Vasilij V. Vereščagin | Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820

Commentary

The exhibition of Vasily Vereshchagin in 1886 was the event of the year. An air of scandal surrounded the artist, who had made a major appearance on the European scene in London in 1873 and in St Petersburg in 1880. During his exhibition in Vienna in 1885, the church authorities demanded that his paintings The Holy Family and The Resurrection be removed from the show. The following exhibition in Pest did not include them at all. The Czech press reported these events in detail and announced that the Umělecká beseda (Artistic Forum) negotiated the transfer of the exhibition to Prague (without the controversial paintings) for the autumn of 1885. The co-organizer – Krasoumná jednota (Fine Arts Association), or rather, the Society of Patriotic Friends of Fine Arts – provided exhibition space in the Rudolfinum. Although the exhibition was planned for the autumn months, articles announcing it filled the pages of periodicals as early as the spring. Most were enthusiastic about the event, but some were critical. According to the daily Národní listy, one Czech newspaper (the text has yet to be found) tried to dissuade the Umělecká beseda from holding the exhibition “claiming that there was nothing to him [Vereshchagin] except that he had the Russian shch in his name" [anonymous author 1886a]. Other texts also show that different groups had different opinions on the artist. The Národní listy suggested that the opponents of Vereshchagin were recruited from the ranks of the “Westerners,” who preferred the art of Germany and France: “Our ‘Westerners’ who mostly just scratch the surface, being carried along by the current political trend, are guided by the principle that what originates where the sun sets is excellent, but what has its home where the sun rises is not worth anything" [anonymous author 1886b]. The author of a feuilleton in the Čech expressed a contrary view of Vereshchagin, seeing him as a naturalized Frenchman whose works were mere artistic schemes and commercial items, many of which he would not be able to exhibit in Russia [anonymous author 1886c].

The exhibition opened on October 1 and lasted until November 15, 1886. In two halls of the Rudolfinum, it presented a total of 43 works in three main thematic areas. Sixteen paintings depicted war scenes, the main attraction of the exhibition, while nineteen of the works were genre paintings, architectural scenes, and landscapes from Central Asia, including the monumental canvas The Future Emperor of India (The Entry of the Prince of Wales into Jaipur). The third group consisted of eight scenes from Palestine, which the magazine Zlatá Praha called biblical, although the controversial scenes from the life of Jesus were not included in the selection and the rest mostly depicted the Jewish world. Vereshchagin came up with the concept himself, even bringing in oriental carpets and, shortly after the opening, borrowing exotic plants from Prague’s botanical garden to complement his Indian paintings. He also authored the commentaries to the individual works in the exhibition catalogue, while K. B. Mádl wrote the introduction. This text was largely based on Mádl’s 1881 article in Ruch. Some reviewers mention that, in addition to authentic canvases, the show included reproductions of some important works, but it is not clear whether they were listed in the catalogue or omitted from it. [Mádl 1886, p. 1]

The press regularly mentioned the high attendance, attesting to the success and popularity of the exhibition. Soon after its opening, the show was attracting 700 visitors a day, and the total number of visitors eventually reached 20,000. The low entrance fee, which Vereshchagin himself set at just 30 kreutzers, certainly played a role. [anonymous author 1886d] Vereshchagin’s work inspired many reviews and scholarly texts. Most of them searched for the essence of Vereshchagin’s artistic expression, using terms like ruthless realism, crude naturalism, and tendentious subjectivism. Most reviewers first focused on the most provocative part of Vereshchagin’s work, the war scenes, which depicted human suffering, such as the horrors of war, in an immediate and brutal manner, completely disregarding its “noble movements, idealistic goals, unselfish and joyful excitement.” [Tyršová 1886, p. 766] While Tyršová drew attention to Vereshchagin’s “extra-artistic intentions,” which, in her opinion, consisted in the purposeful depiction of the horrific spectacle, Lier, Mádl and Durdík compared his work to that of Russian realist writers, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The reviewer of Národní listy (Jan Neruda?) took a completely different point of view. For him, the shocking war scenes represented a humanistic appeal and the celebration of the Russian soldier who is determined to fight under all circumstances. Reviewers appreciated the almost photographic realism of the works, especially in the landscapes and ethnographic scenes which they usually praised above the war canvases for their more refined painterly character. In contrast to the prevailing view of Vereshchagin’s strict realism, Pavel Durdík argued that one of his main strengths was also “the poetic conception with which he so distinctively surrounded nature and the people he saw” [Durdík 1886, 10. 10.]. Tyršová and Mádl agreed that the weakest work in the exhibition was its largest canvas, The Future Emperor of India, and they praised the smaller paintings, The Wall of Solomon and The Entrance to the Tombs of the Kings. Some reviewers criticized the emphasis on genre elements in works primarily concerned with landscape or architecture – Jan Lier felt that Vereshchagin’s texts in the catalogue drew too much attention to the figural staffage in these works, obscuring their true meaning: the viewer “is entitled to demand that the work of art should speak for itself, without the Munkáczyan music” [Lier 1886, p. 463].

With its combination of artistic mastery, social engagement and commercial savvy, Vereshchagin’s exhibition provoked and attracted both the general public and specialists. The deliberate non-idealization of war was problematic for some reviewers, while others praised the humanism of his work, and still others pointed out that it was a commercial scheme, and that the artist’s fame was a passing phenomenon. Mádl’s review in the Politik and particularly Tyršová’s text in the Osvěta – a comprehensive analysis of Vereshchagin’s oeuvre rather than a review of the exhibition – show that the authors found it difficult to place Vereshchagin in context and even to decide whether he was a great artist or not. Mádl summed up the issue as follows: “…he certainly does not stand out among modern artists, but he must be counted among the important and, above all, interesting phenomena.” [Mádl 1886, p. 3]

Markéta Dlábková

Works Cited

Anonymous author 1886a: Anonymous author, bez názvu, Národní listy XXVI, 1886, no. 315, 14. 11., p. 2

Anonymous author 1886b: Anonymous author, bez názvu, Národní listy XXVI, 1886, no. 318, 17. 11., p. 2

Anonymous author 1886c: Anonymous author, Feuilleton, Kulturní listy, Čech XVIII, 1886, no. 135, 13. 6., p. 2

Anonymous author 1886d: Anonymous author, Výtvarné umění, Zlatá Praha III, 1886, no. 43, p. 687

Durdík 1886: Pavel Durdík, Vereščagin, Příloha Národních listů 1886 k no. 281, 10. 10., 5–6; no. 290, 19. 10., p. 5; no. 292, 21. 10., p. 5; no. 293, 22. 10.

Lier 1886: J. L. [Jan Lier], Výstava Vereščaginova, Lumír XIV, 1886, no. 29, pp. 462–464

Mádl 1886: M. [K. B. Mádl], Vereščagin-Ausstellung, Politik XXV, 1886, no. 278, 7. 10., pp. 1–3

Tyršová 1886: R. T–á [Renáta Tyršová], Výstava Vereščaginova, Světozor XX, 1886, pp. 717–718, 734, 749–750, 765–766

Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

1886
Vasily V. Vereshchagin

Works Cited

Further Reading

Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

1886 Vasily V. Vereshchagin

Works Cited

Further Reading

1886
Vasily V. Vereshchagin