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Levitan was born in
1860 into a poor but educated Jewish family. In the late 1860s, the
family moved to Moscow, where Isaac studied at the Moscow School of
Painting and Sculpture from 1873 till 1883. He lost his mother in
1875 and his father two years later. He was left penniless and
homeless in Moscow, sleeping alternately in the homes of relatives
and friends, sometimes spending the night in the empty classrooms of
the school. A night watch took pity on the youth and let him sleep
in his cubicle. The School waived his tuition fee “because of
extreme poverty and in recognition of his singular success in
art”.
The greatest role in the forming of Levitan’s creative personality
belongs to his favorite teacher
Alexey
Savrasov, the most lyrical among Russian landscape painters of
the 1860s-1870s, who influenced many well-known artists of
Levitan’s generation –
Mikhail
Nesterov,
Constantin
Korovin and others. Of course, Levitan’s passionate love for
poetry and music, his persistent studying of pleine-air, the sunny
paintings of
Vasiliy
Polenov, who also taught at the School, the works of the French
painters of the Barbizon school, of Camille Corot were of great
importance for the young artist. As any great talent did and does,
Levitan submitted all the influences to his personality, and even
his early works are very individual.
Autumn Day Sokolniki (1879). Levitan’s attitude towards nature and
the poetry of his art were in many points akin to the works of Anton
Chekhov, who became his friend from the late 1870s.
If his earlier works were chiefly of an intimate and lyrical
character, his mature art becomes philosophical, expressing the
artist’s meditation about man and the world. These pictures were
particularly loved by the Russian intellectuals of the time, for
they represented the purest specimen of the ‘mood landscape’,
most popular in Russia at the end of the 19th century.
To this period belongs
The
Vladimirka Road (1892), a rare example of social historical
landscape; Levitan painted the tragically famous road, along which
convicts were marched to Siberia. In
Above
the Eternal Peace (1894) the artist’s meditations about the
controversies of life, about the transience of human being, gained
almost monumental scale and philosophic character.
In 1897, Levitan felt sick, a severe cardiac disease was revealed.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding the permanent menace of death, he
worked with a particular intensity and inspiration. His latest works
are distinguished by a confident mastership, richness of technical
methods, and new stylistic trends. One can feel the influence of
ancient Russian art, which attracted him at the period, and that of
modern style, and the newest searches in French painting, which
Levitan always took a lively interest in. Nevertheless, Levitan did
not join modern art and remained true to realism, utterly alien to
mythologizing and stylization. Most characteristic in the late 1890s
were numerous paintings of quiet twilights, moonlit nights, sleeping
villages (Haystacks
Twilight. (1899),
Sunny
Day. (1898) and many others). To the very end of his life
Levitan took an active part in artistic life; he taught at the
Moscow School of Painting, where he had been educated, took part in
organizing the Moscow Club of Literature and Art, showed his
pictures at numerous exhibitions of such associations as World of
Art and Munich Secession.
Leo Tolstoy once said, “The basis of human happiness is the
possibility to be together with nature, to see it and to talk to
it”. Levitan was granted this happy feeling as hardly any other
human being ever was. He also knew the joy of recognition by his
contemporaries and of friendship with the best among them. Levitan
ranks among the most appreciated and loved of Russian artists.
Bibliography:
Isaak Levitan. Aurora. Leningrad. 1980
Levitan by V.Petrov. Russian Painters of the XIX century. Moscow.
1992.
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