The life of the Russian village was hard. The so-called resettlement issue worried many representatives of advanced Russian culture and art in those years. Even V. G. Perov, the founder of critical realism, did not pass by this topic. Known, for example, his drawing "The Death of a Settler".
The settlers made a painful impression on A.P. Chekhov, who traveled in 1890 on the road to Sakhalin through all of Siberia. Under the influence of conversations with Chekhov, he traveled along the Volga and Kama, to the Urals, and from there to Siberia and N. Teleshov. “Beyond the Urals, I saw the exhausting life of our settlers,” he recalled, “almost fabulous hardships and hardships of the people’s peasant life.”
Ivanov spent a good half of his life traveling around Russia, carefully, with keen interest, getting acquainted with the life of the many-sided working people. In these incessant wanderings, he became acquainted with the life of the settlers. “Many dozens of miles he walked with them in the dust of the roads, in the rain, bad weather and the scorching sun in the steppes,” Ivanov’s friends say, “he spent many nights with them, filling his albums with drawings and notes, many tragic scenes passed before his eyes.”
Powerless to help these people, the artist thought with pain about the immense tragedy of their situation and the deceitfulness of their dreams of "happiness", which they were not destined to find in the conditions of tsarist Russia.
In the late 1880s, Ivanov conceived a large series of paintings that consistently told about the life of the settlers. In the first picture - "Rus' is coming" - the artist wanted to show the beginning of their journey, when people are still cheerful, healthy and full of bright hopes. “Resettlers. Walkers. 1886 .
One of the final pictures of the cycle is “On the road. The Death of a Settler” is the strongest work of the planned series. Other works on this subject, created earlier and later by a number of writers and artists, did not reveal so deeply and at the same time so simply the tragedy of the settlers in all its terrible truth.
"On the road. Death of a migrant. 1889
Steppe incandescent heat. A light haze extinguishes the horizon line. This sun-scorched desert land seems boundless. Here is a lonely immigrant family. Apparently, the last extreme forced her to stop at this bare place, which was not protected by anything from the scorching sun.
The head of the family, the breadwinner, died. What awaits the unfortunate mother and daughter in the future - such a question everyone involuntarily asks himself when looking at the picture. And the answer is clear. It is read in the figure of a mother stretched out on the bare ground. There are no words and no tears for a heartbroken woman.
In mute desperation, she scratches the dry earth with crooked fingers. We read the same answer in the bewildered, blackened, like an extinct coal, face of the girl, in her eyes frozen with horror, in her entire numb, emaciated figure. There is no hope for any help!
But quite recently, life was glimmering in a small transport house. The fire was crackling, a meager dinner was being prepared, the hostess was busy near the fire. The whole family dreamed that somewhere far away, in an unknown, blessed land, a new, happy life would soon begin for her.
Now everything collapsed. The main worker died, obviously, the exhausted horse also fell. The collar and the arc are no longer needed: they are carelessly thrown near the cart. The fire in the hearth went out. An overturned bucket, the bare sticks of an empty tripod, outstretched, like arms, empty shafts in mute anguish - how hopelessly sad and tragic all this is!
Settlers (Return Settlers), 1888
Ivanov consciously sought just such an impression. Like Perov in "Seeing the Dead", he closed the grief with a narrow circle of family, abandoning the figures of sympathetic women who were in the preliminary sketch of the picture. Wanting to further emphasize the doom of the settlers, the artist decided not to include the horse, which was also in the sketch, into the picture..
The power of Ivanov's painting is not limited to the truthful transmission of a particular moment. This work is a typical image of peasant life in post-reform Russia.
Sources.
http://www.russianculture.ru/formp.asp?ID=80&full
http://www.rodon.org/art-080808191839
In the last years of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Sergei Ivanov turns to acute social problems. In particular, a phenomenon characteristic of the Russian village of the last quarter of the 19th century attracted his attention: in the second half of the 1880s, resettlement to Siberia began.
On the image: “Resettlers. Walkers. 1886.
After the reform of 1861, it became necessary to resolve the land issue. The government saw a way out in the resettlement of landless peasants in this vast sparsely populated region. Only in the last decades of the 19th century, several million peasants left their insignificant allotments, miserable huts and went in search of "fertile lands."
On the image: "Resettler in a Carriage", 1886.
Alone, with their wives and children, in small parties, taking their fragile belongings with them, on foot and in carts, and if they were lucky, then by rail, they rushed, inspired by utopian dreams of "Belovodye" or "White Arapia", towards severe trials and most often severe disappointments. The tragedy of landless peasants who left their original places, from the central provinces to the outskirts of the country - to Siberia and perishing in the hundreds along the way - this is the main idea of Ivanov's cycle of paintings. He captured the scenes of peasant life in deliberately dull, "mournful" in color pictures about immigrants.
Image: On the road. Death of a migrant. 1889.
From the mid-1890s, a new period began in the artist's work, associated with the creation of historical works. Ivanov's historical painting has features that make him related to the art of Surikov and Ryabushkin. The painter understands the state of the excited mass in acute dramatic moments (“Trouble”, 1897, Museum-apartment of I. I. Brodsky); “According to the verdict of the veche”, 1896, private collection), he is attracted by the strength of Russian folk characters and, like Ryabushkin, he finds beauty in the phenomena of folk life, affirms the understanding of this beauty by a Russian person. Ivanov sensitively captures the picturesque search for time; his works of these years acquire a special coloristic sonority.
On the image: "Time of Troubles" (Tushino camp)
Ivanov acted as an innovator of the historical genre, composing episodes of the Russian Middle Ages - in the spirit of modern style - almost like film shots, captivating the viewer with their dynamic rhythm, "presence effect" (Arrival of foreigners in Moscow of the 17th century, 1901); "Tsar. XVI century "(1902), Campaign of the Muscovites. XVI century, 1903). In them, the artist took a fresh look at the historical past of the motherland, depicting not the heroic moments of events, but scenes of everyday life from ancient Russian life. Some images are written with a touch of irony, grotesque. In 1908-13 he completed 18 works for the project "Paintings on Russian History".
On the image: St. George's Day. 1908
On the image: "Campaign of the Army of Moscow Rus'", XVI century, painting 1903.
On the image: "Review of service people", no later than 1907
Peculiar features of nervous “proto-expressionism” stood out with particular force in his images of the first Russian revolution, including in the famous painting “Execution” (1905, Krasnaya Presnya Historical and Revolutionary Museum, a branch of the State Central Museum of Contemporary Art), which struck contemporaries with a piercingly desperate sound of protest.
During the armed uprising of 1905 in Moscow, he was a witness and participant - he assisted students wounded in street battles right in the building of Moscow University on Mokhovaya Street. His drawings of gendarmes and Cossacks, who during the uprising lodged in the Manege, near the Kremlin, have survived.
Later, the artist works on the painting “They are coming! Punitive Detachment" (1905-1909, State Tretyakov Gallery).
Pictured: They're coming! Punitive Squad.
Pictured: Family, 1907
On the image: The arrival of the governor
Pictured: German, 1910
Pictured: Village riot, 1889.
In the image: At the prison. 1884
On the image: Arrival of foreigners. XVII century. 1901
On the image: Boyar serfs. 1909
Russian empire
plot pictures
Sergei Vasilievich Ivanov(4 (16) June, Ruza - 3 (16) August, the village of Svistukha (now the Dmitrovsky district of the Moscow region)) - Russian painter.
Biography
early years
The last period of study includes the paintings "Sick" (1884, location unknown), "At the tavern" (1885, location unknown), "To the landowner with a request" (1885, location unknown), "At the prison" (1884-1885, State Tretyakov Gallery ), "Agitator in the Carriage" (1885, GTsMSIR). The beginning of work on the topic of resettlement dates back to this time (the cycle of 1885-1890).
Migration theme (1885-1890)
Already in the last courses, Sergei Ivanov turns to acute social problems. In particular, a phenomenon characteristic of the Russian village of the last quarter of the 19th century attracted his attention: in the second half of the 1880s, resettlement to Siberia began. After the reform of 1861, it became necessary to resolve the land issue. The government saw a way out in the resettlement of landless peasants in this vast sparsely populated region. Only in the last decades of the 19th century, several million peasants left their insignificant allotments, miserable huts and went in search of "fertile lands." Alone, with their wives and children, in small parties, taking with them their fragile belongings, on foot and in carts, and if they were lucky, then by rail, they rushed, inspired by utopian dreams of "Belovodye" or "White Arapia", towards severe trials and most often severe disappointments. The tragedy of landless peasants leaving their original places, from the central provinces to the outskirts of the country - to Siberia and dying in hundreds along the way - this is the main idea of Ivanov's painting cycle. He captured the scenes of peasant life in deliberately dull, "mournful" in color pictures about immigrants.
Having asked the Moscow Art Society for a certificate of "travel and residence" in a number of provinces from Moscow to Orenburg, Ivanov parted with the school without even receiving a certificate for the title of art teacher. Since that time, Ivanov has become a kind of chronicler of a tragic phenomenon in the life of the Russian post-reform peasantry.
Art critic Sergei Glagol (pseudonym S.S. Goloushev) tells about this period of Ivanov's life and work:
“... He walked dozens of miles with the settlers in the dust of Russian roads, in the rain, bad weather and the scorching sun in the steppes, spent many nights with them, filling his album with drawings and notes, many tragic scenes passed before his eyes, and a series of pictures that are really capable of depicting the epic of Russian migrations.
Ivanov's paintings and drawings depict terrifying scenes of resettlement life. Hope and despair, sickness and death alongside people wandering across the expanses of Russia - “Settlers. Walkers "(, BGHM named after M.V. Nesterov)," Return settlers "(1888, National Gallery of the Komi Republic) and the artist's first serious painting" On the road. Death of a Settler" (, State Tretyakov Gallery), which brought fame to the young artist.
The next section of Ivanov's social epic was the "prisoner series". Work on it sometimes overlapped with the "settlement cycle"; at the same time, the artist created: “Fugitive”, sketch (1886, State Tretyakov Gallery), “Riot in the Village” (, GTsMSIR), “Sending Prisoners” (, GTsMSIR), “Vagabond” (, location unknown). The painting “Stage” (, the painting died, a variant in the Saratov State Art Museum named after A.N. Radishchev) seems to sum up the “prisoner series”.
At the turn of 1889-1890, Sergei Ivanov, along with Serov, Levitan, Korovin, was a recognized leader among Moscow artists of the younger generation. At the same time, he attended Polenov's "drawing evenings", which were organized by V. D. Polenov and his wife, and found support and approval there.
Period of historical works
From the mid-1990s, a new period began in the artist's work, associated with the creation of historical works. There are features in Ivanov's historical painting that make him related to the art of Surikov and Ryabushkin. The painter understands the state of the excited mass in acute dramatic moments (“Trouble”, , Museum-apartment of I. I. Brodsky); “According to the verdict of the veche”, , private collection), he is attracted by the strength of Russian folk characters and, like Ryabushkin, he finds beauty in the phenomena of folk life, affirms the understanding of this beauty by a Russian person. Ivanov sensitively captures the picturesque search for time; his works of these years acquire a special coloristic sonority.
However, the search for other themes and ways of expressing the internal state continued. Ivanov, dissatisfied (in his words) with the "cute scenes" that prevailed in the everyday genre of the Wanderers, strove for ostrodramatic art, sensitively conveying the "beat of the human soul." He gradually, perhaps under the influence of working in the open air, changed his drawing and palette. This happened in, during the years of the creation of the Union of Russian Artists, in which Ivanov played a certain role. The artist turned to the historical genre, painted portraits of his loved ones, illustrated books. He remained a realist artist, despite the times of searching, modernity, and the rejection of objective art.
Ivanov acted as an innovator of the historical genre, composing episodes of the Russian Middle Ages - in the spirit of the Art Nouveau style - almost like film shots, captivating the viewer with their dynamic rhythm, "presence effect" (Arrival of foreigners in Moscow in the 17th century,); "Tsar. XVI century "(1902), Campaign of the Muscovites. XVI century, 1903). In them, the artist took a fresh look at the historical past of the motherland, depicting not the heroic moments of events, but scenes of everyday life from ancient Russian life. Some images are written with a touch of irony, grotesque.
Revolutionary years - last years
Later, the artist works on the painting “They are coming! Punitive detachment "(-, State Tretyakov Gallery).
He taught at the Stroganov School of Industrial Art (1899-1906), at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1900/1903-1910).
He was a participant in exhibitions of the Moscow Society of Art Lovers (1887, 1889, 1894), the Association of Wanderers (1887-1901), "36 Artists" (1901, 1902), "The World of Art" (1903), the Union of Russian Artists (1903-1910).
He fruitfully worked as a master of etching and lithography, as well as an illustrator of the works of N.V. Gogol, M.Yu. Lermontov, A.S. Pushkin and others.
Ivanov died at the age of 46 from a heart attack on August 3 (16), at his dacha in the village of Svistukha on the banks of the Yakhroma River.
Gallery
Literature
- "1989. One hundred memorable dates. Art calendar. Annual illustrated edition. M. 1988. Article by V. Petrov.
- A. F. Dmitrienko, E. V. Kuznetsova, O. F. Petrova, N. A. Fedorova. "50 short biographies of masters of Russian art". Leningrad, 1971. Article by A. F. Dmitrienko.
June 4 1864 , Ruza, Moscow province. - August 3rd 1910 , village Whistle of the Moscow province.
Painter, graphic artist. Illustrator. Genre painter, portrait painter, historical painter.
He studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1878-1882, 1884-1885) under I.M. Pryanishnikova, E.S. Sorokin, at the Academy of Arts (1882-1884). At exhibitions since 1881 (Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions - exhibitor since 1887, member since 1899). Since 1903 - a member and one of the organizers of the Union of Russian Artists. Since 1905 - academician. I.'s work is dedicated to the life and struggle of the peasantry and working people (a series of paintings and drawings "Settlers", including "Death of a Settler", 1889, State Tretyakov Gallery; "Riot in the Village", 1889, "Execution", 1905, both - in the State Tretyakov Gallery Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia). His paintings on the themes of Russian history are marked by realism and nationality ("The Campaign of the Muscovites. XVI century", 1902, State Tretyakov Gallery). New compositional and color schemes of his paintings have enriched the possibilities of historical painting. He painted portraits, worked fruitfully as a draftsman and lithographer. His works are also in the State Russian Museum, the Kiev Museum of Russian Art, the museums of Astrakhan, Ivanov, Kirov, Kostroma, Kursk, Lipetsk, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Ryazan, Saratov, Sevastopol, Smolensk, Syktyvkar, Tula, Ufa, Minsk and others.
Canvas, oil. 71x122 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The life of the Russian post-reform village was hard. All the growing landlessness of the peasantry, frequent crop failures, the inexorable hand of hunger forced the inhabitants of many provinces of Russia to leave their miserable, but familiar home. “Like a fairy-tale dragon, need held the masses in its claws, drove them, staggered, overturned and strangled them,” noted realist writer N. Teleshov, a village writer of everyday life. Pursued by want, lack of rights and arbitrariness, the peasants went to the city to work. Many rushed to new lands, most often to Siberia, in order to find salvation from hunger and need in its vast expanses. The settlers, weighed down by miserable belongings, rose in whole villages from their homes, where their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived for centuries, and stretched in long lines along the dusty roads of Russia from the Kursk, Tambov, Penza, Yaroslavl, Chernigov provinces. Few survived the ordeal of the arduous journey. Diseases, hunger and cold, the arbitrariness of tsarist officials, complete defenselessness - this is what has become their lot from now on. Death mercilessly mowed down the rapidly thinning ranks of settlers. Often, having spent all the funds on the road, they returned back, and those who reached the place were expected by the same poverty and the same orders and officials as in their homeland.
The so-called resettlement issue worried many representatives of advanced Russian culture and art in those years. Even V. G. Perov, the founder of critical realism, did not pass by this topic. Known, for example, his drawing "The Death of a Settler".
The settlers made a painful impression on A.P. Chekhov, who traveled in 1890 on the road to Sakhalin through all of Siberia. Under the influence of conversations with Chekhov, he traveled along the Volga and Kama, to the Urals, and from there to Siberia and N. Teleshov. “Beyond the Urals, I saw the exhausting life of our settlers,” he recalled, “almost fabulous hardships and hardships of the people’s peasant life.” A series of stories by Teleshov, depicting the fate of these people, is the closest analogy to the painting by Sergei Vasilievich Ivanov “On the Road. Death of a migrant.
Ivanov spent a good half of his life traveling around Russia, carefully, with keen interest, getting acquainted with the life of the many-sided working people. In these incessant wanderings, he became acquainted with the life of the settlers. “Many dozens of miles he walked with them in the dust of the roads, in the rain, bad weather and the scorching sun in the steppes,” Ivanov’s friends say, “he spent many nights with them, filling his albums with drawings and notes, many tragic scenes passed before his eyes.” Powerless to help these people, the artist thought with pain about the immense tragedy of their situation and the deceitfulness of their dreams of "happiness", which they were not destined to find in the conditions of tsarist Russia.
In the late 1880s, Ivanov conceived a large series of paintings that consistently told about the life of the settlers. In the first picture - "Rus' is coming" - the artist wanted to show the beginning of their journey, when people are still cheerful, healthy and full of bright hopes. In the following pictures, it was supposed to acquaint the viewer with the difficulties of the road and the first hardships. The series was to be concluded with dramatic scenes of suffering and tragic death of the settlers. However, only a few links of this cycle were brought to completion by the artist. Ivanov embodied in artistic images only the most characteristic and life impressions that most cut into his consciousness.
One of the final pictures of the cycle is “On the road. The Death of a Settler” is the strongest work of the planned series. Other works on this subject, created earlier and later by a number of writers and artists, did not reveal so deeply and at the same time so simply the tragedy of the settlers in all its terrible truth.
Steppe incandescent heat. A light haze extinguishes the horizon line. This sun-scorched desert land seems boundless. Here is a lonely immigrant family. Apparently, the last extreme forced her to stop at this bare place, which was not protected by anything from the scorching sun. The head of the family, the breadwinner, died. What awaits the unfortunate mother and daughter in the future - such a question everyone involuntarily asks himself when looking at the picture. And the answer is clear. It is read in the figure of a mother stretched out on the bare ground. There are no words and no tears for a heartbroken woman. In mute desperation, she scratches the dry earth with crooked fingers. We read the same answer in the bewildered, blackened, like an extinct coal, face of the girl, in her eyes frozen with horror, in her entire numb, emaciated figure. There is no hope for any help!
But quite recently, life was glimmering in a small transport house. The fire was crackling, a meager dinner was being prepared, the hostess was busy near the fire. The whole family dreamed that somewhere far away, in an unknown, blessed land, a new, happy life would soon begin for her.
Now everything collapsed. The main worker died, obviously, the exhausted horse also fell. The collar and the arc are no longer needed: they are carelessly thrown near the cart. The fire in the hearth went out. An overturned bucket, the bare sticks of an empty tripod, outstretched, like arms, empty shafts in mute anguish - how hopelessly sad and tragic all this is!
Ivanov consciously sought just such an impression. Like Perov in "Seeing the Dead", he closed the grief with a narrow circle of family, abandoning the figures of sympathetic women who were in the preliminary sketch of the picture. Wanting to further emphasize the doom of the settlers, the artist decided not to include the horse, which was also in the sketch, into the picture.
The power of Ivanov's painting is not limited to the truthful transmission of a particular moment. This work is a typical image of peasant life in post-reform Russia. That is why it was met with vicious blasphemy of reactionary criticism, which claimed that the death of settlers on the way was an accidental and by no means typical phenomenon, and that the content of the picture was invented by the artist within the walls of his studio. Ivanov was not stopped by the sharp attacks of the enemies of advanced, vitally truthful art. His work was only one of the first results of the artist's deep study of the social truth of contemporary Russian life. It was followed by many other significant works, in which not only the suffering of the people was expressed, but also the angry protest that was brewing among the masses against the oppression of the exploiters.
