Pleasant peasants

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Published: October 14, 2005 (Issue # 1113)

Think about Russian peasants and you can hardly help depressing images coming to mind. You are likely to envisage pale, skinny, emaciated men in shabby clothes, looking as if they have been carrying a heavy burden for a long time. Their lives are characterized by hard labor, injustice and hopelessness.

But a major new exhibition at the State Russian Museum, “The Peasant in Russian Art” creates an altogether different atmosphere. The show, which opened Thursday, strikes you with idyllic splashes of light and a festive, jolly spirit.

Occupying three halls on the second floor of the museum’s Benois Wing, the exhibition juxtaposes 18th century icons with work of the 19th century, the avant-garde and Socialist Realism. Traveling through styles, the display features paintings by Alexei Venetsianov, Ilya Repin, Vladimir Makovsky, Grigory Myasoyedov, Ivan Kramskoi, Kazimir Malevich, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Pavel Filonov and Viktor Ivanov.

At the entrance to the exhibition, visitors are confronted with Grigory Myasoyedov’s bright 1887 picture “Harvest Time,” which exudes vitality. Village folk of different ages move confidently through a sunlit field holding scythes.

It is not quite fair to say that 19th century poet Nikolai Nekrasov, whose verse describes the plight of the country’s peasants and is studied in every Russian school, is solely responsible for the gloomy stereotype. Any TV report from a Russian village shows a virtually unchanged picture of struggling and uncared-for people although they may not be using sickles.

“Sunburned hands and faces, threadbare coats upon their backs,

On bent shoulders knapsacks, crosses round the neck and bloodied feet, shod in hand-made bast,” Nekrasov wrote in his “Thoughts at a Vestibule” in 1858.

As if throwing a challenge to Nekrasov, happy girls soar into the air in Alexei Venetsianov’s panel “Peasant Girls on a Swing” dating from 1830-40.

This work has enthographic as well as artistic value as it describes the Russian folk game of see-sawing on a swinging board. In it, two girls rock both edges of a board placed across a well, while another one jumps in the middle sending the two in the air. The winner is naturally, the one who flies higher.

“Many of the paintings depict long-lost folk rites, ceremonies and rituals in such great detail that an enthographer can, for instance, tell a period and region of a costume,” said Yevgenia Petrova, the museum’s deputy director on science and research.

To strengthen the exhibition’s ethnographic element, its curators took the winning decision to incorporate a series of folk costumes and household items like rugs and jugs, into the show.

Viktor Ivanov’s 1945 painting “Family,” a fine example of Socialist Realism, portrays a group of relatives gathered around a simple wooden table for a modest meal. Looking out of the picture are tough and calm faces but without telltale signs of being worn out by suffering, grief, hunger or deprivation.

The museum’s director Vladimir Gusev denied the suggestion that the optimistic feel was intentional and lack of gloomy works deliberate, and explained the resulting effect by both shortage of space and coincidence.

The most modern items on display date from late 1970s, so the exhibition gives audience a new opportunity to see modern villages through the eyes of modern artists. But the reason for the absense of even more recent works can be explained by the museum’s lack of funding — state subsidies are barely enough to cover maintenance and security costs — but the curators say there is an aesthetic clue to that.

“Russian artists are losing interest in current rustic themes,” Petrova said. “Traditional bucolic landscapes may sell well in commercial galleries but the realities and hardships of living peasants apparently seem too alien to artists these days. Too bad for our collection.”

“The Peasant in Russian Art” at the Russian Museum through Feb. 20, 2006.

www.rusmuseum.org