ROSIZO, FotoFest Inc. and Samara Fine Arts Museum is proud to present Russian Pictorialism exhibition which was already shown at FotoFest (Houston, USA) and Bratislava. Russian Pictorialism brings a period of Russian photographic art almost unknown outside of Russia and still very little known to many Russians.
The exhibit features over 130 images by 16 artists from private and public collections in Russia. It is curated for FotoFest by Evgeny Berezner, Deputy General Director for Photographic Projects & Collections for ROSIZO, State Center for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, and Irina Tchmyreva, Curator, Critic, and Senior Researcher for the Department of Photographic Projects and Collections at ROSIZO.
The vintage works from the 1880’s to 1930’s include masterpieces from the collection of Mikhail Golosovsky as well as vintage works loaned by the Kirov Regional Art Museum n.a. V.&A. Vasnetsovs, and the family collection of Sergey Andreyev, the son of the pictorialist Nikolay Andreyev.
Although pictorialism was a worldwide phenomenon in late 19th and early 20th century photography, Russian pictorialist photography disappeared from view in the 1930’s. Soviet authorities declared the lush views of Russian village life and studies of nudes to be useless, bourgeois, even pornographic, and by the mid 1930’s, pictorialist photographs could not be published in Soviet magazines. Before Pereistroika, the last exhibition of Russian Pictorialism in the Soviet Union was in 1935, the year of the Masters of Soviet Photography exhibition.
“The history of pictorial photography in Russia remains as yet unwritten. Coming to the land of snow in the 1880’s, the movement blossomed like an amazing flower, quite dissimilar from its Western counterpart, with its own willful pattern of subjects and weird entanglement of artistic fates and Russian history,” write Berezner and Tchmyreva in the catalogue essay for the FotoFest 2002 exhibit.
Through their long investigation on Russian pictorialism, Berezner and Tchmyreva have come to redefine the place of pictorialism in Russian history: “The vast expanses of Russia, both the blessing and the curse for the Russian people, have for centuries demanded some meta-language that would help bring people together and allow them to them express their aspirations -- a language that would unite the different parts of society and different generations, and fill the gaps of the nation’s geography. For a while, it was pictorial photography that served this purpose.”
In the 60 years that pictorialism flourished in Russia, its practitioners developed a reputation for excellence and mastery of the medium. As the new technology of photography spread around the globe, it was first carried to Russia in magazines from Germany, France and England. In the last decade of the 19th century, groups of like-minded amateurs formed photographic clubs, like the Daguerre Society in Kiev, Moscow, and other Russian cities. The Russian Photographic Society was set up in 1894 and built on principles of artistic integrity in photography.
These groups that published Russia’s first photographic magazines. Out of these groups came photographers like Aleksey Mazurin, Sergey Lobovikov and Aleksandr Grinberg, some of the first photographers to be honored outside of Russia. Lobovikov and others rose in prominence across Europe, winning gold medals at major shows in Germany and France during the early decades of the 20th century. They were popular in Russia as well. The second generation of Russian pictorialists became a major influence in Soviet Russia, working as directors for the Soviet film industry and teaching in schools that trained the first generation of professional Soviet reporters.
But Soviet denunciations of pictorialism in the late 1930’s marked its demise. Even its most prominent practitioners were not immune from persecution. Grinberg himself was accused of pornography, imprisoned, and later exiled to the northern Soviet Union. Pictorialism disappeared from view.
Russian photographer and optical engineer, Mikhail Golosovsky, is credited with discovering and preserving many of the great Russian pictorialist masterpieces. Having come into contact with Russian pictorialist masters in the 1970’s at well-known photo club in Moscow, Golosovsky became interested in their aesthetic ideas, their practice of art for art’s sake, and their depiction of life in the Russian countryside. He began to search for the work of those masters. Today, Golosovsky‘s private collection is the centerpiece of the revival of Russian pictorialism.
The FotoFest 2002 Biennial, The Classical Eye and Beyond, features five international exhibits, including Russian Pictorialism. The classical exhibits stand in contrast to the Mixed Media/New Technology programs that present mixed media, digital and Internet work from over 30 international, U.S. and Houston-based artists.
Technology has always been a part of photographic history. In the 19th century, technology had a great influence on the birth of pictorialism. Wet plate negatives exposed in large format cameras required long exposure times, making landscapes the preferred subject. Gum and other early printing techniques yielded soft, painterly images that were prized as an alternative to painting.
“ Comparing works by Russian pictorialists with those of their peers abroad, one can see that all shared the creative urge to produce a Work of Art,” say Berezner and Tchmyreva, “But in Russia, the artists themselves and, to a very great extent, their public saw pictorialism as an absolute value, representing a mode of ethical self-improvement, a way to define beauty and to plumb the depth of the image. “
The exhibition presents 15 historical artists and one contemporary artist. The historical artists are: Nikolay Andreyev, Boris Eliseev, Yury Eryomin, Aleksandr Grinberg, Sergey Ivanov-Alliluev, Peotr Klepikov, Sergey Lobovikov, Aleksey Mazurin, Nikolay Petrov, Sergey Savrasov, Miron Sherling, Leonid Shokin, Nikolay Svishchyov-Paola, Anatoly Trapagny, Vasily Ulitin. The contemporary artist is Georgy Kolosov.
This exhibition is organized by FotoFest, Inc. and ROSIZO State Center for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
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