International scholarly conference THE PEREDVIZHNIKI ASSOCIATION OF ART EXHIBITIONS. ON THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION ABSTRACTS 19th May, Wednesday, morning session Tatyana YUDENKOVA State Tretyakov Gallery; Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow Peredvizhniki: Between Creative Freedom and Commercial Benefit The fate of Russian art in the second half of the 19th century was inevitably associated with an outstanding artistic phenomenon that went down in the history of Russian culture under the name of Peredvizhniki movement. As the movement took shape and matured, the Peredvizhniki became undisputed leaders in the development of art. They quickly gained the public’s affection and took an important place in Russia’s cultural life. Russian art is deeply indebted to the Peredvizhniki for discovering new themes and subjects, developing critical genre painting, and for their achievements in psychological portrait painting. The Peredvizhniki changed people’s attitude to Russian national landscape, and made them take a fresh look at the course of Russian history. Their critical insight in contemporary events acquired a completely new quality. Touching on painful and challenging top-of-the agenda issues, they did not forget about eternal values, guessing the existential meaning behind everyday details, and seeing archetypal importance in current-day matters. Their best paintings made up the national art school and in many ways contributed to shaping the national identity. The Peredvizhniki stood at the origins of the processes that later determined the paths of Russian art development, including the impressionism, symbolism, and Art Nouveau. What were the ideas that inspired the Peredvizhniki during the period when their association was created? Did these ideas change over the course of two decades, during the period of their most intense activity, when the Peredvizhniki movement reached maturity? What problems and difficulties did the artists face in the process of organizing traveling exhibitions? And most importantly, what was the main idea of their association? What plans did they make and what did they dream about? This paper analyzes the Peredvizhniki’s vision of their further development in the first two decades of the association’s existence. From the first years of its existence, the Peredvizhniki movement, which became the first professional association of artists in Russia, insisted on independence from officials and art- promoting societies, and did not admit any members other than artists. The talks about including art patrons willing to provide financial support were perceived by many artists as an encroachment on their creative freedom. This issue caused the first important contradiction between the members of Peredvizhniki movement. The charter of Peredvizhniki association as a new type of corporate institution spelled out its goals, the rights of its members, and discussed management and financial matters in detail, as the technical side of the association’s activity. Within the Association, its goals and objectives of were understood differently, which naturally caused a lot of disagreements and discussions that are evident in the letters and minutes of the Association’s meetings. 1 Sergey KRIVONDENCHENKOV State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg On the Issue of Dialectical Development of Realistic Tendency in Russian Painting The Realism is one of the most complex and significant concepts in the history of art. It is often associated with the creative method characteristic of the masters of the second half of the 19th century, though it is used both in descriptions of the oldest prehistoric paintings and of modern hyperrealism. Works of realistic art define the mainstream tendencies of the entire world culture, and the meaningful and original current of Russian realism as its integral part. From the first years of the existence of the Imperial Academy of Arts, students were required to master the small forms of painting, starting with the simplest animal and flower painting. While creation of superior painting works required composition, a simpler painting meant copying from an object. Later, professional interest in figurative painting intensified as positivist principles of world cognition developed. In the middle of the 19th century, naturalism and academicism converged in order to copy the nature in a scientific manner, creating important premises for artists’ professional growth. In literature and art of that period, critics developed a theory of realism, proclaiming a new aesthetic norm: the truth of life is beautiful. There was a growing interest of artists and viewers for genre art, which began to cover themes that were previously considered as not worthy of being depicted. In the 1880s and 1890s, an almost documentary descriptiveness persisted in Russian fine art, but the paintings’ message did not include artists’ straightforward assessment of the conveyed reality. The contradictory and experimental nature of artistic events at the beginning of the 20th century greatly influenced the development of Russian fine arts. However, their deep realistic traditions remained the mainstay of meaningful figurative painting for many decades. Uncertainty and romantic ideas about freedom of creativity that prevailed in the first years of the Soviet regime soon gave way to the ideologically determined plan of Soviet culture development. In the 1920s, there were about fifteen artists’ associations in Moscow and Petrograd-Leningrad. The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia organized in 1922 was the most numerous and influential among them. It was created to express “artistic experiences” mainly “in monumental forms of heroic realism style” and determined the professional requirements for paintings by Soviet artists, for many years. The Great Patriotic War, which tragically affected the fate of every Soviet family, deepened everyone’s fondness for pictures of a peaceful life. The period of the “Thaw” provided some conditions for creative emancipation of Soviet artists who strove for a variety of realistic perceptions of the world. In 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party condemned the cult of Joseph Stalin. In another ten years, translated book “Realism without shores” by French literary critic Roger Garaudy was published in the Soviet Union and contributed to establishment of new artistic techniques in visual arts. The changes that matured within the socialist realism of the 1970s and 1980s predetermined a new understanding of the main Soviet creative method as a dialectically developing open system. The innovative and bold creations of so-called Soc-art (from the names Socialist Realism and Pop Art) aimed at a critical and ironic perception of negative Soviet realities. The interest in depicting tangible objects did not wane in the 1990s. Moreover, everyday difficulties in the period of total shortage of goods gave the artistic imagination an additional impetus for depicting objects in a monumental style. In post-Soviet period, some trends in Russian fine art converged with modern trends in European culture. In the 21st century, faithful representation of realistic forms, generally interpreted as hyperrealism, still holds an important place among the variety of artistic techniques. 2 Dmitry SEVERYUKHIN Saint Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design, Saint Petersburg Group Exhibition as an Incarnate Idea At the turn of the 1850 and 1860s, important internal political changes became imminent in Russia, which greatly influenced the cultural situation. The abolition of serfdom gave rise to rapid development of a capitalist system and led to a breakdown of the centuries-old way of life, for all social groups. The Russia of landlords was turning into a Russia of merchants, the aristocracy gradually giving way to enterprising and educated people from unprivileged estates. Intellectuals of humble origin became the leading force in cultural life. The Church and the Palace, two centers of attention that had attracted artists for many years, were gradually giving way to a free art market, in which new professional self-determination of the artist’s personality took shape. Important changes took place as to ideas about the artist’s status and place in the social hierarchy. An impetus was given to the process of professionalization of culture, which was clearly expressed both in literature and in the visual arts. In this context, the dependence of art on social conditions was increasingly manifest. Russian art was gradually discovering contemporary reality, trying to take its rightful place in the cultural space of the time. Public interest in art grew, and the number of viewers who hoped to see the reflection of new moral and aesthetic ideals in paintings steadily increased. At the same time, the circle of enlightened and wealthy connoisseurs, who purposefully collected the works of Russian artists expanded, and the term Russian school first appeared in art criticism. In the artistic life of Saint-Petersburg, the imminent changes were expressed, among other things, in artists’ repeated attempts to create a professional association independent of both the Imperial Academy of Arts and the semi-official Society for the Encouragement of Artists. On this path, they had to face opposition from the authorities, who took the founding of this association for a threat to public peace and feared that such an association could always