in the early 1860s and, like the kuchkists under Stasov’s influence, had begun to paint in a ‘Russian style’. Without the patronage of Tretiakov, the Wanderers would not have survived these first hard years of independence, when the private art market beyond the court and the aristocracy was still extremely small. Their down-to-earth provincial scenes and landscape paintings appealed to the merchant’s ethnocentric taste. ‘As for me,’ Tretiakov informed the landscape painter Apollinary Goravsky, ‘I want neither abundant nature scenes, elaborate composition, dramatic lighting, nor any kind of wonders. Just give me a muddy pond and make it true to life.’92 The injunction was perfectly fulfilled by Savrasov in his painting The Rooks Have Returned (1871), a poetic evocation of rural Russia in the early spring thaw, which became Tretiakov’s favourite landscape painting and something of an icon of the Russian School. Its simple realism was to become a hallmark of the Moscow landscape school compared to the carefully arranged veduta scenes, with their European styling, stipulated by the Academy in St Petersburg.
Tretiakov in business, the Wanderers in art - each sought to break free from the bureaucratic controls of St Petersburg; each looked to Moscow and the provinces for an independent market and identity. The Wanderers’ name (in Russian, Peredvizhniki) derived from the travelling exhibitions organized by their collective in the 1870s.* Nurtured on the civic and Populist ideals of the 1860s, they toured the provinces with their exhibitions, usually financed out of their own pockets, to raise the public’s consciousness of art. Sometimes they
*The word Peredvizhniki came from the Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykb khu-dozhestvennykh vystavok (Collective of Travelling Art Exhibitions).
taught in country schools or set up their own art schools and museums, usually with the support of liberal noblemen in local government (the zemstvos) and the Populists. The impact of their tours was enormous. ‘When the exhibitions came,’ recalled a provincial resident, ‘the sleepy country towns were diverted for a short while from their games of cards, their gossip and their boredom, and they breathed in the fresh current of free art. Debates and arguments arose on subjects about which the townfolk had never thought before.’93 Through this mission the Wanderers created a new market for their art. Local merchants funded public galleries that purchased canvases from the Wanderers and their many emulators in provincial towns. In this way the ‘national style’ of Moscow became the idiom of the provinces as well.
7
Another merchant patron who helped to define the Moscow style in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the railway magnate Savva Mamontov. A Siberian by birth, Mamontov had moved as a boy to Moscow, where his father was involved as the principal investor in the building of the railway to Sergiev Posad. He fell in love with the place. Its bustling energy was the perfect complement to his creativity and go-ahead panache. Benois (the voice of refined St Petersburg) described Mamontov as ‘grandiose and vulgar and dangerous’.94 He might have been describing Moscow, too.
Mamontov was not just a patron of the arts but an artistic figure in his own right. He studied singing in Milan, acted under Ostrovsky’s own direction in The Storm, and wrote and directed plays himself. He was strongly influenced by the Populist ideas which circulated around Moscow in his youth. Art was to be for the education of the masses. As a monument to this ideal, he commissioned the artist Korovin to decorate his Moscow railway station (today the Yaroslav) with murals showing rural scenes from the northern provinces where his trains were bound. ‘The eyes of the people must be trained to see beauty everywhere, in streets and railway stations,’ Mamontov declared.95 His wife Elizaveta was also influenced by Populist ideas. In 1870 the couple purchased the Abramtsevo estate, set amidst the birchwood
forests near Sergiev Posad, sixty kilometres north-east of Moscow, where they set up an artists’ colony with workshops to revive the local peasant crafts and manufacture artefacts for sale in Moscow at a special shop. It is ironic that these crafts were dying out as a result of the spread of factory goods by rail. For this was what had made the Mamontovs so rich.
Abramtsevo was located in the heartland of historic Muscovy. It had previously belonged to the Aksakovs, the leading clan of the Slavophiles, and as an artists’ colony it attempted to restore the ‘authentic’ (that is, folk-based) Russian style which the Slavophiles had prized. Artists flocked to it to learn from the old peasant handicrafts and assimilate their style to their own work. Korovin and the two Vasnetsovs, Polenova, Vrubel, Serov and Repin were all active there. Gartman spent a year there before he died, building a workshop and a clinic for the village in the neo-Russian style. Alongside its mission to the peasantry, Abramtsevo was, like everything in which its merchant founder was involved, a commercial enterprise. Its workshops catered to the vibrant market for the neo-Russian style among Moscow’s fast expanding middle class. The same was true of other centres, like the Solomenko embroidery workshop, the Talashkino colony and the Moscow zemstvo studios, which all likewise combined conservation with commerce. Moscow’s middle classes were filling up their houses with the folk-styled tableware and furniture, the embroidery and objets d’art that workshops such as these were churning out. At the top end of the market there were spectacular interior designs. Elena Polenova (at Solomenko) built a dining room with elaborate folk wood carvings for the estate of the Moscow textile baroness Maria Yakunchikova (where Chekhov spent the summer of 1903 writing The Cherry Orchard). Sergei Maliutin (at the Moscow zemstvo studios) designed a similar dining room for the merchant Pertsova. Then there was the folk style, slightly simpler but equally archaic, favoured by the Populist intelligentsia. The artist Vladimir Konashevich recalled having learned to read from a special ABC designed by his father in the 1870s. ‘The book was crammed with cart axles, scythes, harrows, hayricks, drying barns and threshing floors.’
In my father’s study in front of the writing table stood an armchair whose back was the shaft bow of a harness, and whose arms were two axes. On the
seat was a knout whip and a pair of bast shoes carved in oak. The finishing touch was a real little peasant hut which stood on the table. It was made of walnut and full of cigarettes.96
Chekhov liked to poke fun at this ‘folksy’ craze. In his story ‘The Grasshopper’ (1891) Olga is the wife of a Moscow doctor. She ‘plastered all the walls with lubok woodcuts, hung up bast shoes and sickles, placed a rake in the corner of the room, and voila!, she had a dining room in the Russian style’.97 Yet Chekhov himself was a purchaser of arts and crafts. At his Yalta house (now a museum) there are two cupboards from Abramtsevo and an armchair like the one described by Konashevich.*
From these arts and crafts, Moscow’s artists developed what they called the ‘style moderne‘, where Russian folk motifs were combined with the styling of European art nouveau. It can be seen in the extraordinary renaissance of Moscow’s architecture at the turn of the twentieth century, and perhaps above all in Fedor Shekhtel’s splendid mansion for Stepan Riabushinsky, which managed to combine a simple, even austere style with the modern luxuries expected by a rich industrialist. Discreetly hidden from the lavish style moderne of its living rooms was an Old Believer chapel designed in the ancient Moscow style. It perfectly expressed the split identity of this merchant caste - on the one hand looking back to the seventeenth century, on the other striding forward to the twentieth. Here indeed was Moscow’s paradox - a progressive city whose mythic self-image was in the distant past.
The fashion for old Moscow was also cultivated by the silversmiths and jewellery shops that catered to the city’s prosperous merchant class. Craftsmen such as Ivan Khlebnikov and Pavel Ovchinnikov (a former serf of Prince Sergei Volkonsky) produced silver tableware and samovars, dishes shaped like ancient Viking ships (kovshi), drinking vessels, ornaments and icon covers in the ancient Russian style. These firms were joined by Carl Faberge, who set up separate workshops in Moscow to produce goods for the rising merchant class. In St Petersburg the Faberge
* There are several similar examples of the armchair in the History Museum of Moscow. All of them were designed by the artist Vasily Shutov.
workshops made gems in the classical and rococo styles. But only Tsars and Grand Dukes could afford to buy such jewels. The Moscow workshops, by contrast, turned out mainly silver objects which were within the financial reach of the middle classes. These Moscow firms all had some artists of extraordinary talent, most of them unknown or neglected to this day. One was Sergei Vashkov, a silver craftsman who made religious objects in the Moscow workshops of the Olovyanishni-kovs - and later by commission for Faberge. Vashkov drew from the simple style of religious art in medieval Russia but he combined this with his own unique version of the style moderne, creating sacred objects of a rare beauty and (in a way that was important to the Moscow revival) reuniting church art with the cultural mainstream.
