"The Influence of Everyday Life on Russian Art:
Genre Painting in St. Petersburg"

By: A. Copeland

The history of Russia, its struggles politically, socially, and economically, and the influences of Western European culture, have truly given Russian artists room to play. Styles, mediums, and subjects of art have changed throughout the years in Petersburg. With so many different sites where artists could sit and paint and communicate with other Russian working class people through thick slabs of paint on canvas, St. Petersburg was the ideal location. Located in northern Russia, St. Petersburg’s winters are like no other. With almost arctic like conditions, the people of Petersburg were left to starve and fend for themselves. Those that made it through the harsh winters were blessed with Petersburg’s beautiful summers. These hardships that the people of Petersburg experienced everyday became the background for Russian Genre painting. Genre painting became the art of the working class people. Genre painting was art of everyday life. It can be explained no other way. It is life. Petersburg was a place where life was both beautiful and full of happiness and hard and full of death and mourning.

Early Russian art consisted of paintings and sculptures that paid homage to religious figures. Not until Peter the Great and his Westernized fantasies of art and culture, did artists pull away from Icon painting to delve into techniques and styles used by big name artistic countries like Italy, France, and Spain.

St. Petersburg in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries was a flourishing art center. The Petersburg Academy of the Arts, founded in 1757, allowed artists to study such styles of painting as Romanticism, Classicism, and other Western European styles that were catching on around the world. “The Academy set the standards of aesthetic principals. It had long regarded the neoclassical styles and mythological subjects as the only acceptable way to convey genuine beauty.” One style however, that the Academy and other Russian artists did not adopt so readily was Genre painting; the painting of “everyday life.” Artists were attracted to this style of painting because it said what no man would say. It showed what no man wanted people to see, yet that is what interested people…seeing what isn’t normal, what isn’t accepted.

“Both depravity and illiteracy seem to have been ubiquitous. Women were universally secluded; the Kremlin had the look of a monastery, a nightclub and a bazaar all at once. Since reading was virtually unknown, especially for secular purposes, there was no standard of education that meant anything at all. There was no question of any knowledge of Latin or Greek even in the highest clergy. A great many noblemen could not even read at all…The cultural level was so low that no social differentiation could be based on it. Boorishness was the keynote of all milieux, from peasant to nobleman to priest. Aristocrats and plebeians were much the same in manner, while moral standards, such as they were, indicated few graduations in behavior from one end of the social spectrum to the other.”

This is what the artists wanted to paint…this truth of everyday life. It was something they had wanted to tackle for a while but had been held back by the Academy. “The Academy considered all other kinds of art, including genre painting, much less appropriate for an artist, and they barely tolerated such works in the walls of the Academy.” Those Petersburg artists that dared to illustrate the Russian landscape and folk traditions of everyday life often found their works excluded from exhibitions at the Academy.

One of the very first Russian painters, that worked in Petersburg, to break away from tradition, was Alexei Venetsianov. Venetsianov is recognized with the establishment of genre painting in Russia and especially in St. Petersburg. He was born in Moscow in 1780 and in 1802 he moved to Petersburg to attend the Academy. “The conservative character of the Academy and its outdated and inflexible rules were bound to change.” Venetsianov could not take being constrained to one form of painting. His career as a painter blossomed after he left the Academy. One of Venetsianov’s most influential works was “The Threshing Floor.” This piece displayed peasants in their everyday life tasks. It also emphasized the natural way light reflected around rooms; a technique rarely ever touched upon by other Academy artists. “Venetsianov was best noted for his natural yet dignified portrayal of peasants, peasant life, and nature. He was also recognized for the tremendous role he played in the education of young artist interested in Russian genre painting.”

Venetsianov was not the only artist to want and eventually break away from the grasps of the Academy. The deviant behaviors of many artists against the traditions of the Academy were not the only reasons why this new style arose. The story of the famous rebellion of the thirteen artists shows how the Academy brought on its own end.

“In 1863, I.N. Kramskoi, B.B. Venig, N.D. Dmitriev-Orenburgskii, A.D. Litovchenko, A.I. Korzhukhin, N.S. Shustov, A.I. Morozov, K.E. Makovskii, F.S. Zhuravlev, K.V. Lemokh, A. Grigor’ev, M. Peskov, and N.V. Petrov were scheduled to participate in the annual gold medal competition. Every year, the winning works were purchased and their authors received an all-expense-paid three year scholarship to work and study abroad. In the same year, several months before the competition, the Academy’s Council announced new rules, the Academy was not going to assign specific topics, as it was done before, but instead, general themes (for example, anger, joy, love for one’s country, etc.). Realizing that the Academy was slowly adjusting to the new trends in Russian painting and to new realities of Russian life, the thirteen decided to strike while the iron was hot, and asked for even more freedom – namely, to be allowed to pick any topic, without any restrictions. This petition was not only rejected, but the angered Academy Council decided that, instead of a general theme, it would assign a specific topic, as in the past. Disappointed and upset, the thirteen artists refused to participate in the competition and resigned from the Academy. The protesters formed an independent organization called the Association of Free Artists (Artel’svobodnykh khudozhnikov).”

Many Russian painters in St. Petersburg had, at one time or another, been a member of the Academy and then after leaving the Academy, became a part of the Association of Free Artists. Being a part of the Association, artists could finally produce the kind of artwork that they had wanted to make for some time now. Some other members of the Association that were based in Petersburg were names like Repin, Serov, Perov, Ge, and Vereshchagin. All of who played incredible roles in the development of Russian Art.

Vereshchagin, who was born in 1842 to a noble landowner, entered the academy in 1860. He followed the strict classical styles of the then Russian painting but then became dissatisfied with the classical priciples of the Academy. Vereshchagin soon after, broke away from the Academy and began devoting himself to sketches and paintings of the life and native customs of the people of Petersburg. Some of his works including Interior of the Wooden Church of St. Peter and St. Paul can still be seen today in the St. Petersburg museum. This painting of the Peter and Paul Cathedral is a very plain one. The dark colors with rays of light seeping through the cracks in the structure showed other characteristics of Genre painting that were popular among artists.

Another artist that began his career in St. Petersburg was Ilya Repin. Repin was born in 1844 in the small Ukrainian town of Tchuguev. He grew up working as an Icon Painter and later moved to Petersburg to attend the Petersburg Academy of Arts. While at the Academy, Repin became very enthralled in the work of the thirteen artists that had rebelled against the academy, and he soon found himself attracted to their styles of painting like many of the artists in Petersburg. He then began Genre painting himself and had a fairly successful run at it.

Genre painting or what some Russians liked to call Realist painting became increasingly well known and appreciated by most Russians. It glorified the working class and the struggles that they went through. It moralized situations of the aristocracy including prostitution, which every social class participated in. And it confirmed the love of the Russian culture and heritage that everyone possessed. One of the great appreciators of this new class of art was Catherine the Great.

After her husband’s assassination Catherine was crowned and the beginning of a famous rule began. Not only was Catherine the Great a very well liked ruler; she was also a very well liked art commissioner.

“Catherine was intensely interested in the arts. Her indefatigable activities as an art collector call for a study in themselves. Her galleries in the Winter Palace soon overflowed with works of art. Among her major acquisitions were the pictures of the Berlin manufacturer Gotzowski in 1763; in 1769 some 600 paintings belonging to Count Bruhl of Saxony; the extensive and wonderful Crozat collection in 1772; and the Walpole collection in 1778. She read catalogues, wrote notes and talked endlessly about her treasures, for she saw the erection of palaces and state buildings and the foundation of establishing monarchic prestige in the Western fashion, following the example of the sovereigns of her time.”

She also played a very important role in the development of Russian art because she made it possible for people to experience these works of beauty through the many museums she started. The most famous of her museums, The Hermitage, is still praised today in Petersburg as the home of Western Art. It is the largest museum in the world and it has gotten to that size because of the many different styles of art that it holds inside its walls. Another museum is the Russian Museum. That is where all the Russian art that was produced in the past is held. Fortunately for Russia, and St. Petersburg in particular because of all the great artwork that that city’s existence had influenced during the years, there are museums like that. Art is the one of the very few ways in which future generations can witness the hardships and good times that past generations experienced.

Many of the reasons why genre painting became so popular were because throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revolution was also very popular. Power shifts throughout Western Europe influenced the type of art that was being produced in countries such as Italy, France, and Spain. They first started the style of genre painting to exploit the aristocracy and to make light of the struggles of the lower working classes. The painters of Italy, France, and Spain changed the styles of the easily influenced Russian painters for the good of the Russian culture and the Russian people.

The introduction of Genre painting into the field of art was one that inspired many other movements later on in Russian and other European histories. The movement allowed artist to make the kind of art they had wanted to make for years and it also allowed for art that was appreciated by all sorts of people not just the aristocracy. Especially for Russia, Genre painting became its way of telling its history, its culture, and its way of life.