Masterpiece theater

By Andrei Vorobei

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

Published: December 2, 2005 (Issue # 1127)

From his correspondence it is clear that the outstanding Russian artist Valentin Serov (1865-1911) preferred Moscow to St. Petersburg and this prejudice is reflected today in the fact that the best of his oeuvre resides in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery.

The State Russian Museum has however mounted an exhibition in its Benois wing to celebrate 140 years since Serov’s birth from its collection of his work.

On one hand, the clear disadvantage of the show is the lack of several important Tretyakov possessions such as Serov’s early masterpieces “Girl with Peaches” and “Girl in the Sunlight.” These works are important not only for any consideration of Serov, but of Russian art in general. Several other works, notably portraits, are also absent. Without them it is difficult to mount an exhibition that reflects the caliber and significance of the artist.

On the other hand, the Russian Museum is more able to fully display its own Serov works, which are usually held in storage.

The exhibition includes 23 paintings, 105 drawings, 23 engravings and a sculpture. Graphic art dominates — drawings, watercolors, pastels and engravings — and this makes the exhibition a very rare opportunity for viewers to familiarize themselves with this aspect of the master’s work, which for strict safe-keeping reasons (such work is delicate) cannot be part of the museum’s permanent exhibition.

Such watercolor exhibits as the “Anointing of Nicholas II” from the Coronation Album, a picture of Emperor Alexander III with Copenhagen harbor in the background, and a portrait of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna have never been displayed before. Many portraits have not been shown for more than 14 years.

As in oil painting, Serov experimented in different genres. Drawings and engravings of landscapes, illustrations for the Ivan Krylov fables, theater sketches, and drawings of animals are all presented at the show. But portraiture remains the dominant genre.

Serov’s “smart portraits” made him the most significant and in-demand portraitist in Russia in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. One of Serov’s most famous oil portraits, the “Portrait of Princess Olga Orlova” is on display. But Serov also used graphic media to produce a multitude of amazing caricatures of actors, artists, and writers.

Behind the quite traditional and indifferent chronological arrangement of the exhibition stands the remarkable social and artistic trajectory of the artist’s career. Serov is connected with almost all the key figures and events of 1880s-1910s.

Ilya Repin was his first teacher, protÎgÎ and friend. He studied under the influential educationalist Pavel Chistyakov at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. For a long time Serov was affiliated with the well-known artist’s colony Abramtsevo outside Moscow. The Russian countryside inspired such exciting etchings in the show as “October” and “Peasant Woman with Horse.”

Although Serov exhibited at several of the exhibitions held by the group of artists known as the Peredvizhniki, or “Wanderers” in the beginning of 1890s, in artistic terms he belonged more to the “art for art’s sake” paradigm of Sergei Diaghilev’s “World of Art” group, which Serov joined from its inception.

Serov’s approach to art is open-minded. Unlike the Peredvizhniki, he avoided social commentary and looked toward formal experiments with color, light, and composition. His readiness to explore new styles and techniques helped Serov evolve from luminous, sunny, impressionistic works to very modernist ones: the flat, assembled and decorative pieces of his later career.

Serov’s fruitful cooperation with Diaghilev in the “World of Art” included the impresario’s “Russian Seasons.” (A sketch for the famous poster for the great ballerina Anna Pavlova is included at the show.) But the most important work Serov did for Diaghilev and, actually, the highlight of the whole current exhibition, is a marvelous curtain (or at least its central fragment) for the ballet “Scheherazade.”

The opposite of the sweet luxury of another of Diaghilev’s famous collaborators, Leo Bakst, Serov’s curtain resembles austere “Persian frescoes,” as the artist put it. Made in 1911, this grandiose curtain symbolically ends the exhibition as in a show. It fell in the year of the artist’s sudden death.

Valentin Serov, at the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum, runs though March 13. www.rusmuseum.ru