions and Monographs Include: 1. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757-1881 (Yale University Press, 2016), 365 pp., funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize. Winner of the Art Newspaper Russia Best Book Award. Honorable Mention, the Heldt Prize Committee for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Studies. 2. Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (exhibition catalogue: National Portrait Gallery, London, 2016), 176 pp. Leading a five-year collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Blakesley curated the exhibition Russia and the Arts at the National Portrait Gallery and advised on its counterpart, Elizabeth to Victoria: British Portraits from the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery at the Tretyakov. 3. The Arts and Crafts Movement (Phaidon Press, 2006), 272 pp.: paperback 2009. Blakesley’s work on the Arts and Crafts Movement challenged Anglocentric narratives to uncover practices which thrived independently of British influence, as much as those inspired by it. With extensive research in Russia and Scandinavia as well as western Europe and the USA, the resulting monograph revealed a transformative design movement extending across the western world. As part of this project, Blakesley advised on and contributed to the catalogues of the exhibitions A Style of Life, a Style of Art: National Romantic Movements in European Art (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1999); and International Arts and Crafts (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2005). 4. An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (exhibition catalogue: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Merrell Publishers, 2003), 224 pp. For this collaboration with the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, Blakesley co-curated an exhibition of women artists represented in the collections of the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. Further work on women artists and patrons in Russia has led to chapters and articles in Europa Orientalis (2019); A Russian Fairy Tale: The Art and Craft of Elena Polenova (exhibition catalogue: Watts Gallery, Guildford, 2014); Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011); Slavic Review (2008); and Women and Material Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 5. Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford Historical Monographs: Clarendon Press, 2000), 216 pp., funded by the British Academy. Co-edited Volumes. In collaborative international projects, Blakesley has brought together Russian, European and American scholars to rethink Russian modernism, and to consider the international contexts and contacts for Russian and Soviet art. From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Artistic Culture (co-edited with Margaret Samu, Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 226 pp. Russian Art and the West: a Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts (co-edited with Susan E. Reid, Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 246 pp. Articles, chapters and exhibition catalogue essays include: ‘The First Woman Peredvizhnik: Emily Shanks and the Blurred Realist/Impressionist Divide,’ in ‘Translations and Dialogues: The Reception of Russian Art Abroad,’ ed. Silvia Burini, special issue, Europa Orientalis , 31 (2019), 81-89. ‘Russia, Rome and the Tricky Business of Disaster Painting,’ The Burlington Magazine , 160 (December 2018), 996-1005. ‘Performing Russian Success? The 1770 Exhibition at the Imperial Academy of Arts,’ in J. Buckler, J. A. Cassiday and B. Wolfson (eds), Russian Performances: Word, Action, Object (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), 64-73. ‘An Unexpected Role Reversal: Pavel Tretiakov and the International Exhibition of 1862,’ Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture , 23 (2017), 93-103. (in Russian and English) ‘Distinguished Visitors: A Russian Cultural Pantheon in London,’ The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine , 2:51 (2016): 36-53. ‘Ladies-in-Waiting in Waiting: Picturing Adolescence in Dmitry Levitsky’s Smolny Portraits, 1772-1776,’ Art History , 37:1 (February 2014), 10- 37. (available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12048/full ) ‘Cultural Leadership and International Dialogue between the London and St Petersburg Academies of Art, 1757-1805,’ The Slavonic and East European Review , 92:1 (January 2014), 1-24. (available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/slaveasteurorev2.92.issue-1 ) ‘Polenovo, the Polenovs, and a Modern Art World’ in N. Murray (ed.), A Russian Fairy Tale: The Art and Craft of Elena Polenova (exhibition catalogue: Watts Gallery, Guildford, 2014), 17-33. ‘Women and the Visual Arts’ in W. Rosslyn and A. Tosi (eds), Women in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Lives and Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011), 91-117. (available online at http://www.openbookpublishers.com/reader/98 ) ‘Pride and the Politics of Nationality in Russia’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, 1757-1807,’ Art History , 33:5 (December 2010), 800-835. (available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00782.x/abstract ) ‘“The Venerable Artist’s Fiery Speeches Ringing in my Soul”: The Artistic Impact of William Morris and his Circle in Nineteenth-Century Russia’ in G. Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts (Peter Lang Publishers, 2009), 79-105. ‘Emile Zola’s Art Criticism in Russia’ in C. Adlam and J. Simpson (eds), Critical Exchange: Art Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Russia and Western Europe (Peter Lang Publishers, 2009), 263-284. ‘Art, Nationhood, and Display: Zinaida Volkonskaia and Russia’s Quest for a National Museum of Art,’ Slavic Review , 67:4 (Winter 2008), 912-933. (available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/27653031) ‘“There is something there […]”: the Peredvizhniki and Western European Art,’ in ‘Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology,’ ed. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier and Wendy Salmond, special issue, Experiment: A Journal of Russian Culture , 14 (2008), 18-56. ‘Introduction’ to Magnificence of the Tsars: Men’s Dress at the Imperial Russian Court, 1727-1903 (exhibition catalogue: V&A Publications, 2008), 9-13. ‘Internationalität und Eklektizismum: Diaghilews Zeitschrift und Kunstbewegung “Mir Iskusstwa”/“Welt der Kunst”‘ in R. Beil (ed.), Russland 1900: Kunst und Kultur im Reich des Letzten Zaren (exhibition catalogue: Museum Künstlerkolonie, Darmstadt, 2008), 243-251. ‘Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts’ in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds), Women and Material Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 71-85. ‘Slavs, Brits and the Question of National Identity in Art: Russian Responses to British Painting in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ in C. Payne and W. Vaughan (eds), English Accents: Interactions with British Art c. 1776-1855 (Ashgate/Scolar Press, 2004), 203-223. ‘“Help me to eclipse the celebrated Hogarth”: the Reception of Hogarth in Russia,’ Apollo , CLIII/471 (2001), 23-30. ‘The Homo-erotic Paintings of Aleksandr Ivanov’ in P. Barta (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Russian Civilisation (Routledge, 2001), 163-80. ‘Questions of Identity at Abramtsevo’ in L. Morowitz and W. Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate/Scolar Press, 2000), 105-121. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881 by Rosalind P. Blakesley. Finally there exists a comprehensive study of Russian painting before the twentieth century: Rosalind Blakesley’s gloriously illustrated, exceptionally researched history of painting from the foundation of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1757 to the death of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. This is a book we may not have even known we were waiting for, but now that it is here, it may well change the field of art history. To say that “it fills a gap in existing literature” (2) is a gross understatement. The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757–1881 not only shows us in profound depth how large our art-historical blind spot to Russia has been, but fills it with a treasure trove of biographical information on artists, rich formal analyses, and nuanced contextual readings of works and movements. This is a book that also stands “to recalibrate the geographical compass of the history of art” (3) by completely remaking our understanding of nearly two centuries of art making in a larger pan-European context. Blakesley has in this single volume removed any lingering iron curtain to give us a full view of the richness of artistic production in a long-understudied place and period. Packed with information about artists and works that are in many cases completely unknown outside Russia, The Russian Canvas comprehensively brings together an array of information that previously was littered across many divergent sources. Drawing on English-language scholarship (some out of print or published in Slavic Studies journals that are off most art historians’ radars) as well as untranslated Soviet sources, Blakesley creates a magisterial account of the development of Russian painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book is organized around ten well- paced chapters. The first four focus on processes of education: the creation of the Academy (chapter 1), the life and works of the Academy’s earliest painters (chapter 2), the arts under Tsar Nicholas I and the emergence of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists (chapter 3), and the beginnings of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture as well as provincial art schools (chapter 4). The next two chapters are devoted to Russian painters who worked abroad in Paris and Italy, while chapter 7 considers artists who occupied marginal territory due to their location or lack of formal training. Chapters 8 and 9 return to St. Petersburg and the critical direction in Russian realist painting as well as the formation of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. The book concludes with a chapter on the social and political circumstances that both hindered and enabled the work of women artists beginning in the late eighteenth century. Blakesley is careful throughout to situate Russian artistic production within larger understandings of western European art (ranging from Britain and France to Italy, Germany, and Spain), while still maintaining an unwavering focus on the indigenous pictorial tradition. A case in point is Blakesley’s critical investigation of how French and German artists influenced the Russian realists of the 1860s and 1870s. The discussion of the importance of the Barbizon school and Düsseldorf painters for Ivan Shishkin and Fedor Vasilev is revelatory. Shishkin in particular is often considered the pinnacle of Russian nationalism in the landscape tradition. But Blakesley reconsiders his indebtedness to peripheral artists and schools through an analysis of his travel records and letters. While other accounts have briefly considered the influence of the Barbizon on Shishkin’s work, Blakesley takes this contextualization to a new level, showing how an exploration of “pan-European concerns” (255) adds a vital new dimension to our understanding of even the most heavily studied areas of nineteenth-century art. Blakesley also provides crucial reassessments of certain moments in Russian history that have applicability beyond the eastern European setting. Her nuanced discussion of artists who forged careers outside of major cities in chapter 7 adds important new insights in terms of how center and periphery operate within a broad geographical context. She develops this discussion by adding a further dimension: she looks at “the periphery within cities” (168; emphasis in original), examining artists who worked outside the standard systems of production and patronage. For example, this approach provides a new way of understanding art production under Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–55). Whereas earlier scholars often focused on the heightened state control and censorship that characterized this period, Blakesley makes a case for a fresh view of Nicholas’s reign as not entirely deleterious for the arts. She is careful not to overstate the reactionary nature of his reign and discusses his addition of new galleries for modern Russian works in the Winter Palace (the only contemporary art displayed in the Hermitage at the time) along with his purchase of works by native artists to raise the profile of Russian art. In each reassessment, Blakesley builds contextual evidence step-by-step, challenging evaluations that have come before and often performing a total recalibration of periods in Russian art’s history. This is particularly true of her fresh account of what happened with the “Revolt of the Fourteen” in 1863. Blakesley takes the reader through the events that led fourteen Academy students to withdraw from the school, something that other scholars working on the period such as Elizabeth Valkenier and David Jackson have also done. But Blakesley provides perhaps the richest picture of this important moment by carefully negotiating the “minefield of critical opinion” (237) that characterized the time. Through her reassessment, a new picture of the Academy emerges: long supposed to be a conservative and retrograde inhibitor to Russian artists, it is shown in a much richer and progressive context than previous evaluations have acknowledged. Throughout the volume, Blakesley skillfully marries visual analysis and historical detail, weaving between descriptions of paintings, analyses of iconography, and discussions of the larger social and political context. Blakesley has an eye for details and a voice that allows her to enrich our understanding of Russian culture in an inclusive way. She adroitly handles Russian terms—giving explanations that will allow readers without any Russian to understand some of the intricacies of the language. Cases in point include her brief discussions of isskustvo vs. khudozhestvo (both words for “art” in Russian) and russkii vs. rossiiskii (both usually translated into English as “Russian”). Blakesley also proves a master of evocative analogies. Her description of works that epitomize “the cocktail of native and foreign influences that many Russian artists imbibed” (54) is a good case in point, as is her characterization of “the viper’s nest of quasi-xenophobic recrimination” (17) in which the new Academy emerged. But it is as a historian that she truly shines. She provides biographical detail for nearly every artist she discusses, in particular emphasizing their class origins —a boon for scholars who want to study lesser-known figures of serf origin. There is also much that is new in this book from a historical standpoint. Blakesley’s presentation of the emergence of provincial art schools, for instance, breaks important ground. She examines these institutions in relation to the origins of the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, and discusses all of the training centers in relation to the Academy in St. Petersburg. The section on the understudied, but highly skilled, Romantic portraitist Orest Kiprensky is also wonderfully fresh. Blakesley provides a rich level of detail on his life and a select group of his works, bolstering her account with previously untranslated sections of letters and contemporary criticism, footnoted to guide prospective future work. The same can be said of the chapter on women artists, which draws together fragmentary evidence to provide perhaps the first comprehensive view of Russian women’s experiences as practitioners and professionals in the period. That contribution leads to a larger point that needs to be made about the exhaustive, synthetic research Blakesley has conducted. She brings together material scoured from Moscow and Petersburg archives with analyses and quotes found in a wide array of untranslated Russian studies and monographs. She then adds central ideas culled from major Western art- historical and cultural thinkers such as Michael Fried and Michel Foucault. And she combines these with the most recent work by junior scholars in the field, including unpublished dissertations and in-progress manuscripts. A tremendous quantity of material has been synthesized here, and readers are left with the impression that potential for future work on this period is endless. That being said, there were occasionally moments when one might wish for Blakesley to continue her arguments at greater length. Often, her insights are so provocative and fresh that it seems they could have been drawn out further, as in her fascinating but brief comparative discussion of Dmitri Levitsky’s and Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits from the second half of the eighteenth century. She suggests fleetingly that Gainsborough’s motif of balletic poses actually postdates its use by Levitsky and should force a reconsideration of Russian painters’ indebtedness to the West. But she lets this stand as something that “merits some thought” (45) instead of bringing it to fuller fruition. Likewise, her discussion of the Neoclassical stalwarts Karl Briullov and Aleksandr Ivanov along with Fedor Bruni—“a figure often mentioned only in passing . . . despite unparalleled success as an academic history painter in his time” (141)—is significant. There has long been a need to reconsider Bruni as Blakesley does in the context of Neoclassicism in Russia. But her discussion of his work, compared especially to Ivanov (to whom she devotes twelve pages to Bruni’s five), feels rather thin. In each instance it seems as though much more could be said. At one point Blakesley writes that “it was going to require the efforts of artists independent of the Academy, as well as those working within the system, to persuade Russian and foreign observers alike that Russia had a pictorial tradition of sufficient diversity and longevity to hold its own on the international stage” (83). These lines were meant to describe the formation of a national school in Russia, but they could also be applied equally well to the work Blakesley does in the book. Students and scholars alike have long needed persuading that Russia’s pictorial tradition can hold its own among the western European heavy-hitters of early modernism. The Russian Canvas makes the most convincing case to date for Russian art’s ability to hold its own on the international stage. Perhaps now, in its aftermath, persuasion will no longer be necessary. Allison Leigh Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.