Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: the Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists'

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H-SHERA Olsen on Shabanov, 'Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists'

Review published on Monday, April 20, 2020

Andrey Shabanov. Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019. Illustrations. 280 pp. $108.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-5013-3553-2; $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5013-3552-5.

Reviewed by Trenton Olsen (Ohio State University)Published on H-SHERA (April, 2020) Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha (University of Calgary)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54485

For nearly a century, scholarship regarding the Peredvizhniki misconstrued the group’s true character. Stalinist historians were primarily responsible as they politicized the group, fashioning them as the forefathers of socialist realism. In his introduction, Andrey Shabanov cites the work of two modern scholars who have helped reverse this reading. Pioneering efforts were made by Elizabeth Valkenier in her work Russian Realist Art: The State and Society; The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (1977) to wrest the legacy of the group away from its propagandistic historiography, and David Jackson’s more recent monograph, The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth- Century Russian Painting (2006), likewise provides fresh understanding of these artists and their work. Despite the revisionary efforts of scholars over the last several decades, Shabanov takes aim at a recurring myth surrounding the Wanderers—namely, to dispel the conceptualization of the Peredvizhniki as a group of realists with a homogenous aesthetic and ideology. He suggests the root of this mischaracterization began with period art criticism offered by figures like Vladimir Stasov, but its pervasiveness has colored most scholarship on the artists to the present. His contention is, therefore, to demonstrate that the Peredvizhniki were unified primarily by their endeavor to create a commercially successful business-like partnership of artists, and he contains the scope of his investigation to the first twenty-five years of the group’s existence. Shabanov signals a shift in the way we think about the group by referring to them as the Partnership. This altered English expression emphasizes the business-like operations of the Russian Tovarishchestvo, as opposed to the titles Peredvizhniki or Wanderers that connote the group’s traveling exhibitions conveyed by peredvizhnaia vystavka.

As Shabanov states in his introduction, the focus of his book is on the institution of the Peredvizhniki, and not on a single artist or group of paintings (indeed, he does not turn his attention to the usual blockbuster Peredvizhniki oil paintings until well over halfway through the manuscript). This approach distinguishes this work as it reads not so much as a work of art history but rather a history of the group. Instead, Shabanov examines a variety of rich archival artifacts to demonstrate the market ambitions of the group. These resources include exhibition catalogs and advertisement materials, group photographs, an extensive amount of exhibition reviews, and the Partnership’s documents, including the group’s official charter filed in 1870. Among these alternative documents, and perhaps the two greatest gems unearthed by Shabanov’s deep archival dive, are the fifteenth and

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Olsen on Shabanov, 'Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists'. H-SHERA. 04-20-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/166842/reviews/6124008/olsen-shabanov-art-and-commerce-late-imperial-russia-peredvizhniki Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-SHERA twenty-fifth anniversary reports drafted by Grigorii Miasoedov. Miasoedov’s writings offer rare insight into the quotidian concerns and operations of the Peredvizhniki, which, when paired with Shabanov’s insightful exposition, provide a clear sense of the values and struggles of the group of artists. Reading Miasoedov’s reports helps the reader ascertain the human dimension of individual artists in this group, giving their lives a sense of present, tangible, and warm three-dimensionality, removed from the sometimes deadening or flattening treatment of individuals in art historical investigation.

Shabanov divides the focus of his book neatly into two sections. In part 1, he investigates the Peredvizhniki’s self-image: what they valued, how they viewed themselves, and how they packaged and conveyed the values of their artistic endeavors to the public. Part 2 focuses on how the public perceived the Peredvizhniki, which he gauges primarily through the critical reception published surrounding certain benchmark exhibitions.

Shabanov quickly establishes the validity of his intervention by appealing to the Peredvizhniki’s foundational charter. As the document states, the artists’ first aim was to foster a movement of Russian art that traveled throughout the Russian Empire, inspiring a love for art in society. Secondly, the Partnership wished to arrange exhibitions in order to sell works and replica prints. He fleshes out this motivation in the first chapter by citing a letter from Vasily Perov to Ivan Kramskoi in which the writer described the purpose of the Peredvizhniki as allowing its members to create an art market independent of the Imperial Academy of Arts wherein they could collect the revenue generated by selling their own works. That financial independence and security constituted a major concern for the Peredvizhniki and is so readily apparent on the surface of their origin documents, it is a wonder that this theme has not received more scholarly attention and justifies the important corrective work that Shabanov offers.

In the four chapters, Shabanov provides an encyclopedic wealth of information revealing the internal operations of the Peredvizhniki, from issues of how to finance the traveling exhibitions, to the pragmatics of transporting and hanging the shows, and the group’s struggle to secure a stable venue in St. Petersburg. However, this first section does not quite reach the compelling conclusion that Shabanov sets out to establish regarding the Peredvizhniki’s self-image. He dwells at length on the types of advertisements, catalogs, and illustrations that accompanied their exhibitions. While this investigation deals ostensibly with how the Peredvizhniki perceived themselves and tried to situate their image within an international art context, he does not emphasize that artists’ role in the creation of these materials. Rather, he indicates that many choices in creating these materials were determined by independent publishers. And while he cites the commercial appeal of catalogs with photo-mechanical reproductions over text-only catalogs, he does not dwell on the actual revenue generated from catalog sales. This gives the reader a vague notion that the Peredvizhniki had concerns of representation and revenue in mind, but as these constitute major points of interest for Shabanov, he could have brought these conclusions to a finer point.

A similar issue persists in chapter 3 as Shabanov analyzes several of the seventeen group photographs taken of the Peredvizhniki. The premise of analyzing the photographs is intriguing, but aside from some surface-level visual observations concerning the compositions and settings of the photographs, he does not provide a novel interpretation of the images. While his intention for the chapter is to prove that the group photographs reflect the image the Peredvizhniki wished to promote

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Olsen on Shabanov, 'Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists'. H-SHERA. 04-20-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/166842/reviews/6124008/olsen-shabanov-art-and-commerce-late-imperial-russia-peredvizhniki Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-SHERA of themselves, he contradicts the gravity of their importance as he points out that “there is no evidence that the Peredvizhniki deliberately promoted their group photographs themselves” (p. 90). While a number of images were taken of the group surrounding important anniversaries, these images sometimes took as long as five years to reach the press , causing the reader to wonder how immediately concerned the Peredvizhniki were to use these group portraits to present a curated identity to the public.

The chapters of the second half of the book are organized around select exhibitions during the first twenty-five years of the Partnership’s existence. Shabanov strategically selects exhibitions that marked major shifts for the group—their inaugural exhibition of 1871, the first exhibition outside of the academy in St. Petersburg in 1876, the shows between 1883 and 1885 during which Ilya Repin’s submissions shook the politically stable persona the Peredvizhniki had built—and then concludes the book with the reports written at the twentieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries of the Partnership’s existence. Shabanov limits his investigation of public perception of the Peredvizhniki to the St. Petersburg press as it produced far more reviews than Moscow or any of the provinces to stage the traveling exhibitions.

In addition to reviewing contemporary reception of the Peredvizhniki, Shabanov seeks to lay the historical groundwork for how the Peredvizhniki came to be regarded primarily as a group of realist artists. He repeatedly reiterates in these chapters that they had no unified agenda or aesthetic. While I doubt if anyone who has encountered the works of the Peredvizhniki would contend with the view that they were all adopting similar aesthetic principles, even for those who came from the same academic background, Shabanov’s contention made me aware that my default notion of the Peredvizhniki is that they were dedicated realists. His exploration of the exhibition reviews in chapters 5 and 6 makes clear the case that critics recognized the variety of works and genres that comprised the Peredvizhniki exhibitions. Chapter 7 focuses on Repin’s submissions to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth exhibitions. The artist’s thinly veiled political criticisms of Russian society drew unwanted attention and elicited official government censure that the group had managed to avoid in all previous exhibits. Shabanov wants to demonstrate that Repin’s politically charged works between 1883 and 1885 sparked an unfavorable critical reception, which both placed Repin into the limelight as the Peredvizhniki’s leader and resulted in the group’s association with realism. However, the seeds for the legacy of realism are not clearly demonstrated in the exhibition reviews he includes, and to solidify this link, Shabanov would have to resort to charting the group’s twentieth-century historiography, which would feel out of place given the parameters of his book. But without it, Shabanov merely asks the reader to infer that Repin’s contributions to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth Peredvizhniki exhibitions are really at the root of the group’s contemporary stereotypical conception as realists, without offering any concrete evidence to support this conclusion.

In the closing sections of the book, Shabanov softens in his objection against the realist interpretation of the Peredvizhniki, framing his contention in a different manner, by stating that the Partnership “was capable of accommodating a broad range of aesthetic ideologies, of which realism was only one” (p. 203). This final assertion struck me as the greatest achievement of Shabanov’s scholarship. Indeed, by the end of the eighth chapter, where Shabanov has most succeeded is to demonstrate the diversity of works in the Peredvizhniki exhibitions. This diversity includes such aspects as the types of paintings exhibited as well as the social breadth of models represented in portraiture. In most exhibitions, only a minor portion of works are realist genre scenes. It therefore becomes clear that

Citation: Trenton Olsen. Review of Shabanov, Andrey, Art and Commerce in Late Imperial Russia: The Peredvizhniki, a Partnership of Artists. H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews. April, 2020.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54485

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.