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拍品專文
In 1924 in New York The Russian Art Exhibition opened at Grand Central Palace, presenting to an international audience a selection of work by 100 of Russia's finest contemporary artists. As the esteemed art historian and a key organiser of the exhibition, Igor Grabar, proclaimed: 'In the whole history of Art, so unusual, so unique, so almost fantastic an event has never before occurred.' (Exhibition catalogue, The Russian art exhibition, New York, 1924, p. 7). A New York Times article devoted to the exhibition commented with insight: 'However calmly they attempt to judge the vast group of paintings now in the Grand Central Palace, however learnedly they go over the historic groundwork of their development, nothing is so apparent as the fierce pulse of emotion beating through their words, and whatever New York, bent on its thousand missions, clear and cool of vision, may think of the exhibition, to its organisers it presents a tragic and heroic face, the face of a spiritual Russia struggling against degradation and death.' ('The World of Art: The Russians and Others', New York Times, 9 March 1924). The image selected from over 900 works to represent this lofty aim? Boris Kustodiev's The Coachman. Presented here at auction for the first time in history and offered from the prestigious Kapitza Collection, in the wake of the 1917 Revolution and World War I, against a backdrop of tremendous social change and a new world order, this iconic painting became the emblem of this bold venture, encapsulating in an image the Russia that Russians chose to present to the world. In the words of the émigré Count Ilya Tolstoy, 'I am not an art critic. I did not come to see the pictures: I came to see Russia and that it what I saw.' (Ibid). It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which the work of Kustodiev and crucially The Coachman itself is seared into the minds and hearts of the Russian people.
Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan where the mighty Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. Although there was no art school in the region, the arrival of the 15th Exhibition of Itinerant Artists, which included portraits by Repin and Kramskoi, is said to have made a significant impression on the nine-year-old Kustodiev. Repin became an almost God-like figure in the aspiring artist's eyes and was to have much influence on his subsequent career. After entering the St Petersburg Academy of Art in 1896 Kustodiev was granted entry into Repin's studio in February 1898, where he studied with Ivan Kulikov, Filipp Maliavin and Alexander Murashko. The established artist quickly acknowledged that 'This talented youth, whose success has made such an impression and who comes from some place on the Volga and has studied under some unknown teacher, is the pride of our Academy, our greatest hope.' (quoted in M. Etkind, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad-Moscow, 1960, p. 249). While Kustodiev began his career as a portraitist and created a number of excellent works in this sphere, the finest of which depict his wife, children or close friends, his fate was not to become Repin's successor. In locating his own subject matter, at the heart of which lay the Russian provinces, Kustodiev was instead destined to become the portrait painter of Russia herself.
The author of more than one excellent and incisive monograph on Kustodiev, the art historian Victoria Lebedeva suggests that in many of his portraits and particularly the formal commissions, the artist displays a tendency to amuse himself with characteristic irony by painting á la Serov, who he much admired or Repin or the Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860-1911), with whom he had became much enamoured with in the wake of Diaghilev's exhibition of Scandinavian art in St Petersburg in 1897. Capable of producing brilliant works in this vein, Kustodiev's utmost ability was revealed in the paintings in which he addressed his own subject matter. He admired a broad range of artists: from Velasquez and the Italian Renaissance Masters to Aleksei Venetsianov (1780-1847), the 1911 exhibition of whom he found utterly revelatory, and the late 18th Century Russian masters Dmitry Levitsky, Fyodor Rokotov and Vladimir Borovikovsky with whom he became acquainted at Diaghilev's 1905 Tauride Palace Exhibition. Of course Kustodiev's content was informed by his context: like Goncharova, Larionov and the Abramtsevo generation preceding them, he was much interested in folk art: Zhostovo tray painting, Vyatka figurines; customs and dances, recording songs and chastushki (comic folk verses). He may also be accused of romanticising his subject matter in the manner of his fellow World of Art member Konstantin Somov. Irrespective to these unifying factors, in execution Kustodiev stands alone, the works he created immediately discernible by his distinctive style and truly without analogy.
The Coachman belongs to series of works depicting national types, which was first realised with a collection of watercolours executed in 1920. His choice of subject matter continues a well-established proclivity for such a project in the history of Russian Art, surely indicative of a pervasive longing to capture the intangible quality of Russianness. Consider Alexander Orlovsky's (1777-1832) Russian types (see lot 46), those of Ignaty Shchedrovsky (1815-1870) and Vasily Timm (1820-1895) and more recently Kustodiev's contemporary and friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957). Kustodiev's types, painted from the imagination with their foundation in observation, are not portraits but the presentation of an archetype. Like the precursor to the series, The balloon seller (1915, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), our coachman is not an individual but a figure ubiquitous in towns all over Russia. By 1923 we know him well, indeed our affection for him has only increased with familiarity from his cameo roles in paintings such as The Freezing Day (1913, The Radishchev State Art Museum, Saratov) where he drives past in his sleigh or in A Moscow Tavern where he is seated sipping tea (1916, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
Lebedeva suggests that paradox lies at the heart of Kustodiev's work, that the initial impression of his work and that achieved on further contemplation are likely to be polar opposites. Does this hold true applied to The Coachman? It depicts a booming man, laughing and welcoming, the flat opaque surface and planes of colour reminiscent of a poster. Is there some sinister undercurrent? Some elaborate irony? Certainly the picture is stylised, realist but fantastical, the snow a little bright, the smile a little wide, the figure exaggerated by the chosen perspective, strongly outlined against the sky. But as Christian Brinton, author of the foreword to the 1924 Central Palace exhibition catalogue rightly suggests, 'With the Russian temperament one never, in fact, quite knows when the world of objective reality may dissolve before the beckoning smile of a Swan Princess, or the enigmatic smile of Jar-Ptitza' (Exhibition catalogue, The Russian art exhibition, New York, 1924, p. 3). In fact there is little to malign our initial impression of sheer pleasure. Although certainly the coachman's face is suspiciously reddened by the cold (might he have indulged in a drop or two?). Perhaps the coachman's foibles are easier to regard indulgently, his weakness for the demon drink less off-putting than the smugness of Kustodiev's well-fed kupchikhi, the vanity of their laden dressing tables and the silliness of their gossip. It is impossible to look at The Coachman and not feel the light and warmth of Kustodiev's irrepressibly sunny disposition, persistently startling to his biographers. Plagued by ill health, the first symptoms of which appeared in early August 1909 and were subsequently diagnosed as tuberculosis of the bone in 1911, from late 1916 Kustodiev was confined to a specially adapted chair for the remainder of his life. Despite this, he created many of his finest works in the last decade of his life, which proved a period of continuous creative activity. Kustodiev was himself unable to explain his optimism, writing to his wife on 26th February 1912 from his convalescence in Leysin: 'Despite everything I am sometimes surprised at my light-hearted disposition, a kind of obstinate ingrained joy of life, simply being happy to be alive, to look at the blue sky and the mountains and be thankful for that.' (quoted in V. A. Kapralov (Ed.), B. M. Kustodiev, Leningrad, 1967, p. 122). This irrepressible optimism, surely supported by his vehement love of Russia, is perceivable in all of his finest works, The Coachman included: 'I think that a picture, whatever its subject may be, should draw its force from the love and interest the painter is moved by in conveying its mood.' (quoted in Ibid, p. 62).
Painted in 1923, eight years after Malevich completed his Black Square, The Coachman is in many ways timeless. Kustodiev's ability to express the eternal qualities of the Russian soul and not merely their current manifestation is precisely what rendered the work so suitable as the poster for the 1924 Grand Central Exhibition. Kustodiev's words: 'I do not know whether or not I have succeeded to do and express in my works that which I wished - a love of life, joy, and vitality, devotion to all that Russia means to us - these have always been the solo subject of my pictures' (quoted in Ibid, p. 181), can be viewed in some sense as a manifesto. On contemplating The Coachman, arms outstretched and welcoming, a Father Russia of sorts, Kustodiev's characteristic modesty is evident: there can be no doubt that this most Russian of Russian painters was entirely successful in expressing all that he hoped.
Kustodiev was born in Astrakhan where the mighty Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. Although there was no art school in the region, the arrival of the 15th Exhibition of Itinerant Artists, which included portraits by Repin and Kramskoi, is said to have made a significant impression on the nine-year-old Kustodiev. Repin became an almost God-like figure in the aspiring artist's eyes and was to have much influence on his subsequent career. After entering the St Petersburg Academy of Art in 1896 Kustodiev was granted entry into Repin's studio in February 1898, where he studied with Ivan Kulikov, Filipp Maliavin and Alexander Murashko. The established artist quickly acknowledged that 'This talented youth, whose success has made such an impression and who comes from some place on the Volga and has studied under some unknown teacher, is the pride of our Academy, our greatest hope.' (quoted in M. Etkind, Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Leningrad-Moscow, 1960, p. 249). While Kustodiev began his career as a portraitist and created a number of excellent works in this sphere, the finest of which depict his wife, children or close friends, his fate was not to become Repin's successor. In locating his own subject matter, at the heart of which lay the Russian provinces, Kustodiev was instead destined to become the portrait painter of Russia herself.
The author of more than one excellent and incisive monograph on Kustodiev, the art historian Victoria Lebedeva suggests that in many of his portraits and particularly the formal commissions, the artist displays a tendency to amuse himself with characteristic irony by painting á la Serov, who he much admired or Repin or the Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860-1911), with whom he had became much enamoured with in the wake of Diaghilev's exhibition of Scandinavian art in St Petersburg in 1897. Capable of producing brilliant works in this vein, Kustodiev's utmost ability was revealed in the paintings in which he addressed his own subject matter. He admired a broad range of artists: from Velasquez and the Italian Renaissance Masters to Aleksei Venetsianov (1780-1847), the 1911 exhibition of whom he found utterly revelatory, and the late 18th Century Russian masters Dmitry Levitsky, Fyodor Rokotov and Vladimir Borovikovsky with whom he became acquainted at Diaghilev's 1905 Tauride Palace Exhibition. Of course Kustodiev's content was informed by his context: like Goncharova, Larionov and the Abramtsevo generation preceding them, he was much interested in folk art: Zhostovo tray painting, Vyatka figurines; customs and dances, recording songs and chastushki (comic folk verses). He may also be accused of romanticising his subject matter in the manner of his fellow World of Art member Konstantin Somov. Irrespective to these unifying factors, in execution Kustodiev stands alone, the works he created immediately discernible by his distinctive style and truly without analogy.
The Coachman belongs to series of works depicting national types, which was first realised with a collection of watercolours executed in 1920. His choice of subject matter continues a well-established proclivity for such a project in the history of Russian Art, surely indicative of a pervasive longing to capture the intangible quality of Russianness. Consider Alexander Orlovsky's (1777-1832) Russian types (see lot 46), those of Ignaty Shchedrovsky (1815-1870) and Vasily Timm (1820-1895) and more recently Kustodiev's contemporary and friend Mstislav Dobuzhinsky (1875-1957). Kustodiev's types, painted from the imagination with their foundation in observation, are not portraits but the presentation of an archetype. Like the precursor to the series, The balloon seller (1915, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), our coachman is not an individual but a figure ubiquitous in towns all over Russia. By 1923 we know him well, indeed our affection for him has only increased with familiarity from his cameo roles in paintings such as The Freezing Day (1913, The Radishchev State Art Museum, Saratov) where he drives past in his sleigh or in A Moscow Tavern where he is seated sipping tea (1916, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
Lebedeva suggests that paradox lies at the heart of Kustodiev's work, that the initial impression of his work and that achieved on further contemplation are likely to be polar opposites. Does this hold true applied to The Coachman? It depicts a booming man, laughing and welcoming, the flat opaque surface and planes of colour reminiscent of a poster. Is there some sinister undercurrent? Some elaborate irony? Certainly the picture is stylised, realist but fantastical, the snow a little bright, the smile a little wide, the figure exaggerated by the chosen perspective, strongly outlined against the sky. But as Christian Brinton, author of the foreword to the 1924 Central Palace exhibition catalogue rightly suggests, 'With the Russian temperament one never, in fact, quite knows when the world of objective reality may dissolve before the beckoning smile of a Swan Princess, or the enigmatic smile of Jar-Ptitza' (Exhibition catalogue, The Russian art exhibition, New York, 1924, p. 3). In fact there is little to malign our initial impression of sheer pleasure. Although certainly the coachman's face is suspiciously reddened by the cold (might he have indulged in a drop or two?). Perhaps the coachman's foibles are easier to regard indulgently, his weakness for the demon drink less off-putting than the smugness of Kustodiev's well-fed kupchikhi, the vanity of their laden dressing tables and the silliness of their gossip. It is impossible to look at The Coachman and not feel the light and warmth of Kustodiev's irrepressibly sunny disposition, persistently startling to his biographers. Plagued by ill health, the first symptoms of which appeared in early August 1909 and were subsequently diagnosed as tuberculosis of the bone in 1911, from late 1916 Kustodiev was confined to a specially adapted chair for the remainder of his life. Despite this, he created many of his finest works in the last decade of his life, which proved a period of continuous creative activity. Kustodiev was himself unable to explain his optimism, writing to his wife on 26th February 1912 from his convalescence in Leysin: 'Despite everything I am sometimes surprised at my light-hearted disposition, a kind of obstinate ingrained joy of life, simply being happy to be alive, to look at the blue sky and the mountains and be thankful for that.' (quoted in V. A. Kapralov (Ed.), B. M. Kustodiev, Leningrad, 1967, p. 122). This irrepressible optimism, surely supported by his vehement love of Russia, is perceivable in all of his finest works, The Coachman included: 'I think that a picture, whatever its subject may be, should draw its force from the love and interest the painter is moved by in conveying its mood.' (quoted in Ibid, p. 62).
Painted in 1923, eight years after Malevich completed his Black Square, The Coachman is in many ways timeless. Kustodiev's ability to express the eternal qualities of the Russian soul and not merely their current manifestation is precisely what rendered the work so suitable as the poster for the 1924 Grand Central Exhibition. Kustodiev's words: 'I do not know whether or not I have succeeded to do and express in my works that which I wished - a love of life, joy, and vitality, devotion to all that Russia means to us - these have always been the solo subject of my pictures' (quoted in Ibid, p. 181), can be viewed in some sense as a manifesto. On contemplating The Coachman, arms outstretched and welcoming, a Father Russia of sorts, Kustodiev's characteristic modesty is evident: there can be no doubt that this most Russian of Russian painters was entirely successful in expressing all that he hoped.