Everything is ghostly: Borisov-Musatov retrospective is full of mirages
The long-awaited retrospective of Viktor Borisov—Musatov, one of the main artists of Russian Art Nouveau, is filled with melancholic admiration for the passing beauty and nostalgic searches for unattainable harmony. The exhibition, which opened in the new building of the Tretyakov Gallery on Kadashevskaya Embankment, was repeatedly postponed, and at some point it seemed that this project was as ephemeral as Borisov-Musatov's dream images. Fortunately, the case was finally brought to an end and the works of genius from museums and collections from all over the country came together. Izvestia was among the first to appreciate Dolgostroy and immerse themselves in the world of picturesque dreams.
The world of illusion
The figure of Borisov-Musatov is fundamental and defining for Russian Art Nouveau: few other features of the era were so concentrated and uncompromising. In his mature works, the painter abandoned storytelling in favor of pure decorativeness, limited the color scheme to just a few shades (green, blue, pale pink - all with pastel muted tones), abstracted from modernity, immersed in a speculative beautiful world — either gone, or never existed.
He dressed his models (as a rule, the same girls posed for him — his wife Elena, his sister, also Elena, and his friend Nadezhda Stanyukovich) in vintage dresses and placed them in the park spaces of noble estates, creating harmonious ensembles between people, architecture and nature. But his nature is not the same as that of Levitan or Shishkin: he prefers weeping willows to pines, and the melancholy of sunset to the joyful morning sun.
However, Borisov-Musatov's time of day and even seasons are conditional. Instead of a snowy winter and a sultry summer, it's early autumn, but without a riot of colors and with a premonition of fading and a bright farewell diffused in the atmosphere itself. The culmination of the artist's work was the first years of the 20th century — the pre-storm period. He caught the revolution of 1905, passing away just a few months after its end. However, we will not find an echo of social catastrophes in him. On the contrary, all his art is a kind of refuge from external adversities, both for the viewer and for the author himself.
Go into art
Borisov-Musatov was, in general, unhappy. He lived with a physical illness (after a childhood injury, he began to grow a hump), did not receive widespread recognition during his lifetime, and failed to realize any of his ambitious plans: sketches of murals of the A.I. Derozhinskaya mansion, built by Fyodor Shekhtel, did not convince the customer to allocate a decent fee, and participation in a competition to create majolica panels for The central office of the Moscow Electric Traction Department proved unsuccessful.
Nevertheless, in his short career (death overtook the painter at the age of 35) Borisov-Musatov was able to create a unique, instantly recognizable aesthetic and — most importantly. However, due to these circumstances, the volume of his legacy is relatively small. And in addition, the works are scattered in different collections. Hence the difficulty of creating a retrospective: without showing all the major works, it would be meaningless. And it's not so easy to get them at the same time, even to the Tretyakov Gallery.
Nevertheless, the museum eventually coped with the task: perhaps for the first time we can see a complete picture of Borisov-Musatov's work, trace its evolution from student items in the spirit of impressionism to the latest masterpieces, which are also presented surrounded by many sketches.
Photos as sketches
At the entrance to the hall, the audience is greeted by "Self—portrait with my sister" - the only major work where Borisov-Musatov portrayed himself. And on this canvas, his trademark lyricism, serenity, and gentleness, expressed primarily in the female image, are combined with drama: the dissonance is felt in the artist's figure, from which he spent his whole life trying to escape into the beautiful worlds of art.
On both sides of this work are early works dating back to the 1890s. Depicting gardens and plants, Borisov-Musatov follows the French and is still only groping for his "I". But, for example, in the sketches for the unfulfilled canvases "The Lady with the Rocking Chair" and "The Kiss", the future theme, the mood of carefree contemplation, and solitude in nature are already felt.
Oddly enough, photography had an important influence on the formation of the master's style. Borisov-Musatov was deeply immersed in this business, mastered the process of developing and used the photographs as preparatory materials for creating paintings. A separate area at the exhibition shows exactly how this happened. In it, we see the shots made by the artist enlarged to a large format, and next to them are paintings based on them.
Musatov's photographs, by the way, are very good in themselves. But they played an auxiliary role for him — they helped to abstract from the real color, created a distance between the depicted object and the artistic image.
Laboratory of Beauty
In general, the exposition is remarkable because it allows you to look into the creative laboratory of a genius. In addition to photographs, these are various sketches — from miniature, very schematic sketches on small leaves to very large canvases. For example, the famous "Pond" — perhaps Borisov-Musatov's most textbook piece — is presented here in two versions.: both the final canvas from the Tretyakov Gallery and a more compact preliminary version from the Russian Museum.
To see them in the same space is a great rarity and happiness for connoisseurs of painting. After all, comparing the works can tell us quite a lot about the Borisov-Musatov approach. In the sketch, he uses oil, which gives a denser, brighter color. At the same time, the modest size does not allow you to "drown your eyes" in the magic lake. Whereas the final composition is made in tempera, and all the color changes here become something unreal, almost a mirage. Well, the more than two-meter width creates just the necessary scale, which turns out to be surprisingly organic for non-pretentious art.
For some reason, these works were hung quite far from each other at the State Tretyakov Gallery - the curators seemed afraid to smear the impression of the main exhibit with a not so perfect preparatory study. The same, by the way, applies to many other similar examples. "Requiem", "Harmony" ... But even if we disagree with this approach, we must admit that it is good that the sketches are here in principle.
They often acquire a self-sufficient sound altogether. These are the panoramic watercolors for the failed murals of the mansion of A.I. Derozhinskaya. One can only imagine what full-size frescoes would look like, but it is on paper that the fragile charm of these illusory idylls seems especially expressive. For Borisov-Musatov's style, they seem no less revealing than canvases.
Ghosts of the past
However, it is perhaps no coincidence that in the very center of the entire exhibition space, in an oval enclosed area like a pearl inside a shell, there is not even a large—scale murals project or the famous "Pond", but the "Ghosts" of 1903. The manor house again. More girls in flowing long dresses. Again, the green-pink-blue color scheme. But the whole image is blurred and distorted. It seems that this is a reflection in the surface of the water, which has been lightly touched. Borisov-Musatov paints with tempera on a canvas of coarse rare weaving, which is why the threads are clearly visible, and their bends themselves create a specific undulation.
The artist is breaking all the rules here. Technical, compositional (the figure of one of the heroines is literally cut off, only part of her dress is "in the frame"), geometric (the proportions of the house in the background are clearly distorted). And he does it consciously, thereby anticipating the experiments of the Russian avant-garde. But unlike Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Ilya Mashkov and other leaders of the artistic revolution of the 1910s, Borisov-Musatov's art and philosophy itself are directed not to the future, but to the past. The past, where beautiful ladies in magnificent dresses strolled serenely along beautiful alleys, cavaliers in powdered wigs were gallant and elegant, and all the worries of the world remained somewhere out there, far, far away.…
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
