Peredvizhniki
The Peredvizhniki - the Wanderers, or Itinerants - were Russian realist painters who broke with the Imperial Academy of Arts and took art to the people. The story begins in 1863, when fourteen students left the Academy rather than paint the subjects it prescribed; in 1870 their cooperative became the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions. Between 1871 and 1923 the society staged 48 mobile exhibitions in St Petersburg and Moscow, then toured them to Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and other provincial cities. Their paintings showed contemporary Russian life honestly - poverty and injustice alongside the beauty of the folk way of life, national history, portraits, and above all the Russian landscape, which they made an emblem of national identity. Led early by Ivan Kramskoi and championed by the collector Pavel Tretyakov and the critic Vladimir Stasov, they defined Russian art for a generation.
Defining characteristics
- Unvarnished realism: everyday people and scenes painted without academic idealization
- Socially charged subjects - labor, poverty, provincial life, moments of injustice
- The Russian landscape treated as an emotional, national subject
- A lighter palette and freer brushwork than the Academy's dark convention
- Large narrative canvases staged like scenes of contemporary life
Key figures
- Ivan Kramskoi (1837-1887) — Founder and moral leader of the society, master of psychological portraiture
- Ilya Repin (1844-1930) — The society's greatest painter of contemporary life and history
- Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) — Epic forest landscapes, the 'singer of the forest'
- Vasily Surikov (1848-1916) — Monumental canvases of Russian history
- Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) — The 'mood landscape' that became a national emblem
Example works
- Barge Haulers on the Volga — Ilya Repin (1870-1873)
- The Rooks Have Returned — Alexei Savrasov (1871)
- The Morning of the Streltsy Execution — Vasily Surikov (1881)
Sources
- Peredvizhniki - Wikipedia encyclopedia