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Under the impact of the Crimean war the
Academy of Arts ws increasingly unable to ignore the liberal mood of Russian
intellectuals and the influences of Chernishevskii's "Aesthetics"
upon the young painters. While it continued to defend the official manners and
traditions, it also started accepting the coexistence with some new trends,
primarily the genre painting which, according to A. Ivanov, was
"Accommodating art to the requirements of the time." The official
recognition came in 1859, when the Academy awarded silver medals to genre
painters Miasoyedov, Korneyev, Paskov, and Yakoby. In 1860 A. Popov received a
gold medal for his "Tea Warehouse at Nizhnii Novgorod Fair," the
"small" gold medal went to Perov for his "Son a a Sextant
receiving His First Cross" and the second silver medal to Kramskoy for his
"Death of the Wounded Lenskii." In the same year the Academy approved
Perov's sketch for the "Sermon in the Village," which as a painting
was awarded a gold medal the following year. Some genre painters were admitted
to the professorship at the Academy. Among them was V.V. Pukirev, who was
invited to teach painting of folk scenes. His "Misalliance" (1862)
was enthusiastically received by the liberals. The picture represents the sell
out of a young woman. It made a strong psychological effect on the public and
it appears that even some academicians liked it and helped Pukirev to enter the
Academy.
In 1862 small gold medals went to F.S. Zhuravliev and N.P. Petrov and to the
surprise of everybody, the Academy announced that it would admit all styles and
manners without discrimination and let the students of the graduating class
choose their own subjects in the contest for the prizes instead of imposing its
own. It also decided to award the gold medal to the best painting regardless of
what it represented. However, the Academy soon withdrew its pledge to the
students and for the contest of 1863 gave "The Feast in Valhalla" as
the theme, revering to its old practice of prescribing the topic for the
graduation picture from the mythology and maintaining its prerogative as
supreme arbiter in arts. The trouble was that the new generation of artists did
not want any longer to work under the tutelage of anybody. The students
revolted against the continuing conventionalism and scholasticism of the
Academy and thirteen of them, out of a total number of fourteen, refused to
participate in the contest and decided to leave the Academy. They founded the
Artel (artists' cooperative) of Russian Artists, headed by I. N. Kramskoy,
which enabled them to paint and earn a living. The public received them
favorably and orders were not lacking. The life in the rented hostel was
exciting for a while, but then began recriminations and disputes among the
members. Kramskoy was one of the first to leave the Artel and not long after it
dissolved.
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