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: Ilya Repin in Paris: Mediating French Modernism
Description: This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia’s most famous realist painter, Il’ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un
Show moreThis article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia’s most famous realist painter, Il’ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin’s stay in Paris from 1873-75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin’s letters and the work itself show him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet. Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of western European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.
This article cannot be republished without permission from Cambridge University Press.
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Geographic Area: Russia
Subject: Art History
Time Period: 19th century
Date Issued: 2019-08-30
Type of Resource: text

: Men's Time: Pavel Fedotov and the Pressures of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Masculinity
Description: For seven weeks in the spring of 1835, the Russian painter Pavel Fedotov kept a journal. He was, in these months, still an officer serving in the Fin
Show moreFor seven weeks in the spring of 1835, the Russian painter Pavel Fedotov kept a journal. He was, in these months, still an officer serving in the Finland Regiment of the Imperial Guards in St. Petersburg, but he was ultimately to become known as Russia’s most celebrated early realist painter. The journal preserves in unusual depth of detail the monotony and perpetual sameness which characterized life for the nineteen-year old officer as he grew his painterly skill. Examining it, along with a small cluster of the artist’s paintings and drawings, shows that the repetitiousness found in the journal also characterized Fedotov’s painting practice. Time and again, the artist added details to his works that emphasized the durational aspect of the single depicted moment. Tropes of visual and narrative extensiveness, these elements parallel what the intellectual Petr Chaadaev called in these same years “the stifling embraces of time.” Both were concerned to emphasize a new restless futility they perceived among a generation of Russian men, one that can be linked to a problem in these men’s relationship to time itself. Utilizing excerpts from Fedotov’s previously untranslated journals and letters, as well as the literary and philosophical works of his contemporaries, this article investigates how temporality was experienced in newly problematic ways and develops a new interpretation of the social organization of time along gendered lines.
This article cannot be republished without permission from the Slavic and East European Journal.
Allison Leigh, "Men’s Time: Pavel Fedotov and the Pressures of Mid-19th-Century Masculinity," Slavic and East European Journal 63, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 28-51.
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Geographic Area: Russia
Subject: Art History
Time Period: 19th century
Date Issued: 2019-07-01
Type of Resource: text

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Department of Visual Arts

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