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Il΄ia Repin in Paris: Mediating French Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

Allison Leigh
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Abstract

This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia's most famous realist painter, Il΄ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin's stay in Paris from 1873–75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist, not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin's letters and the work itself shows him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet. Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of west European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.

Type
Visions of Russian Modernism: Challenging Narratives of Imitation, Influence, and Periphery
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 434 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

This article is related to a forthcoming book entitled Picturing Russia's Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting (available from Bloomsbury Press in 2020). I thank Molly Brunson, Andrés Mario Zervigón, and Trenton Olsen for engaging with my argument at various stages as the project developed, and also the anonymous reviewers at Slavic Review for their valuable comments. Thanks are also due to Olena Martynyuk for editorial assistance with translations and to the audiences at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Texas at Tyler for their insightful questions on the work while it was in progress.

References

1. Repin, I. E. to Stasov, V. V., Petersburg, December 24, 1872, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma v dvukh tomakh 1867–1930 (Moscow, 1969), 1:50–51Google Scholar. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2. Repin was born in Ukraine, but there is reason to conceive of him as a Russian artist. He described himself generally as such. See I. E. Repin to E. P. Antokolskii, August 7, 1894, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 2:74. Quoted in Brunson, Molly, Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890 (Dekalb, Ill., 2016), 128Google Scholar.

3. He may actually have arrived with his wife at the end of September. In a letter to Stasov dated October 15, 1873, Repin wrote: “We’re in Paris and two weeks have already passed.” See I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:86.

4. On Repin’s background, see Sternin, Grigori and Kirillina, Jelena, Il΄ia Repin (New York, 2011), 14Google Scholar.

5. “Kartina Repina ‘Burlaki na Volge,’” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedemosti, March 18, 1873, no. 76; reprinted in Stasov, Sobranie sochinenii, 1: pt 2, 397–411. Translated in Elizabeth Valkenier and Wendy Salmond, eds., Russian Realist Painting. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology, Vol. 14 of Experiment, A Journal of Russian Culture (2008), 241.

6. I. E. Repin to V. V. Stasov, Paris, October 15, 1873, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:86.

7. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, November 8, 1873, in ibid., 1:88.

8. I. E. Repin to V. V. Stasov, November 5, 1873, quoted in Igor E. Grabar΄, Repin. Monografiia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1963), 1:124.

9. I. E. Repin to P. M. Tret΄iakov, Paris, March 22, 1874, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:118. Nearly every translation of this very important line “the main types of Paris in their most typical place [glavnye tipy Parizha, v samom tipichnom meste]” has pluralized “place” to “places.” I believe this line is better translated in the singular. These are Parisians of all types in the place they can be found all together.

10. Sternin and Kirillina, Il΄ia Repin, 24.

11. All of these works were featured in the Christie’s auction on June 6, 2011 in London, in which the painting was also sold.

12. I. E. Repin to P. F. Iseev, Paris, November 27, 1873, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:90.

13. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, December 16, 1873, in ibid., 1:98.

14. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, March 31, 1874, in ibid., 1:122.

15. These debates have received much attention in critical scholarship. For more on how nationalism affected art, see Theofanis Geroge Stavrou, ed., Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Bloomington, 1983) and Rosalind Blakesley, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia, 1757–1881 (New Haven, 2016). For the debates in Russian culture more generally, the seminal texts are Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles : A Study of Romantic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass., 1952) and Marc Raeff, Russian Intellectual History : An Anthology (New York, 1966). More recent works on the subject include Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany, 2006) and Sergey Horujy, trans. Patrick Lally Michelson, “Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism,” in G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole, eds. A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (Cambridge, 2010), 27–51.

16. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii, “The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality,” in Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow, 1953), 369–70.

17. My conception of modernity is deeply indebted to T. J. Clark’s writings on the subject. This article reflects in particular the understanding of Paris he puts forward in two distinctive, but historically vital moments: 1793 and 1863. See Clark, “Painting in the Year 2” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, 1999), 15–53; and “Olympia’s Choice” in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, 1999), 79–146.

18. For Charles Baudelaire, the painter of modern life had to be “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; … a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life …” See The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1995), 10. Repin hints at understanding the task of the modern painter in similar terms in his letters. For both men, such a painter had to be the encapsulation of an impossible contingency, securing a content that could never be fixed. Repin admits this awareness and the special pressure it put on painting: “I’m terribly interested in Paris: its taste, grace, ease, speed, and this deep elegance in simplicity. And in particular the costumes of the Parisiennes [parizhanok]! It is impossible to describe.” I. E. Repin to V. V. Stasov, Paris, February 20, 1874, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:115. By highlighting a series of seemingly impossible coexistences and the dress of Parisian women in particular, Repin summed up the problem of modernity well.

19. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1983), 9.

20. Ibid., 21.

21. T.J. Clark, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam,” in “Obsolescence,” a special issue of October 100 (Spring 2002): 158.

22. Hanri Bergson, The Creative Mind (New York, 1946), 112.

23. Ibid., 114.

24. Paul Ardoin, “Bergson on Habit and Perception,” in Paul Ardoin, S. E. Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, eds. Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (New York, 2014), 311.

25. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, 9. The essay was first published in 1863.

26. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire (Paris, 1887), 1:346 (entry dated November 18, 1860).

27. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, 10 May 1875, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:154.

28. This went against the strictures of the Academy, which expressly forbade pensioners to submit work for inclusion in foreign exhibitions. It is interesting to note that for 1875, the Salon Livret listed the artist as: “REPINN (Élie) né à Tchougoueff (Russie),” providing yet another permutation of the artist’s name. See “Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture,” in Horst W. Janson, ed., Catalogues of the Paris Salon 1673 to 1881 (New York, 1977), vol. 1875.

29. I. N. Kramskoi to I. E. Repin, May 16, 1875, in Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi. Pis΄ma, 1:300–301. Translated in Valkenier and Salmond, eds. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology, 171–72. The Salon of 1875 opened May 1.

30. I. N. Kramskoi to I. E. Repin, August 20, 1875, in ibid., 172.

31. Elizabeth Valkenier has written productively on the Russian expectations for a “national” strain in subject matter. She describes how: “The disposition to consider art not as an autonomous realm but as intertwined with ‘life’—as primarily expressing extrinsic moral, civic, or national values, not intrinsic esthetic qualities—is a pronounced Russian trait.” See “The Intelligentsia and Art,” in Stavrou, Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 153.

32. David Jackson, The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Painting (Manchester, Eng., 2006), 22.

33. For more on Russian art and nationalism see the eloquent arguments formulated on the subject throughout Blakesley’s The Russian Canvas. For more on narodnost΄, see Maureen Perrie, “Narodnost΄: Notions of National Identity,” in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881–1940 (Oxford, Eng., 1998), 28–36.

34. Quoted in Katia Dianina, When Art Makes News: Writing Culture and Identity in Imperial Russia (Dekalb, IL, 2013), 164.

35. I. N. Kramskoi to I. E. Repin, August 20, 1875, in Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi. Pis΄ma, 1:311–13. Translated in Valkenier and Salmond, eds. The Peredvizhniki: An Anthology, 172. There is a larger subtext here regarding class that unfortunately falls outside the purview of this article. Kramskoi’s addressing Repin as “a man with Ukrainian blood in his veins …” is laden with not only ethnic, but deep class connotations as well. While not meant as an insult, this may have stung Repin doubly. He was throughout his life self-conscious of his origins.

36. The Russians are consistently using the term kokotok in these letters—borrowing the term for cocotte directly from the French vocabulary. Trenton Olsen is working on Judic’s role in this painting and Grabar’s description of her as a “cocotte.” This work is currently unpublished but was presented at the 2015 ASEEES conference under the title “Feigned Discontents: Modernism and Prostitution between Paris and St. Petersburg in the Late Nineteenth Century.” For more on images of prostitution in Russian art (specifically in the work of Ivan Kramskoi), see Olsen’s “Fallen Womanhood and Modernity in Ivan Kramskoi’s Unknown Woman (1883)” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2014).

37. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, August 29, 1875, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:165.

38. Elizabeth Valkenier is very close to making a similar claim in her book on Repin, noting that he: “… was searching for a more immediate and expressive language in which to communicate with the viewer.” See Il΄ia Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York, 1990), 56.

39. The definition of modernism I am proposing here differs from that put forward by Clement Greenberg in the 1960s. While I do agree with Greenberg that Manet was one of the first modernists, I do not believe that modernism centers entirely on “the frankness with which [modern artists] declared the flat surfaces” on which they painted. See “Modernist Painting,” in Sally Everett, ed., Art Theory and Criticism : An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought (Jefferson, NC, 1995), 112. Nor does my definition of modernism align completely with that put forward by Michael Fried in his work on Manet (or Adolf Menzel for that matter). Repin’s work is not characterized by the deep engagement with the past that Fried cites as key to Manet’s modernism, nor is the Russian artist embroiled in the art of embodiment that Fried cites as key to Menzel’s modernism. This article reevaluates the idea of the painting of modern life as centered on artists’ mutual desire for coherence and consistency in the face of its very impossibility, using Repin as a case study to demonstrate the interrelation of the experience of modernity across place.

40. Jean Clay, “Ointments, Makeup, Pollen,” trans. John Shepley, October 27 (Winter, 1983): 3.

41. The most sustained analyses of the painting in Russian include: Igor Grabar΄, E. Repin, monografiia. 2 vols. (Moscow, 1963–64), 1:116–68; I. S. Zil΄bershtein, “Repin v Parizhe (novonaidennye raboty 1873–1876 gg.),” in I. E. Grabar΄ and I. S. Zil΄bershtein, eds. Repin. Khudozhestvennoe Nasledstvo, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1948); and N. A. Vatenina, “Tvorchestvo I. E. Repina Parizhskogo perioda (Novye materialy),” in Tvorchestvo I. E. Repina i russkoe iskusstvo vtoroi poloviny XIX–XX vv. (Leningrad, 1987), 14–22.

42. Valkenier, Il΄ia Repin, 53.

43. David Jackson, “Western Art and Russian Ethics: Repin in Paris, 1873–76,” Russian Review 57, no. 3 (July 1998): 394–409.

44. Ibid., 405. It is important to note that while Jackson ultimately pitted Repin against Manet due to the divergence in their paintings’ stylistic qualities, he did note that subject matter was their “most palpable affinity.” This idea that it was subject matter (or content to return to the notion of soderzhanie) that was the link between them deserves greater attention.

45. I. E. Repin to V. V. Stasov, Paris, October 13, 1875, in Pis΄ma I.E. Repina i V. V. Stasov: Perepiska, 3 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1948–50), 1:120. On the first visit, in the company of Stasov, see Grabar΄, Repin, 1:148.

46. For more on Manet and Degas’ ability to capture moments of absence and preoccupation, see Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987), 141–64.

47. Ibid., 143.

48. I. E. Repin to V. V. Stasov, Paris, April 12, 1876, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:178.

49. En bateau was exhibited in Manet’s studio in 1876, but he did not submit the painting to the Salon until 1879. See Adolphe Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1947), discussed in Françoise Cachin and Charles S. Moffett, Manet: 1832–1883 (New York, 1983), 356. Argenteuil was accepted for the Salon of 1875, but was not ultimately bought by Durand-Ruel. Manet kept it until his death. See Cachin and Moffett, Manet: 1832–1883, 353–55.

50. Ibid., 126. Competing claims exist that it remained in Manet’s studio until 1883.

51. The institutional factors that led to this being possible are largely unknown. Jackson points out that Repin did meet a broad cross-section of the cultural intelligentsia in Paris, most often through his connection with Ivan Turgenev, but the networks that Repin engaged with in Paris deserve greater attention. See Jackson, “Western Art and Russian Ethics,” 398.

52. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, August 29, 1875, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:165.

53. Jackson, “Western Art and Russian Ethics,” 396–98. Née Anna Damiens (1850–1911). Many of the figures in the painting have been identified and may have been recognizable to viewers of the time.

54. Grabar΄, Repin, 1:150.

55. It would seem only Rosalind Blakesley avoids the trap of the cocotte in the foreground. Her recent book discusses the painting briefly but gives a more expansive account of the figures it contains. See Blakesley, The Russian Canvas, 259.

56. Valkenier, Il΄ia Repin, 60.

57. Jackson, “Western Art and Russian Ethics,” 401–402.

58. This might be yet another Manet reference. The foot breaking through the skirt had been a device Manet used in Repose: Portrait of Berthe Morisot in 1870. While Repin missed seeing this work in the Salon of 1873, Durand-Ruel bought it from Manet in 1872 and Repin may have seen it in his gallery in 1876.

59. See especially The Balcony of 1868 (Musée d’Orsay) and Antonin Proust of 1880 (Toledo Museum of Art). For more on these motifs, see Armstrong, Carol, Manet Manette (New Haven, 2002), 221Google Scholar.

60. “Elle est multiple, et lui assigner une origine n’est pas chose facile.” Edouard Siebecker, Physionomies Parisiennes. Cocottes et Petits Crevés (1867), 77. Cited in Elizabeth K. Mix’s excellent essay on the cocotte: “Paper Ladies: Locating the Nineteenth-Century Cocotte in Popular Literature and Journal Illustrations” in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Laurinda S. Dixon, eds. Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (Newark, DE, 2008), 203.

61. “La cocotte ne se définit pas. Elle se dépeint, comme elle se peint. C’est un être complexe, multiple, étrange qui échappe à l’analyse.” Anon., Nos cocottes par un petit crevé, Paris, no date, 9. Quoted in Bernard, Jean-Pierre Arthur, Les deux Paris: les représentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 2001), 257–58Google Scholar.

62. These typologies for classifying women were also highlighted by Baudelaire in “The Painter of Modern Life”: “… those creatures whom the dictionary of fashion has successively classified under the coarse or playful titles of ‘doxies,’ ‘kept women,’ lorettes, or biches.” See The Painter of Modern Life, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, 14.

63. Jackson describes the repainting of this area and its restoration in 1936. See “Western Art and Russian Ethics,” 398.

64. To my knowledge, only one other painter—Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres—reworked faces in such a way, but it was a feature of his portraiture process and not usually so long after a work’s initial completion and exhibition. See Betzer, Sarah E., Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History (University Park, PA, 2012)Google Scholar.

65. T.J. Clark has written extensively on this issue as at the heart of the Olympia scandal a decade earlier: “The boundaries between moral laxity and prostitution seemed to be dissolving, and this was held to be the more dangerous because it was not just sexuality that strayed over into the public realm, but money—money in fleshly form.” See Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, 108.

66. The closest Manet comes to the dynamic in Repin’s painting might be in his Masked Ball at the Opera (1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), but I maintain there is a qualitative difference that is of central importance. The men and women in Masked Ball are in the process of negotiating sexual liaisons. There is a definitiveness to these women in their costumes and states of undress that is blatantly dissimilar from the ambiguity of Repin’s cocotte.

67. Profan [Adrian Viktorovich Prakhov], “Vystavka v Akademii khudozhestv,” Pchela 45, November 21, 1876, 14–15. Discussed by in, Elizabeth Valkenier “Il΄ia Repin and His Critics,” in Adlam, Carol and Simpson, Juliet, eds., Critical Exchange: Art Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Russia and Western Europe, (Bern, 2009), 232Google Scholar.

68. Ibid., 232, [Anon.] 1876a.

69. See the exhibition history in the Christie’s catalogue accompanying the sale of the work in 2011. As far as I can ascertain, the painting was displayed in Russia only once after 1876, at Christie’s pre-auction exhibition in April 2011, and has not appeared in public since it was sold to an anonymous buyer that year.

70. Piotr Piotrowski, “East European Peripheries Facing Post-Colonial Theory,” nonsite.org, no. 12, published August 12, 2014, https://nonsite.org/article/east-european-art-peripheries-facing-post-colonial-theory (accessed August 26, 2016).

71. I. E. Repin to I. N. Kramskoi, Paris, August 29, 1875, in I. Repin. Izbrannie Pis΄ma, 1:164.

72. Again, Bergson is helpful here—this idea of the fluidity of modern life was what Bergson called “flux”—a central idea of time as becoming within the thinker’s system. Indeed, the French philosopher would prove highly influential on Russian modernists like Osip Mandel΄shtam and Daniil Kharms; Bergson believed that through “an act of artistic intuition, one could plunge into the flux of life and apprehend the inner reality of things in ceaseless change.” For more on Bergson’s influence on Russian thinkers, see Fink, Hilary L., Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, Ill, 1999), 24Google Scholar.

73. There was even some sense that Russian realist art was superior to (or about to be superior to) the European art it was already a part of. Fedor Dostoevskii wrote along similar lines: “Perhaps our poor country will at the end say the new word to the world… . beyond all doubt, the destiny of a Russian is pan-European and universal.” See Pages from the Journal of an Author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. S. Koteliansky and J. Middleton Murry (Boston, 1916), 36–38.