KRAMSKOY'S BIOGRAPHY
(1837-1887)
He was artist -painter, master of a historical, fantastic picture, theorist of
art, art critic, teacher, representative of critical realism.
Ivan Nikolayevich kramskoy is an outstanding representative of the
democratic culture in Russia of the second
half of the 19th century. He is known as a wonderful painter and draughtsman, a
remarkable art critic and theoretician of art, a talented teacher. Besides, he
was an originator and ardent inspirer of the first independent artistic
organizations, namely the Itinerants' Society of
Traveling Exhibitions and
St. Petersburg Team of Artists, which had
played an important part in the development of art in
Russia.
Born into the family of a provincial
state clerk, kramskoy
had no opportunity to study art during childhood. At the age of 15 he
became an apprentice to an icon-painter, a year later a photographer took him as
a retoucher. Only in 1857, he managed to come to St.
Petersburg and enter the
Academy of Arts. There he soon became a
popular leader among the students. In 1863, he was among the 14 best graduates
who refused to fulfill the diploma work on a given mythological theme. All 14
were dismissed from the Academy, and kramskoy
headed the
St. Petersburg Team of Artists, a commune
where artists shared studios and household. The young wife of
kramskoy,
Sophia Nikolayevna, née
Prokhorova, took care of their mutual
household.
Ivan Kramskoy is famous mainly as a
portraitist; his portraits of the 60s are not large, and very often monochrome,
reminding of photographs. At the same period (1863-68)
kramskoy taught in The Drawing School of the Society for Promoting of
the Artists; his pupils, among others, were Iliya Repin
and
Nicolay Yaroshenko. Since 1869,
kramskoy started to receive regular commissions
from the collector of Russian art
Pavel Tretyakov.
Tretyakov commissioned portraits of
personalities of
Russian culture and science. These portraits
have become an innate part of the
Russian art and social history. For
kramskoy it was a feat to preserve, for the generations to come, the
likeliness of his outstanding contemporaries. Portrait of the Author
Ivan Goncharov. Portrait of the Sculptor
Mark Antokolsky. Portrait of
Dmitry Mendeleyev. In 1869,
St. Petersburg Academy chose him an academician. The same year he
made his first trip abroad: he visited
Berlin,
Dresden, Munich,
Düsseldorf, Antwerp,
Paris, and Vienna,
where he studied famous art collections. After his return to
Russia he started organizing the Itinerants' Society of Traveling
Exhibitions. The aim of the Society was:
1) to give the opportunity to everybody in Russia
to get acquainted with its contemporary art;
2) to develop love for art in Russian
society;
3) to make selling their works easier for the artists.
In 1872 kramskoy painted his masterpiece
Christ in the Desert, a traditional topic,
yet, in kramskoy's work it acquired new
social interpretation and deep philosophical meaning.
Christ in the Desert carried the idea of man's moral duty to society
and therefore it greatly impressed the painter's contemporaries, who found a
definite affinity to their attitudes and feelings in it in the crucial period of
Russian history, which demanded personal
heroism and sacrifice for the sake of people. 'The best
Christ I ever saw'-
Leo Tolstoy.
In 1873 Tretyakov
commissioned the Portrait of Leo Tolstoy for his gallery.
Tolstoy had refused several times. 'Please use
all your charm to persuade him ', wrote
Tretyakov to
kramskoy. And
kramskoy managed to do this, the writer and the artist were both
impressed by each other's personalities. kramskoy
painted one of the best of all
Tolstoy's portraits.
Tolstoy was working on
Anna Karenina at the time and he used
kramskoy's character as one of the secondary personages in the novel
- the artist Mikhailov.
Kramskoy always understood the capturing
charm of color, admired Alexander Ivanov,
his younger contemporaries -
Repin, Vasiliyev,
Polenov, French
Impressionists - ':Just a small group of laughed at painters, but the future
belongs to them:', he wrote in the 70s about his
French
colleagues. But he himself was a poor colorist. Once during the work on the
portrait of Adrian Prakhov, the mother of
the sitter saw the portrait after the first day of painting and impressed by it,
took it away and did not allow
kramskoy to finish it, she said that if the
artist went on working he would dry it as usual.
Kramskoy himself understood his drawbacks and limits, but was afraid
to change his manner.
The artist died on 24 March 1887 during his work on the portrait of Doctor
Rauhphus with brush in his hand.
Kramskoy's works embody the high moral
and social ideals of his time. For him, artistic truth and beauty, moral and
aesthetic values were inseparable. His works greatly influenced his
contemporaries' ideology. Today they still affect people because the artist's
attitude to life was based on love and respect of man, on his belief in truth
and justice.
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