Ilya Repin (exhibition at Ateneum)

Ilya Repin (1844–1930) : What Freedom! / «Какой простор!». 1903. Oil on canvas. 179 cm x 284.5 cm. Collection: Russian Museum. Ж-2774. Please do click on the image to enlarge it.

EXHIBITION
Repin. Exhibition at the Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, 27 April – 29 Aug 2021. Produced by the Ateneum Art Museum and the Petit Palais (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris / Paris Musées), in collaboration with the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum. The curator of the exhibition at the Ateneum is the chief curator Timo Huusko. After Ateneum, the exhibition will be on display at the Petit Palais in Paris.
    The original opening of 9 March 2021 was postponed due to the corona emergency.
    Corona security: pre-booking, limited capacity, staggered entry, face masks, distancing, hand hygiene.
    Viewed 6 May 2021.

CATALOGUE
Ilya Repin. Editor: Anne-Maria Pennonen. Photo editor: Lene Wahlsten. With contributions by Marja Sakari, Tatjana Yudenkova, David Jackson, Timo Huusko and Satu Itkonen.
    Graphic design: Minna Luoma.
    Ateneum Publications Vol. 145.
    Three editions: Finnish, Swedish and English.
    207 pages : richly illustrated : 28 cm.
    ISBN 978-952-737125-1 hardbound.
    Printing: Livonia Print © 2021.
    Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, 2021.

OTHER BOOKS CONSULTED
Ilya Repin: Ilja Repin: Mennyt aika läheinen (Far and Near / Далёкое близкое, 1937). Finnish translation: Mirja Rutanen. Porvoo – Helsinki – Juva: WSOY, 1970. – A wonderful book of memoirs.

Tito Colliander: Ilja Repin, ukrainalainen taiteilija. Translation from the Swedish original: Lauri Kemiläinen. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, 1944. – Largely based on the same notes of Repin's from which the painter's memoirs were posthumously edited.

From the official introduction: " A master of psychological portrayals and depictions of Russian folklife

Ilya Repin (1844–1930) is above all known as a master of psychological portrayals of people and depictions of Russian folklife. The Ateneum is able to display Repin’s best-known paintings with masterful details, including Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–1873) and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–1891), both from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

The exhibition’s many portraits feature members of the artist’s family, as well as cultural influencers of the time, such as the composer Modest Mussorgsky and the author Leo Tolstoy. In all, Repin painted more than 300 portraits, including portrayals of many influential women in culture.

Ilya Repin, the most significant Russian artist of his time, depicted the Russian people, who had been freed from serfdom in the 1860s, as well as the intelligentsia of the era, and the relationship between the people and their rulers. His work has also strongly influenced the Finnish people’s current perception of the essence of Russianness.

The exhibition is the first review of Repin’s entire career in Finland in the 21st century. The exhibition features more than 140 paintings and paper-based works spanning a period of more than sixty years. Many of the works are shown in Helsinki for the first time. The Ateneum collection also includes a great number of Repin’s works." (From the official introduction)

AA: My first visit to a large art exhibition in half a year is to Ateneum's grand retrospective of Ilya Repin, the Ukraine-born master of Russian realism.

As a contributor to a volume of essays on Leo Tolstoy that was published in January 2021, I have been absorbed in Russian society, history and realism for a couple of years. I confronted Ilya Repin also during my Tolstoy quest. Repin and Tolstoy were long-term friends, and Repin's Tolstoy chapter in his memoirs contains some of the most engrossing pages about the author.

They were opponents in many ways, particularly regarding Tolstoy's infamous, polemical What Is Art? treatise in which Tolstoy denied the worth of almost the whole legacy of world art. Disregarding that, Repin and Tolstoy connected in profound spiritual levels.

The last pages of Repin's Tolstoy memoirs are devoted to their long riding tour in 1909, when Tolstoy was 81 years old, one year before his death. Repin admires Tolstoy's tact, skill and bravado with his beloved horse Délire. And Leo's patience: when he has tried to lead the horse through the wrong forest thicket path Leo finally understands to give up and let the horse find the right path.

Having read those genial memoirs, it is startling to discover the last Tolstoy portrait painted by Repin while the author was alive, made during the year of the last ride. (Based on his sketches, Repin painted some more portraits after Tolstoy's death). Repin created 12 portraits of Tolstoy, several of which are on display at Ateneum. In addition, he made 25 drawings. There are also eight sketches of Tolstoy's family members, 17 book illustrations and three plaster busts.

That 1909 Tolstoy portrait was for me the biggest revelation and the most startling experience in the Ateneum exhibition. All other Repin's Tolstoy portraits are full of vigour, and there is a powerful spiritual radiation, although Tolstoy is usually in humble and ordinary clothes. There is a sense of passion and perseverance. They evoke a prophet, a seer, an apostle, a shaman.

But in this portrait in the pink chair from the year 1909 the keynote is agony. Tolstoy was disturbed about the recent developments in Russia. "Stolypin's necktie" had been used mercilessly to crush opposition. On "Bloody Sunday", the Czar's Imperial Guard massacred peaceful, unarmed demonstrators led by Father Gapon who wanted to deliver a petition to the Czar. Such events were a blow to Tolstoy's faith in non-violent resistance. The conflicts and contradictions were turning unbearable to the ageing and ailing author who in the next year tried to retire from the world.

All this can be felt in the last portrait.

Ilya Repin belongs to the greatest masters of portrait painting. The Tolstoy cycle is only an example. In all portraits we have a feeling of being in the presence of a real, vivid and impressive human being. Repin created a portrait gallery of the Great Men and Women of Russia. When we contemplate Repin's Alexander III, Nikolai II and Kerenski we get an inside track into history. Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna, Varvara Uexküll von Gyldenbrandt, Elizaveta Zvantseva and Eleonora Duse (a frequent visitor to Russia) are remarkable presences. His own family Repin painted with warm affection and a sense of humour.

John Berger's "male gaze" discourse has been recently revived for the Me Too age. Repin survives such a critical examination. His female portraits are proud, independent and intelligent. They are not passive objects of the male gaze. Instead, Repin's women gaze at us with their heads held up high.

This is my first Ilya Repin solo exhibition, but many of his paintings I have seen at the Russian Museum. During the corona emergency I have had time to read and study comfortably three Ilya Repin books, including the exhibition catalogue, so I was pretty well prepared when my turn came to visit the museum. In our age of record visitor figures to museums, we have already been used to queues in Le Louvre and the Hermitage. Now the pandemic adds a new twist to the Golden Age of Museums.

It adds to the reverence of art to have to stand in line to review it. But yet again, people wander in the exhibition photographing paintings with their mobile phones, instead of viewing them, although superior images exist online of almost all. (But of the Tolstoy in 1909 painting I only discovered an inferior photo on the web.)

Most paintings are familiar, but intriguing rarities are dispersed among them, many of them from Finnish collections. The last 12 years of his life Repin lived in Finland with a Nansen passport. Repin did not emigrate, but since December 1917, Repin's villa Penates in Eastern Karelia happened to remain on the West side of the border, in the newly independent Republic of Finland.

There is a grand and engrossing vision on display at the exhibition. It is an epic survey of the history of Russia and Ukraine. The painting of Ivan the Terrible after the murder of his son in 1581 was withdrawn from the exhibition due to vandalism. But we have history paintings from the Zaporozhian Cossacks laughing at the Ottoman Sultan in 1676 and Tsarevna Sophia Alekseevna in her imprisonment in the Novodevichy Convent in 1698 till the Russian Revolutions in 1905 and 1917. Repin's painting on the Demonstration on October 17, 1905 is one of his most joyful, and his view of the Memorial at the Wall of the Communards at Père Lachaise (1883) has a special feeling of hopeful anticipation. But Repin condemned the bloodshed of Russia's Civil War, and his desolate Golgotha (1922) may be seen as a vision of the tragedy.

Even in Finland Repin's chain of great paintings on Russian history continued. In his partially sketchy Great Men of Finland (1927) he places in the middle the Finnish painter Axel Gallen-Kallela lighting his pipe, and himself standing next to him, with his back towards us, addressing General Mannerheim, the White General of Finland who in 1918 wanted to join the Russian Civil War to conquer Saint Petersburg. Mannerheim would have won the war, and that's why he got no backing, because the victory would have meant that Finland would have lost her independence.

A major current in the exhibition is rebellion, from post-Dekabrists to Oktyabrists. Before the Confession, two versions of the Unexpected Return (female and male), Meeting, and Arrest of a Propagandist are complex, disturbing, dynamic scenes. In his emblematic What Freedom! we can sense Repin's high hopes for the future of his country.

Almost all Repin's paintings can be examined at home in official high resolution digital transfers. Because of the epic quality of many it pays to study them on the biggest possible screen. But seen "live" it becomes possible to experience their three-dimensional brushstrokes. At close range the paintings are far from photorealistic. First they turn expressionistic, then abstract. It's worth the effort to "track forward and track back" to keep gaining new insights into these masterworks.

Finally, there is the aura of the unique artwork. Viewing the original portrait we are at two degrees of separation from Tolstoy.