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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

Magnificent Failure

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

By Diana KLOCHKO, The Day

A tall and lean old man with a long white beard could often be seen in
the drawing and painting classrooms of Kyiv, Odesa, and Moscow, when, in
the absence of professors, he painstakingly touched up the works of young
artists. Stunned by the accuracy of corrections, the young people would
heap this almost-beggarly-clad stranger with feverish questions. It is
very often at the end of a conversation with the unusual orator that they
knew they spoke with the famous artist Mykola Ge. "He had a wonderful gift
of influencing people, making them listen to him, and finding in each person
those common points where there can be no differences" (Tetiana Sukhotina-Tolstaya).

In his final years, Ge retired to his country retreat in Chernihiv gubernaya,
where he immersed himself in religious painting. Ge spoke about this enthusiasm
of his not only with passion but with what amounts to graphic sensation:
"The aim of religious art is not to promote prejudices but to root out,
as radically as possible, all fetishes and destroy idols. Clouds, a chair,
a god or goddess with an irreplaceable 'pancake' around his or her head.
Sabbaoth on a soft divan together with a horrible Apocalypse beast. The
aggregate of these unlikely pancakes, armchairs, and heads creates a well-known
cult and a whole hierarchy of idols, which not only smells of mythical
spices but also tastes bitter and pungent in a different way." The sharpness
of his ideas shocked many, but he was a close friend of Leo Tolstoy's family
and a passionate opponent of the writer during their long walks and discussions
at Yasnaya Poliana.

Many people rebuke Ge for having become a "brilliant loser" in art because
of his excessive passion and impetuosity. After coming from quiet Kyiv
(where, at a private high school in Lypky, he listened to the lectures
of none other but historian Mykola Kostomarov) to Petersburg and being
admitted to the mathematics department at university, he suddenly made
turnabout in his life, having stood for a few hours in front of Karl Briullov's
Destruction of Pompeii. He was able to enter the Academy of Arts,
where he was treated for a long time as an underachiever but graduated
with a gold medal for his picture, The Sorceress of Aecdor Invokes the
Shade of Samuel. And instead of consolidating his success and seizing
the opportunity to take over Briullov's art class, Mykola Ge promptly got
married and went to tour Italy.

In 1861 in Florence, Ge began to paint his Last Supper, this
time after standing in front of a Leonardo da Vinci's half-ruined fresco.
It struck everybody at the Academy of Arts exhibition in 1863 and was purchased
by Emperor Alexander II. But even now the painter was not tempted by academic
success. He got to know the Peredvizhniks (members of a Russian
school of realist painters - Ed.) and began to rapidly adapt the
historical analogies with the contemporary sociopolitical situation. Ge
summed up these pursuits in the picture Petr I and Aleksei (1873),
thus focusing on the problem of legitimate succession to the throne in
Russia's tragic history. But Ge again moved on, after exciting the public.
Having returned to his home country, he occasionally visited friends. The
40 year-old artist led a peaceful life, entertaining guests and enjoying
the reputation of a witty interlocutor. Illia Repin applied the term "highly-moral
cheerfulness" to this trait of Ge's, to tell jokes and burst into laughter
at the drop of a hat. It is during such soirees that the painter came up
with one of his most well-known aphorisms: "Man is dearer than canvas."

It is only somewhere in the 1890s that Mykola Ge summoned the strength
to paint again. In his country house studio, painted brown inside, the
artist built a whole system of mirrors. He painted pictures using almost
life-size clay models, on which he focused light from many windows. This
ash-colored light that mysteriously glows at dusk and sunset, with candles
burning, created a strange, "lacerated," tension embodied in the pictures
What Is the Truth? and The Crucifixion. Eyewitnesses claim
that this unbelievable Crucifixion "had such an ecstatic effect" on the
viewers at the 1894 exhibition of the Peredvizhniks that Emperor Alexander
III banned the official showing of the picture. Still rife are the disputes
of art researchers about the endless version of The Crucifixion
(painted and engraved) not fitting in with the generally accepted theories
of styles and genres, the picture seems to exhale a premonition of all
the future humanitarian disasters the twentieth century so abounds in.

The Crucifixion became a symbolic culmination in Ge's life. As
if having fulfilled his prescribed mission, Mykola Ge died June 13, 1894,
in his favorite home studio.

105 years have passed since the death of outstanding painter Mykola Ge 
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