REPIN'S BIOGRAPHY
(1844-1930)
He has connected strong tradition of realism of 19 centuries to
innovations of a boundary of centuries.
Iliya
Efimovich Repin
was born in
Chuguev, in the
Ukraine, in the family of a soldier-settler. He received his first
lessons in art in 1858, when he started working for I. M.
Bunakov, a talented icon painter from
Chuguev. Commissions for portraits and religious
paintings allowed Repin to collect enough money
to go to
St. Petersburg with the goal of entering the
Academy of Arts. He arrived in the capital in 1863 and enrolled in the
School of Drawing attached to the
Society for the Encouragement of the Arts.
Working with
Kramskoy, in a year the young artist developed his
skills sufficiently to be accepted to the Academy.
In May 1870 Repin went on a boat trip down
the
Volga during which he made sketches for his
Barge-haulers on the Volga (The Volga Boatmen).
A year later the artist finished his schooling at the Academy. His graduation
work,
The Resurrection of Jairus' Daughter, won the
Gold Medal and a six-year scholarship (including
three years of travel abroad). After traveling through
Europe and staying in
Paris (1872-76),
Repin returned to
Russia. He spent a year in
Chuguev, making sketches for his famous
Religious Procession in the Kursk Province.
The next six years (1876-82) Repin lived
in
Moscow, trying to get along with the Academy,
the Mamontov circle, and his old friends
Stasov and Kramskoy.
Tired of their constant squabbles, he moved to St.
Petersburg. He made several bio trips to Europe
- in 1883, 89, 94, and 1900. He taught at the
St. Petersburg Academy
(1894-1907) and was an influential member of the
Wanderers. In 1900, during a trip to Paris,
Repin met
Natalia Nordman, the "love of his life" (Repin
was separated from his wife), and moved to her home,
Penaty (Penates), in
Kuokkala
(Finland), located about an hour's train ride
from
St. Petersburg. Together, they organized the
famous Wednesdays at the Penaty which attracted
the creative elite of Russia. When
Nordman died in 1914, she left the estate to the
Academy, but Repin occupied it for the next
sixteen years. Handicapped by the atrophy of his right hand,
Repin could not produce works of the same quality as those, which
brought him fame. Although he trained himself to paint with his left hand, he
lived his last years under a constant financial strain. Since the artist did not
accept the Revolution of 1917, he did not want
to go back to
Russia, even though in 1926 a delegation sent by
the Ministry of Education of the Soviet Union
helped him financially and tried to entice him to return. To acknowledge and
commemorate Repin's artistic achievement, in
1948
Kuokkala was renamed
Repino.
As Fan and
Stephen Jan Parker note in their monograph on
Repin, "Western art historians and critics have
minimized
Repin's achievements and contributions either
because his very "national" identity has not been grasped, or because - and this
is most likely - Repin was neither a technical
innovator nor the creator of a school of painting. However, he was a realist and
not a modernist. Yet in the esteem of both pre-Revolutionary and Soviet
Russia,
Repin occupies a position alongside
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,
Musorgsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov. He was and is
Russia's foremost national artist, whose oeuvre
adheres to the requisites for national art as proposed by the noted painter and
art historian Igor
Grabar: it must reflect the spirit of the people, expressing their
thoughts and aspirations; it must excite; and it must be understandable to the
people".
Among Repin's most famous canvasses are
The Volga Boatmen (1872),
The Archdeacon (1877),
Portrait of the Composer Musorgsky
(1881), Religious Procession in the Kursk Province
(1878-83),
Portrait of Pavel Tretiyakov (1883),
They Did Not Expect Him (1884),
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan: November 16,
1581 (1885), and Zaporozhie Cossacks Writing a Reply to the
Turkish Sultan (1880-91).
The Volga Boatmen was enthusiastically
received. Stasov predicted fame and success for
the young artist and
Dostoevskii
wrote the following review in his Writer's Diary:
"As soon as I read in the newspapers about the burlaki of Mr.
Repin, I immediately became frightened. The very subject is horrible:
we are conditioned to believe that the burlaki bio than others are capable of
conveying the well-known socialist idea about the unpaid debt of the privileged
class to the people. In expectation of this I was prepared to meet them all in
uniforms with appropriate labels on their foreheads. What happened then? To my
joy all my fears turned out to be in vain. Not one of them shouts to the viewer
from the painting: 'Look how miserable I am and how great a debt you owe to your
people!' Just for this alone the artist deserves the greatest merit. Good,
familiar figures: the two front burlaki are almost laughing, at least they
aren't crying at all, and by no means are they thinking about their social
condition..."
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