Video: 50 Shades of Red: What Abram Arkhipov's Painful Portraits of Russian Peasant Women Tell About
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
He was an enthusiastic impressionist among the Itinerants, the last romantic in those years when art was beating backhand with the cruel truth of life. Starting with the glorification of hard peasant labor, he remained in the history of painting as a singer of Russian women. In his paintings there are as many shades of scarlet as the eye can distinguish …
The artist Abram Arkhipov lived his life quietly and unassumingly, but always, without making any revolutions, as if he did not fully fit into the artistic environment - too "peaceful" for the itinerant, too lyrical for a socialist realist … He was born in the village of Yegorovo, Ryazan province, in a poor peasant family, barely making ends meet. Since childhood, against the background of other children, he was distinguished by a passion for drawing and incredible perseverance. He painted everywhere, everywhere, with anything and on anything. He watched the world around him - tenaciously, carefully, memorizing every detail, as if for a picture to come. Every summer he stuffed himself into students of visiting icon painters - and so he met a certain Zaikov, a volunteer at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In his person, the future itinerant found a teacher and inspirer. It was thanks to Zaikov that he realized that he could become a real professional artist, and Zaikov undertook to prepare him for admission.
The family reacted to their son's aspirations with understanding and, by some miracle, was able to find the means to send the fifteen-year-old boy to Moscow. In 1877, he took the first step towards his dream - he managed to enter that very art school. During these years, hunger and poverty did not matter to him - after all, every day Perov and Makovsky gave him valuable advice …
However, Arkhipov never lost touch with his homeland. He often painted scenes from the life of the people - from memory. Returning home for the holidays, he devoted all his time to sketches and sketches. In the early works of Arkhipov, there are the harsh shades of northern nature, hard peasant labor, the stingy furnishings of dwellings … Here he was strongly influenced by the work of Perov, who called on artists to write the "truth of Russian life." However, after his death, under the leadership of Polenov, Abram Arkhipov turned to lighter shades and lyrical subjects, began to write more landscape works, saturating them with the rays of the northern sun. In 1883, Arkhipov sold his work for the first time - it fell into the hands of Pavel Tretyakov. Inspired by his achievements in the field of painting, in 1884 Arkhipov moved to St. Petersburg, where he became a student of the famous Academy of Arts. There he will be one of the best, many of the young artist's drawings and sketches will appear in the Academy's own museum as exemplary, but … despite the obvious successes, two years later Arkhipov will return to Moscow. The academic school of painting, with its strict restrictions, brought only disappointments.
In Moscow, he receives the title of "class artist" - and former teachers, idols and authorities become his colleagues. He begins teaching at his native art school, joins the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. Arkhipov is rarely mentioned among the famous Itinerants - his works did not provoke heated discussions and were devoid of acute plot drama. To tell the truth, already in these years the Narodnaya Volya's pathos and the tragedy of the Itinerants ceased to meet his creative aspirations. He habitually writes plots of peasant life and landscapes of the Russian north - but more and more dynamically and sweepingly, more and more freely and spiritually. The pinnacle of his work in the ranks of the Itinerants was the painting "Washerwomen", dedicated to the hard work of women who moved from village to city in search of earnings.
Abramov's desire for compositional and coloristic experiments is demonstrated by his famous work "On the Volga" - at the same time, in the 1890s, he increasingly paints his characters against the background of the beauties of his native nature, as if saving them from the crowdedness and stuffiness of tiny rooms, workshops, dark huts. In 1903, Arkhipov contributed to the creation of the Union of Russian Artists, which aimed to glorify national traditions in art.
In 1914, Arkhipov's restrained palette suddenly explodes with many shades of red, and the painting style becomes almost impressionistic. In a whirlwind of scarlet strokes - joyful faces with laughing eyes, strong hands, fragments of embroidery and braid … Time after time Arkhipov repeats this image - a Russian peasant woman in a scarlet festive dress.
All of his "red peasant women" were painted, of course, from life, but these works are more than just attempts to capture the real appearance of each of the portrayed. Here Arkhipov is almost a symbolist, endowing the everyday image with unprecedented power and depth. Arkhipovskaya peasant women wandered around the world, receiving awards at exhibitions in Paris, Munich, Rome … And he himself was an avid traveler - he traveled a lot in Russia, visited Germany and Italy.
Arkhipov accepted the revolution calmly, the Soviet government was supportive of him - in 1927 he was one of the first to receive the title of "people's artist". He taught a lot, was the teacher of a whole galaxy of socialist realist artists. However, since 1917, he practically abandoned other subjects, continuing to paint almost exclusively portraits of Russian women in red. Arkhipov's "post-revolutionary" work also includes portraits of political figures, which are generally not particularly successful.
Nothing is known about Arkhipov's personal life. He was never married, he has no descendants. In everyday life, his compatriot Vera Klushina helped him, taking upon herself all the worries about the day. In the last years of his life, the artist suffered from cancer and died in 1930 after an unsuccessful operation to remove the tumor. Arkhipov's successor, the continuer of the artistic dynasty, was his grand-niece Alla Bedina, known for her graphic works. And Abram Arkhipov's "red peasant women" continue their march around the world, laughing happily at auction visitors - today Arkhipov's paintings go to private collections for six-figure sums.
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