|
Ilya 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 Kramskoi, 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 Kramskoi. Tired of their constant squabbles,
he moved to St. Petersburg. He made several more 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. Moreover, 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, Mussorgsky 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".
|
