Ivan Kramskoy(1837-1887) is remembered for creating art that he believed should be morally useful and something that belonged to the people. This made him deviate from the elite form of classicism practised by the Russian Academy of Arts. He was a co-founder and the public-facing member of the Peredvizhniki, or the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions or Wanderers. He is also known for his famous piece “Christ in the Desert” as well as his portraits of Russian peasants, which reflected his ideals that art should belong to the people and represent them.
Education
Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoy was born into a lower-class family. He started painting at the age of 15 and became an apprentice to a painter with whom he began his work with icon painting. From 1857 to 1863, he had the opportunity to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from where he was expelled for his revolutionary ideas against academic art. He was the initiator of the “Revolt of Fourteen,” where the top 14 students of the Academy refused to participate in a competition as a response to being refused to choose their own subjects by the academy. This was said to be the first response by the Realist artists, which subsequently created the importance of Realism in Russian art history and conventions.
His revolutionary ideas of art being a part of moral as well as social responsibility and of art belonging to the people led him to create the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions: a group of realist painters who were graduates of the academy who all held the same belief that art belonged to everyone and was not purely academic nor was it bound by its restrictions. They were also known as the Wanderers or the Itinerant in English, but known as Peredvizhniki in Russia.
Signature Works
Kramskoy’s most well-known work is “Christ in the Desert,” an exploration of humanity and philosophy through the image of Jesus Christ. His depiction is a Christ who is very human and worn down by the world around him. He used realism in a way that reflected something beyond the subject. The subject was a mere symbol for the deeper study of morality and philosophy. This is also explored in his work “Inconsolable Grief,” where grief is seen purely through the grieving woman’s eyes as her face is covered with a handkerchief. She is wearing a black dress, signifying her period of mourning, and her eyes have pain and melancholy as they look away towards some memory that brings her such a great feeling of loss.
Ivan Kramskoy was also celebrated for his portraits. He was known as an eccentric for giving away his paintings for free to his customers. His portraits included people from the peasant class whom he believed were the main source of life. They inspired a great many of his works during his late creative period. These portraits made a collection of very diverse and interesting faces, such as in “Peasant with a Bridle”(1883) and “Old Man with a Crutch”(1872).
Themes
The themes that are present in Ivan Kramskoy’s work include mainly morality, emotional experiences, humanity, philosophy, and the importance of the gaze. His work is largely introspective, meaning he prefers to create a work of art that tells an emotional story rather than an external plot. This is seen in both his famous religious paintings “Christ in the Desert” and “Laughter”. Both of these show the human side of Jesus as he fasts in the desert of Judea before he starts his ministry at the age of 30, and in the second painting, it is his last day he is on his way to being crucified.
The paintings “The Stranger”(1883) and “Inconsolable Grief”(1857) are two of his best explorations of the internal worlds of subjects through their body language and expression. In “The Stranger”, the woman in the carriage looks down upon the viewer with a cool and haughty expression. She assesses the viewer as beneath her with solely her gaze. In contrast, in the painting “Inconsolable Grief,” the aged woman’s grief is at the forefront, and she looks away from the viewer to stifle her sadness and pain. In all the paintings mentioned above, they all show the importance Kramskoy held to the gaze or the eyes. Every work of his boasts their mastery through the eyes of his subjects, no matter if they were the Empress or an old peasant. Their story and their state of being were captured in their eyes. “Moonlight Night” and “Mermaids” are two of his fantastical and romantic paintings that are well known for their exploration of the use of moonlight and folklore.
Philosophy
Ivan Kramskoy created the Itinerants’ Society of Travelling Exhibitions so that people all over Russia could view the work done by the Peredvizhniki. He believed that “art cannot be any other than national”. Hence, his goal was to create art that the people of Russia in the present could enjoy as well as have a reference of what the culture and history of Russia included for future generations of Russia so that they may see the artworks and understand.
Kramskoy said, “We have to constantly strive to express light, color and atmosphere
without losing the artist’s most precious conscience.” He believed art was spiritual and that it should express the spiritual experience of the artist through the painting. This was why his fight for liberating art from the hands of the aristocracy felt so important to him. He believed that art could be a useful tool that could educate the working people and could be used to promote progressive ideas. This is why his series of portraits of the peasant class was revolutionary for his time, along with the Travelling Exhibitions, as they opened the door of the world of art for the common people to come and take part.