HIS LIFE

Isaak Levitan was one of the greatest landscape painters of the nineteenth century not only in Russian but in European art as well. He created works of undying artistic merit. His art is for all time and for all people because it absorbed into itself the woes, the joys and the social realities of its age because it converted that which men lived by into sublime works of art and translated the author’s emotions into lyrical images of his native land. At the end of the nineteenth century, the landscape was one of the foremost genres in Russian painting. It was this influence that shaped Levitan’s art, an art fully and by right symbolic of the finest achievements of Russian landscape painting.

Few materials pertaining to Levitan’s biography have survived. His personal archives (letters and probably documents too) were destroyed on his orders by his brother Adolf shortly before the artist’s death. Nonetheless, in broad outline, we know Levitan’s biography well enough. It is quite typical for an artist hailing from the lower-middle class (the raznochintsy) who paid his way through art school with “copper coins” and who achieved success and recognition on the strength of his talent alone but at the price of dire privation and gruelling toil.

Isaak Ilyich Levitan was born on August 30 (18 Old Style), 1860, in the little town of Kybartai (now Vilkaviskis District, Lithuanian SSR). His father was quite an educated man for his time who not only graduated from a rabbinical seminary but picked up a degree of secular education on his own as well, an education which, incidentally, included the mastery of German and French. This provided him with a living in Kovno (now Kaunas, Lithuanian SSR) where he gave private lessons and later worked as an interpreter for a French construction company then building a railway bridge in the vicinity.

At the beginning of the 1870s Ilya Levitan desirous, evidently, of finding more fertile fields for his abilities, moved with his family to Moscow. The large family (Isaak had an elder brother, Adolf, and two sisters) led a hand-to-mouth existence. For the young Levitan conditions became almost unbearable when his mother died in 1875 and his father two years later. The Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture which Levitan entered in 1873 even waived his tuition “because of extreme poverty” and in recognition of his “singular success in art”. Levitan was homeless in Moscow, sleeping alternately in the homes of relatives or friends and sometimes even spending the night in the empty classrooms of the School. Now and then the School’s night watchman took pity on the youth and let him into his cubicle for the night; another watchman, who sold breakfasts on the side, would provide the lad with “up to five kopecks’ worth” of victuals on credit. Levitan’s good showing in the academic year of 1874-75 induced the School’s Board of Teachers to reward him with “a box of paints and brushes”. By that time the fledgeling artist was beginning to show a preference for landscape painting, and in the autumn of 1876, Alexei Savrasov took Levitan into his studio. In March 1877 two of Levitan’s canvases — Evening and Sunny Day. Spring — were displayed in the students’ section of the 5th Moscow Exhibition of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions, the largest and most influential creative association of realist artists in the country, active between 1870 and 1923 (also known as the Itinerants’ Society). Autumn Day. The Sokolniki Park, Levitan’s entry for his own School’s 2nd Students’ Exhibition of 1879-80, was purchased by Pavel Tretyakov, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, which meant that the artist was beginning to achieve public recognition.

Levitan’s years in the School coincided with its most fortunate period. Only towards the end of his studies there did a certain decline set in, but prior to that the School was referred to as the “Moscow Academy” and to a certain extent regarded as a counterbalance to the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts in that the Moscow School was a freer and more progressive institution. Inside the School, the most advanced studio was Savrasov’s who believed implicitly in working in the open air and studying nature first hand. “Savrasov was blessed with an ability to arouse his pupils’ enthusiasm, and they, gripped by a passionate adoration of nature, banded into a closely-knit little group and worked tirelessly in the studio, at home and outdoors. With the first signs of spring, the whole studio would hurry out of town to admire amid the melting snows the beauty of reawakening life. When an oak flowered, Savrasov, elated, would run into the studio, announce the fact as though it were a momentous event and take his pupils out into the greening groves and fields again. The general animation prevented any of the studio’s pupils from getting their sleep, and the entire school looked on that studio with adoring eyes.”[1]

In addition to studying nature, Savrasov advised his pupils to draw on the experience of French plein-air painters of the Barbizon school whose works were long known and appreciated in Russia not only by artists but by collectors as well. Levitan used to copy the French pictures in the Tretyakov family’s collection, being particularly impressed with the painting of Corot.

The love of nature and the need to study it which Savrasov instiled in his pupils could not but be further strengthened by Vasily Polenov who joined the School’s staff in the autumn of 1882. At first, Polenov led a still-life class but soon took over the landscape studio too. Himself an excellent landscapist, one of the foremost Russian open-air artists in the second half of the nineteenth century, Polenov deeply influenced Levitan and his young contemporaries. He helped them develop a new approach to landscape painting, a new understanding of pleinairism. Levitan greatly admired Polenov’s Palestine studies, all superb examples of open-air painting, the first-ever instance in the history of Russian art of an on-Location sketch achieving the level of an independent work of art. At the Itinerant exhibition of 1885 Polenov’s Palestine studies produced an immense impression, contributing largely to the development of a new trend in landscape painting in the second half of the 1880s. Unfortunately, Levitan did not long profit from Polenov’s advice and guidance because in the autumn of 1883 the latter went abroad to do a series of open-air sketches for his painting Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. By that time Levitan, who had passed his examinations “in the sciences” for the fifth term and had two minor silver medals to his credit, naturally considered himself to have completed the School’s course and stopped attending classes. On Polenov’s return to Moscow, contacts between them were renewed, only now these were contacts between two artists of equal standing. In Polenov’s absence, the School’s Board rejected Levitan’s entry for the Big Silver Medal competition and the title of “commissioned artist” so that Levitan left the school with a diploma entitling him to work only as a teacher of art. His relations with the School were severed for many years to come, up to the day when he, by then a famous artist, again entered its doors as head of the landscape studio.

Levitan’s creative endeavour coincided with a general upsurge in Russian artistic culture. The years of his formation as an artist — the first half of the 1880s — saw the creation of such masterpieces as Ivan Kramskoi’s Grief Inconsolable (1884), Ilya Repin’s Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1880-83) and Vasily Surikov’s The Boyarina Morozova (1881-87). Levitan developed as an Itinerant and was associated with the movement’s junior generation, the so-called “young Itinerants”. He was a contemporary of Mikhail Nesterov, Konstantin and Sergei Korovin, Alexei Stepanov, Vasily Baksheyev, and Abram Arkhipov. With some of them he studied together in the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, with others, like Ilya Ostroukhov and Valentin Serov, he maintained friendly relations. Like Nesterov and Serov, Levitan was already beginning to evolve a new realism that went further than the realism on which he had been reared. Yet to the end of his days he did not break with the Itinerants, not even when he was exhibiting with the World of Art group. The World of Art (Mir Iskusstva), founded in the late 1890s, preached artistic individualism and “art for art’s sake”, but the work of its members often revealed realist tendencies. The new, emerging trend to which Levitan belonged should not, however, be identified with the World of Art, though in its early stages the society did attempt to draw into its orbit all that was young, novel and fresh.

That which Nesterov and Levitan aspired to was to a certain extent realised by the Union of Russian Artists, which came into being in 1903 and combined the traditions of the Itinerants with an interest in Impressionism. With all that, however, Nesterov never joined it, and it is doubtful whether Levitan would have either. Generally speaking, it would be incorrect to regard the evolution of Russian art at the turn of the century as a simple replacement of one trend, the Itinerant, by another, the World of Art school: this would be a gross oversimplification of the actual state of affairs. In the 1860s-1880s progressive art comprised a more or less integrated entity opposed to academism, a fact reflected in the creation of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions which was, in effect, the only major artistic association of the time and thus quite in tune with the tendencies then prevailing in Russian art.

At the turn of the century, alongside the World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists, there were other trends too which have yet to be explored in depth. Such, for instance, is the art of Nesterov, a graduate of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture some of whose pupils comprised the nucleus of the “young Itinerants”, of Mikhail Vrubel whose origins were with the Academy of Arts, and, finally, of Arkady Rylov. These three masters cannot be identified either with the Itinerants or the Union of Russian Artists, or the World of Art. Levitan, though, could and should be numbered among the “transitional” masters, not because he belonged to any group or trend, but because of the transitional character of his art. No matter how many new features are discernible in Levitan’s canvases of the period, his painting of these years taken as a whole does not seem to go beyond the realism of the second half of the nineteenth century.

This assertion would ring absolutely true if the evolution of Levitan’s art had stopped at what had been achieved by 1895, particularly in such pictures as The Month of March which culminates, as it was, the Itinerant landscape and heralds a new approach to this genre, sums up the traditions of Savrasov and begins a trend subsequently represented primarily by Igor Grabar and Konstantin Yuon. If he is estimated in these terms, then Levitan is indeed an artist of the transitional period. His later works, however, especially The Lake. Russia, all relate to the future, to the new landscape painting of the twentieth century.

The question thus arises of the impact of Levitan. He did not found any “school”, to the same extent that all the major masters, from Raphael and Rembrandt to Repin and Surikov, left no really outstanding followers. On the other hand, Levitan’s overall significance for Russian landscape painting is, like theirs, truly immense, though it is not designated by any narrow boundaries nor defined as anything tangible. So great was his influence on Russian landscape painting that after Levitan it developed along entirely new lines.

The impact of Levitan’s art stemmed from the profoundly subtle poetic feeling that permeated all his work. It cannot be said that he was the first to discover the lyrical beauty of the simple, unpretentious Russian landscape. That had been done before him by Savrasov, who had his predecessors too. But in developing further Savrasov’s lyrical and deeply national landscape painting Levitan lent it a new dimension, elevated it to a new plane. He was a true poet of nature, and this universally accepted definition of Levitan is quintessential. For Levitan, Savrasov’s contribution “to the realm of Russian art” lay in the fact that he attempted “to seek out in the most ordinary and commonplace phenomena the intimate, infinitely touching and often melancholy features which are so strongly felt in our native scenery and which evoke an overwhelming response in our soul”.[2] These words are applicable to Levitan himself because his landscapes are suffused with an even greater measure of the “lyricism and boundless love for one’s native land” that he so highly valued in the art of his first teacher.