Ilya Yefimovich Repin

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Self-portrait

Ilyá Yefímovich Répin (Илья́ Ефи́мович Ре́пин) (August 5 1844 (Julian calendar: July 24) – September 29 1930) was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth and exposed the contradictions of the existing social order. Beginning in the mid-1920s, a Repin cult was established in the Soviet Union and he was held up as a model "progressive" and "realist" to be imitated by "Socialist Realist" artists in the USSR.

Life and Work

Repin was born in the town of Chuguev near Kharkov in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. (Today, it is located in the eastern part of the independent Ukrainian state.) His father was a Russian military settler. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. From 1873 to 1876 on the Academy's allowance, Repin sojourned in Italy and lived in Paris where he was exposed to French impressionist painting, which had a lasting effect upon his use of light and colour. Nevertheless, his style was to remain closer to that of the old European masters, especially Rembrandt, and he never became an impressionist himself. Throughout his career, he was drawn to the common people from which he himself traced his origins and he frequently painted country folk, both Ukrainian and Russian, though in later years he also painted members of the Imperial Russian elite including both the intelligentsia and the aristocracy including even the Tsar, Nicholas II himself.

In 1878, Repin joined the free-thinking "Association of Peredvizhniki Artists", generally called "the Itinerants" in English, who about the time of Repin's arrival in the capital, rebelled against the academic formalism of the official Academy. His fame became established by his painting of the "Volga Barge Haulers", a work which portrayed the hard lot of these poor folk but which was not without hope for the youth of Russia. From 1882 he lived in Saint Petersburg but frequently visited his Ukrainian homeland and on occasion made tours abroad.

Beginning shortly before the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, he painted a series of pictures dealing with the theme of the Russian revolutionary movement: "Refusal to Confess", "Arrest of a Propagandist", "The Meeting", and "They did not Expect Him", the last of which is undoubtedly his masterpiece on the subject, mixing contrasting psychological moods and Russian and Ukrainian national motifs. His large-scale "Religious Procession in the Province of Kursk" is sometimes considered an archetype of the "Russian national style" displaying various social classes and the tensions among them set within the context of a traditional religious practice and united by a slow but relentless forward movement. One of his most complex paintings, "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Satirical Reply to the Turkish Sultan" occupied many years of his life. He conceived this painting as a study in laughter, but later accepted that it also involved the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraterity, in short, Ukrainian Cossack republicanism. Begun in the late 1870s, it was only completed in 1891, and, ironically, was immediately purchased by the Tsar. During his maturity, Repin painted many of his most celebrated compatriots, including the novelist, Leo Tolstoy, the scientist, Dmitri Mendeleev, the imperial official, Pobedonostsev, the composer, Mussorgsky, and the Ukrainian poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko. In 1903 he was commissioned by the Russian government to paint his most grandiose design, a 400 x 877 cm canvas representing a ceremonial session of the State Council.

The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey (1880-91)

Repin himself designed his home Penaty (literally, "the Penates"), located just to the north of Saint Petersburg. After the 1917 October Revolution, Penaty was incorporated into Finland. He was invited by Lenin to come back to Russia but refused the invitation giving the excuse that he was too old to make the journey. With the exception of a portrait of Provisional Government head, Alexander Kerensky, he never painted anything substantial on the subject of the 1917 revolutions or the Soviet experiment that followed. His last painting, "The Hopak", was on a Ukrainian Cossack theme. In 1930, he died in Kuokkala, Finland (now Repino, Leningrad Oblast). The Penates are part of the World Heritage Site Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.[link] In 1940, Penaty was opened for the public as a house museum.

Repin's most famous paintings are Ivan the Terrible killing his son (1885), Burlaks on the Volga (1870-73), and The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan of Turkey (1878-91).

Alexander Glazunov's Oriental Rhapsody, Op. 29 (1889) is dedicated to Ilya Repin.

Bibliography

• Fan Parker and Stephen Jan Parker, Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin (University Park-London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1980). Repeats the standard Soviet interpretation of Repin's life and work.

• Grigory Sternin and others, Ilya Repin: Painting Graphic Arts (Leningrad: Aurora, 1985). Standard Soviet treatment, but well illustrated.

• Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1990). Critical non-Soviet treatment with much fresh information, but geared primarily toward academics.

Paintings

Repin's paintings appear in the following Wikipedia articles:

• Peredvizhniki | Cossacks | State Council of Imperial Russia | Ivan IV of Russia | Myra | Sadko | Eudoxia Streshneva | Sophia Alekseyevna | Modest Mussorgsky | Dmitry Mendeleyev | Gavriil Derzhavin | Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum | Anton Rubinstein | Aleksey Pisemsky | Konstantin Pobedonostsev | Sergius Witte | Pavel Tretyakov | Afanasy Fet | Vladimir Stasov | Leo Tolstoy