Moscow

Author(s): Xenia Muratova

Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 119, No. 889, Special Issue in Honour of Benedict
Nicolson (Apr., 1977), pp. 302+305+307
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/878821
Accessed: 15/09/2010 08:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bmpl.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Burlington Magazine.

http://www.jstor.org
 CURRENT
full as one would have wished. Some
magnificent and, perhaps, the most im-
portant Derains from American and
Russian collections are absent, and this
does considerably impoverish the exhibi-
tion and, in a way, misrepresent the idea
of Derain's wuvre.
Derain is a very unequal painter, and
even if one is ready 'to enjoy the worst of
his pictures because the best canvases
contain something of the worst and vice-
versa' (A. Giacometti, 'Derain', in: Der-
riere le miroir, Nos.94-95, Paris, 1957), the
fact should have been considered when
preparing his exhibition. The absence in
an exhibition of some of the best paintings
of a master involves the risk of a miscon-
ception. It concerns in the same measure
the next periods of Derain's work when he
was no longer at his best. This part of the
presentation begins with the marked
classicism of the nudes of 1922-23, SO
congenial to the spirit of the Art Deco, and
continues in the key of post-impressionist
eclectism, with a tinge of Derain's liking
for the old masters. It was a period when
Derain tried, as he himself confessed, to
create neither a modern, nor an ancient
picture, but simply a good one (A. Derain,
'Propos', in: PrismedesArts, No.6, Novem-
ber 1956).
The twenties were a critical point in the
evolution of all the protagonists of the
fauvist movement. For Derain they were
catastrophic. Just when his fame and his
influence reached their zenith, Derain
ceased to be himself.
Thus, this exhibition evokes considera-
tions about the artistic development of our
century, about the artist's destiny and the
tragic turn in his evolution. But it adds
nothing to Derain's fame. It is all the
more regrettable since Derain is a painter
whose euvreimmensely influenced genera-
tions of painters, and his retrospective
ought to have brought out better the
reasons why his work has been so much
admired.
XENIA MURATOVA
Moscow
In the course of last winter a large
exhibition of the 'Self-portrait in Russian
painting and graphic art' was on show in
the interminable lower halls of the
Moscow Tretyakov Gallery. It covered
a period from the eighteenth century to
the present day and included about I,ooo
exhibits from sixty museums and collec-
tions in the USSR. Thoroughly prepared,
surprising on account of the quantity of
almost unknown material, it was extremely
interesting and unexpected. Indeed, while
the spread of the portrait genre in Russian
painting has been a well-known fact, and
some self-portraits by such painters as
Kiprenski, Briullov, Vrubel (Fig.Io09) are
numbered among the best, one was
greatly impressed not so much by the
quantity of self-portraits but by the close
attention to the inner life, the will for self-
AND FORTHCOMING EXHIBITIONS
concentration and the capacity for self-
knowledge of their authors emanating
from the paintings. The distinctive feature
of the Russian self-portrait is its intimacy,
its quietness. There are practically no
bright, showy, ostentatious portraits. One
is aware of the painter constantly watching
the interior movements of his soul,
rendered with an extreme truthfulness and
sincerity. It is already noticeable in the
portraits of the eighteenth century (see
Fig.i i o), in spite of the tribute they pay to
external effects; it is particularly evident
in the self-portraits of the nineteenth
century (see Fig.i i i). And, perhaps, noth-
ing else than self-portraits of Russian
painters of the twentieth century better
reflects the turbulence and shifting con-
ditions of Russian life, the stages of the
evolution of its art: from the elegant
remoteness of a Vrubel self-portrait (Fig.
Io9) to the exuberant buoyancy of Kont-
chalovski, from the post-C6zannian self-
portrait of Falk (Fig.io7) before the i920's
to the search for the renovation of tradi-
tional pictorial values in his self-portrait
of the 1920's (Fig.io8); from the pre-
constructivist audacity of the early Male-
vitch to the realist, theatrically bright
self-portrait by him of 1934, from the
official self-portraits of some painters of
the 1950's to the new intimacy against
backgrounds of everyday life in the self-
portraits of a new generation of artists.
XENIA MURATOVA
New York
An exhibition of some I7o nineteenth-
century French drawings, shown under
the title 'The Non-Dissenters', marked the
tenth anniversary of the Shepherd Gallery,
New York, last winter. We might take
such an event as simply one among many
signs of conservatism in the world of art
during the present recession, if what we
actually saw didn't have to do so much
more with continuity than with retrench-
ment. Thus the overall conviction shown
plentifully in this remarkably varied array
of approaches to drawing, may actually
correspond, to some extent, with a
phenomenon evident in even the most
advanced recent art, namely, that the
act of drawing retains a vital perti-
nence. The most eccentric or revisionist
qualifications of drawing only confirm
further what we already find within the
pluralism of the nineteenth century: that
drawing makes sense for practically all
types of serious artistic enquiry.
Admittedly, the 'non-dissenter' concept
has a certain anti-modernist edge. Martin
Reymert, of the Shepherd Gallery, coined
it in I96i1 - as the fully illustrated and
very thorough catalogue informs us - 'to
find a name under which could be
grouped all French artists who were then
more or less forgotten and/or held in bad
repute by prevailing theories of "mod-
ernism".' But if the story of modernism
can easily be told without mentioning
Bonheur or Bouguereau, Couture or
G6r6me, not to mention D6taille, Flan-
drin, Michel or Vernet, it nevertheless
cannot be told without reference to Ingres
and G6ricault and Delacroix and Millet
and Degas and, even, Puvis de Chavannes.
All these artists, and many more, were
represented. Yet the whole enterprise
would have been far less worthwhile if it
had amounted to a mere vindication of
academicism. On the contrary, what was
interesting was to discover 'modern' or
enduring value in what may have been
circumstantially academic. Thus, for
instance, Jean-Jacques Henner's powerful
little black chalk Prostrate Male Nude;
Studyfor 'Bara' (c. x1882) (Fig.x 2) takes up
a pose closely associated with poeticized
heroic death in earlier Romantic Classi-
cism, but with as much originality as
(modern) traditionalism. Henner dis-
covers an occasion to deal with a radically
gravitational, prone posture with shallow,
oblique axes, and he gets energetically
involved with the heavy, expressive
blacking-in of the surrounding 'non-
mnotif' in a way that not only mutes
descriptive space but, more urgently,
becomes the anxiously expressive embodi-
ment of a meditation on death. To con-
sider a few more of the drawings indi-
vidually may suggest the same dialectic of
tradition and modernity in various other
ways.
G6ricault was represented by a spirited
ink-and-wash Man Clutching his Horse in
Water (Fig. 113), of about 1815-i6. The
almost passionate closeness between this
bearded, turbaned North African (?) and
the horse dragging him through the water,
must be one of the most intense of G6ri-
cault's many treatments of equine vital-
ism. Even the oxidation of the ink in
Gericault's impulsive lines flatters the
impetuosity of the theme. Both man and
horse, although preoccupied in a forceful
charge against the strong current of some
stream or river, fit together into a com-
pactly triangular, even pedimental, ar-
rangement. Indeed, the raking horse's
head, even if it were not in such intimate
connection with the rippling water, would
be enough to remind us of the East
pediment marbles of the Parthenon. Yet
what we see is hardly in a class with
plaster-cast school drawings after classical
sculpture; it is, instead, a completely vivid
sample of Romantic emotion.
Ingres's pencil Portrait of Jean-Pierre
Granger (I818) was a disappointment, but
an interesting one. Granger, it seems, had
that kind of thoroughgoing bad looks that
it might take the full ingenuity of some
Roman Imperial sculptor to sublimate.
M. Granger was half nose. That organ
does boast a distinguished enough angle
in the middle - a fact of which Granger
seems to have been all too aware - but
there is enough extent above and below
the angle for two noses. That Granger's
307
 ... .
.........

.V

fl?.N

. .
. 'M
M
.. ...
........
...
......
.........

........ ,?g

.0gg

....
........
........

R moss,

o106.Portraitof Mme Kahnweiler,by Andr' Derain. 1913- Canvas, 92 by 107. Self-Portrait, by R. R. Falk. 191 7. Canvas. (Tretyakov Gallery,
73 cm. (Private Collection, Paris). Moscow).

..

..

...
.....
'
I'l ................... •..... ?

t.u

..
..........
I X
ao-

XV

+too

i o8. Self-Portrait,by R. R. Falk. 1924. Canvas. (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). 109. Self-Portrait,by M. V. Vrubel. 1904. Paper, charcoal, red chalk, 35-5 by
29.5 cm. (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
 ...
x-A
.

..........

.
N
iM
N.i ................

...
Iio. Self-Portraitwith theArtist's Wife, by A. Matveev. ?I729. Canvas, 75.5 by 90.5 cm. (Russian Museum, Leningrad).

... Ag:?
.. ...............
.

of

.. . -
i t

ig

RM:

'w.x

fal.

ME

Xx's.
F!dr. I.x;:i d

I I. Self-Portraitwith the Artist's Family, by F. P. Tolstoi. 1830. Canvas, 89 by I 17 cm. (Russian Museum, Leningrad).