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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Creating in an Epoch of Catastrophes

17 November, 1998 - 00:00

Up until sometime in 1933 when Mikhail Vrubel was ending his "Kyiv
period" he was known among friends as an eccentric and one visited by lady
luck very seldom, if at all.

While in Kyiv, he gave drawing/painting lessons to local aristocratic
ladies and painted icons for St. Cyril's Church. He painted old daguerreotypes
to lend frozen features a touch of life. And he would appear in social
places sporting costumes designed a la Raphael. He would be childishly
happy to receive make-believe royalties for his splendid works when decorating
St. Volodymyr's Cathedral. He would not insist on using his major mural
sketches. He adored Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls and hated Dostoyevsky.
There are known to have been very subtle creative personalities who feared
Vrubel's works. Feodor Chaliapin saw his "Demon" (the artist would never
part with the picture, not even when in a mental asylum) and declared:
"I would never have this canvas on any of my walls. After looking at him,
especially his eyes, one can never forget the image." Such prejudiced opinions
may have helped the artist's reputation after his death.

However, in the 1970s-1980s Mikhail Vrubel turned out the target of
close intelligentsia and scholarly scrutiny, often with exalted overtones.
One of the most expensive and sought-for contemporary monographic albums
started with a feature signed by a certain Nikolai Sudeikin. The latter
wrote that Pablo Picasso would spend hours standing in front of Vrubel's
pictures displayed at Paris's autumnal Salon in 1906 (the artist was then
ailing and very lonely). Then came perestroika and Mikhail Vrubel suddenly
emerged as one of the number one cultural leaders, rating the biblical
halo of a prophet never recognized in his own country. This approach was
very much in common with the attitudes of the "advanced Soviet intelligentsia"
seeking "spiritual enlightenment."

Mikhail Vrubel took a strikingly pessimistic approach to his works,
particularly those he created in Kyiv. "It was only toward the end of my
stay that I could finish my work," he wrote in a letter to his sister (late
1889). "I mean ornamenting both naves of St. Volodymyr's Cathedral." Quite
some time later the artist would bitterly admit to Valery Briussov that
he considered his iconostasis and "The Advent of the Holy Ghost" (St. Cyril's
Church, 1884) the two very bad mistakes creatively; and the same was true
of "Mourning over His Grave" and "Resurrection" (1887), pointing out that
"It's Satan's doing; he makes me work my canvases the way he wants. He
has the power to make me portray the Mother of God and Jesus Christ without
being worthy of undertaking this mission." Vrubel may have got the idea
that these works were too tragic, that the dominant spirit of bitter disillusionment
created that "sparkling passion play that would invariably leave the audience
with a feeling of doom," (M. Herman) and that their outward spiritual enlightenment
was precariously verging on sorrow. Vrubel's expressly pessimistic approach
to his Kyiv works could be explained now that a century has elapsed by
the artist's own mentality being tragically divided between the awareness
of his own titanic reviving strength and the inability of the new twentieth
century to appreciate them. His creative legacy bears witness to the disheartening
fact that the eternal religious theme, rooted in one's belief in God, is
in many respects incompatible with the anthropological crisis begot by
this departing century.

Perhaps last week's Mikhail Vrubel exhibit, including canvases, prints,
and sculptures, is important precisely because it testifies to such spiritual
affiliation, as well as because the Russian Art Museum boasts one of the
world's richest collection of his works, this time displayed in the museum's
five rooms.

 

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