Repin’s Rooms

Encyclopaedia Britannica calls him a Ukrainian-born Russian painter of historical subjects, known for the power and drama of his works. The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine, a century later, still reaches for an encyclopaedia of another kind: his pictures as an “encyclopaedia of Russian life,” peasants and aristocrats, working classes and royalty, revolutionaries and artists. Kornei Chukovsky, his neighbour in Kuokkala, named the gift more sharply — “emotional tempests, whirlwinds, huge crowds, indomitable passions,” and “a brilliant insight into humanity.” The studio self-portrait of 1887, painted in Florence, is a dark coat and a steady look. The work is what happens when that look goes back into a room full of other people and does not flinch.

He was born on 24 July 1844, Old Style — 5 August New Style — in Chuguyev, now Chuhuiv, Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire, to a poor family near Kharkov. Britannica records that he learned his trade from a painter of icons named Bunakov, and in 1864 became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg. Icon-painting is not a footnote. It is a first education in faces that have to carry more than likeness. In 1871 he won an academy scholarship that took him to France and Italy. When he returned he devoted himself to history painting. In 1894 he became professor of historical painting at the academy. The dates are a ladder. The pictures are what the ladder was for.

I love variety.

Critics heard that variety as a fault. Yudenkova quotes him paraphrasing a review: no continuity, no clear goal, everything accidental. His answer was the three words. In the same May 1886 letter he listed the charges as if they were a menu — a Gospel scene, a folk motif, a fantastical epic, a genre of foreign life, an ethnographic study, a newspaper story, a psychological étude, a liberal melodrama, a bloody scene from Russian history — and then wrote that he could not change who he was. Alexandre Benois, in his History of Russian Painting, called him “a sad victim of the misunderstanding that was prevalent in Russian art,” a talent that grew “sideways.” Chukovsky, writing in the artist’s defence between 1907 and 1913, answered that to dismiss Repin was to dismiss Russia. The argument is still the visitor’s map. He is not one mood. He is a country walking through a door.

Galina Churak, in another Tretyakov Gallery Magazine essay, sets two early pictures side by side and will not let you choose. Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1871, in the Russian Museum, was recognised as the best fellowship competition entry in the Academy’s history. Vladimir Stasov wrote that in the museum of the Academy’s gold graduation works the piece was one of the most original and striking creations. Repin later recalled, in Far Away, Close By, a “special gripping allure in tragedy” and the childhood farewell to an older sister. At the same time he was at work on a canvas of a totally different nature: Barge Haulers on the Volga. Churak reads the double labour as the polyphonic character of the whole career. A miracle in a dim room. A towpath in hard light. He would not wait until one was finished to begin the other.

Barge Haulers on the Volga, 1870–73, in the Russian Museum, is the picture Britannica still names as epitomising the stark realism of his work. Oil on canvas, 131.5 by 281 centimetres. A line of men, a barge, a sky that does not help. The Tretyakov Magazine’s account of the Academy and the Wanderers records how it came: a trip along the Volga in 1870 with the young Fyodor Vasiliev, studies, then a commission from Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich after he had seen those studies. Britannica’s date for the finished picture is 1873. Grim, sharply drawn, boldly composed: the adjectives are the critic’s. The painting’s fact is simpler. Labour has been given a horizon and has not been asked to look noble. Soviet later use of the canvas as a model does not change what the towpath already knew.

I have no regrets, nor do I wish to change anything or please anyone.

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, 16 November 1581, 1885, in the Tretyakov, is 199.5 by 254 centimetres of a crime that will not end. Yudenkova notes that government censors forbade him, for a time after the first display, from exhibiting it. She reads the pair as a Pietà reversed: not quiet grief holding a body, but a “dishevelled and pathetic” killer at the moment he understands finality. Tolstoy, she writes, spoke of the “true beauty of the dying” young man, forgiveness, the father’s remorse. Repin does not spare the angular face. Churak adds that the canvas represents not the denouement of the tragedy but the lead-up, the extreme tension of father and dying heir. History painting, here, is not a reconstruction of 1581. It is a present tense of blood on a carpet. Britannica lists the picture among the works that made his name. The visitor does not need the listing. The red is enough.

The early 1880s kept several large canvases in the studio at once. Yudenkova names four conceived in those years: They Did Not Expect Him; Ivan the Terrible; a commission from the Ministry of the Imperial Court, Emperor Alexander III Receives Village Elders; and St Nicholas of Myra Saving Three Innocents from Death. He felt, in his own words, a “natural inclination” to work on the first two. Religious Procession in Kursk Province, 1880–83, in the Tretyakov, is the polyphonic crowd Britannica also names. Dust, a column, the country walking as if walking were a faith. Churak calls it polyphonic. Polyphony, on this canvas, is not a musical metaphor borrowed for elegance. It is the refusal to let one face be the picture. A procession is a society that has not yet admitted it is a society. He paints the admission.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, 1880–91, in the Russian Museum, is the other temperature from the same years. Britannica says it is perhaps his best-known work. Yudenkova hears in it a merry “clatter and chatter” running at the same time as Ivan’s howl and the exile’s uncertain step. A table, laughter, a letter being composed as an insult. The years of making it are almost a decade. Variety, again, is not a programme. It is the fact that a man who could paint a murder could also paint a joke that takes up a whole wall. Critics condemned the Cossacks as they condemned the State Council later. He went on painting. The table does not care about the review. The letter is still being written.

They Did Not Expect Him, 1884–88, in the Tretyakov, is the room that will not close. Yudenkova traces it to the legacy of the Narodnik movement: an exile’s return after penal servitude. The first version showed a man brave and resolute. After the changes, the 1888 face is assailed by doubt, an uncertain gait, a question in the eyes. On the far wall, a lithograph of Charles de Steuben’s Calvary equates the convict’s road with another. Stasov wrote to Repin that Alexander Ivanov’s Christ still had his fateful journey in front of him, and the man in this picture had already made it. In August 1888 Repin told Pavel Tretyakov, “I think I have finally got him right. the painting rings true.” Churak says the states endure and evolve and do not reach a final point. That is why the canvas still feels like an interruption. You have walked in at the wrong second. The second is the subject.

Look at these eyes: they look as if alive, they are lost in thought; in them is drawn the whole inner, spiritual work of that minute.

The Mussorgsky portrait is the other kind of history: four days, a hospital, no easel. Stasov, writing in Golos in March 1881, says Repin came from Moscow for the Wanderers’ ninth exhibition and found the composer in the Nikolaevsky Military Hospital. He painted on 2, 3, 4 and 5 March; after that the last period of the illness began. The painter had to perch at a small table. Mussorgsky sat in a hospital armchair, in a dressing-gown with crimson velvet facings, head a little inclined, “deeply considering something.” Stasov was there when Kramskoy saw the canvas, took a chair, sat close to the face, and did not leave. Tretyakov bought the picture sight unseen. The Tretyakov Gallery Magazine gives the oil as 69 by 57 centimetres. Britannica names Mussorgsky among the vigorous portraits of great contemporaries, with Tolstoy and Glinka. Stasov’s fact is smaller and harder. The man in the gown would not sit again.

The Tolstoy of 1887, in the Tretyakov, is the other sitting: a count who had already turned toward a harsher ethic, dark blouse, hands that know a desk and a field. Repin would paint him again, later, barefoot, as if property were a mistake the body could refuse. Portrait, for him, is not a rest from the crowds. It is the crowd reduced to one weather. Chukovsky said the goal seemed to catch expressions that appear on a face only once in a lifetime. Kramskoy, in Stasov’s hearing, found in Mussorgsky’s eyes “the whole inner, spiritual work of that minute.” The minute is the unit. A barge-hauler’s minute. An exile’s. A tsar’s. A composer’s in a hospital chair. He does not average them. He waits until the once happens, and then he is already painting.

The late official picture is not a betrayal of the early towpath. Ceremonial Sitting of the State Council on 7 May 1901, finished in 1903, in the Russian Museum, is a hall of uniforms around a horseshoe table, a centenary that looks like a census of power. Yudenkova notes that it drew condemnation, as the Cossacks had. Variety, again, includes the state as a subject, not only the people the state would rather not see. He remained capable of Gospel scenes in old age, of Finland, of Kuokkala. Britannica records the death: 29 September 1930, Kuokkala, Finland — the settlement later named Repino. The Wanderers had lost their lofty status in younger eyes. He went on working. The career does not tidy into a slogan about the people. It is a sequence of rooms in which someone is always arriving, hauling, killing, returning, or sitting for the last time.

Kuokkala, on the Finnish side of the border that later moved, was not a retirement from Russia. It was a house, Penaty, in which work continued and neighbours came. Chukovsky lived close enough to become, Yudenkova writes, a good friend, and to publish, between 1907 and 1913, the defence that still helps a visitor: an “awkward Russian beauty,” a goal of catching faces that appear only once. The younger generation saw in him the realist the Wanderers had already become in textbooks. He, she shows, was still trying new Gospel canvases, still writing to friends about doubts. The encyclopaedia of Russian life did not close because a border had. It changed rooms. Finland in the last years is a fact of geography. The easel is the fact of character.

The Wanderers — the Peredvizhniki — are the society Britannica’s career walks through even when the word is not on the page. The ninth exhibition, the one that hung Mussorgsky’s portrait, opened under the shock of Alexander II’s assassination; Stasov’s article, the Wikisource commentary notes, barely mentioned Surikov’s Morning of the Streltsy Execution that hung in the same rooms. Repin wrote to Tretyakov that Surikov’s picture was their pride. He could champion another man’s crowd while his own Cossacks and processions were already the public’s idea of the movement. Landscape, in those shows, had Shishkin. Mood had the line that would become Levitan. History and the door had him. A visitor who knows only the towpath has met the manifesto and missed the hospital chair.

Icon, Academy, France, a professorship in historical painting: Britannica’s ladder is real. What the ladder does not say is that he kept several temperatures in the studio at once and would not apologise. Yudenkova’s four pictures of the 1880s — exile, tsar, emperor, saint — are one week of looking if you walk the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum in the mind. Churak’s pairing of Jairus and the barge-haulers is the same lesson from a decade earlier. He is not a specialist. Specialists, in Russian painting of his generation, were already splitting sea from forest from peasant. He painted the split itself: the educated room and the towpath, the joke and the murder, the composer dying and the count refusing shoes. Variety, he said. The word is small. The walls are not.

Britannica names Mussorgsky among the vigorous portraits of great contemporaries, with Tolstoy and Glinka. The third name is a door this page does not open: Glinka as a sitting we do not hang. The two we do hang are enough to show the gift Chukovsky named — expressions that appear on a face only once. The hospital gown is four days. The 1887 Tolstoy is a count who had already turned toward a harsher ethic. The Florence self-portrait of the same year is the painter’s own once: a dark coat, a look that then goes back into rooms full of other people. Portrait, for him, is not a rest from the crowds. It is the crowd reduced to one weather. He waits until the once happens, and then he is already painting.

In 1894 he became professor of historical painting at the academy, Britannica’s date for the chair that looks like a settlement. It was not a settlement of the pictures. The State Council still sat ahead of him, a centenary of uniforms around a horseshoe table. The Cossacks’ letter was still being written in the public’s memory. Kuokkala, later named Repino, was still a house in which work continued after the Wanderers had lost their lofty status in younger eyes. He went on working. The career does not tidy into a slogan about the people. It is a sequence of rooms in which someone is always arriving, hauling, killing, returning, or sitting for the last time. The professorship is a fact of the ladder. The rooms are the fact of the gift.

Begin with Barge Haulers on the Volga if you want the country as a weight on a shoulder. Stay for Ivan the Terrible if you need to know that history, for him, was a present tense of blood. They Did Not Expect Him is the domestic door the politics walked through. The Kursk procession is the crowd as a climate. The Cossacks are the laugh that takes as long as a tragedy. The Mussorgsky portrait is four days that outlasted the sitter. The Tolstoy is a face that had already judged its own fame. He is the painter who said he loved variety and then proved it until the proof looked like Russia. After him, a Russian room is never only furniture. It is a second in which a life has just changed, and the paint has arrived in time to see it.