NeWestMuseum
Museum of Modern Western Art

On the initiative of Sergey Witte the rouble finally joins the gold standard.

In What is Art Leo Tolstoy divided art into good and bad, asserting that good art should inspire a sense of common brotherhood, that it should be based on an emotional tie between the artist and his audience. Amongst those producing the opposite kind of art he named Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tolstoy applied all his considerable power to an attack on Impressionism and other forms of artistic expression, which he defined as decadent. 

In a supplement to the periodical Cornfield [Нива] a young artist and art historian, Igor Grabar, published the article ‘Decline or Renaissance’ in which he analysed the state of Western contemporary art.  Grabar’s central art historical tenet underpinning this and other writings lay in the rejection of ‘photographic realism’. Somewhat later the artist was to apply in his own works a technique based on the achievements of Claude Monet and the Divisionists, thereby allowing Abram Efros to call him ‘an Impressionist meteorite fallen into the midst of our painting’.

In February the collection of Gustave Caillebotte went on public display in the Musée du Luxembourg. For the very first time, despite the opposition of the arbiters of taste in the Salon and the Academy of Arts, people could see a broad range of Impressionist paintings. But the exhibition was possible only after a long battle waged against the conservative rules of the Salon and the Museum administration by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and other Impressionists. The compromise which was eventually arrived at made it possible at last to exhibit a large number of Caillebotte’s Impressionist masterpieces but the greater part of the collection bequeathed to the nation under the terms of his will had already been rejected: these paintings were later to be sold. Only Edgar Degas avoided rejection: all seven of his pastels were accepted by the commission set up at the Musée du Luxembourg. Of four works by Édouard Manet two were declined, and a similar fate met those of Paul Cézanne. Just eight of Monet’s sixteen were accepted, seven of Camille Pissarro’s eighteen, five of Alfred Sisley’s nine. Even so, conservative artists and their supporters were disappointed that they had not been able to entirely isolate the new art. 

Текст: 
А. Костеневич