With publication of The Russian Canvas Rosalind P. Blakesley places a capstone on two decades of primary research on the art and art institutions of Imperial Russia. Her published work includes numerous articles, book chapters, and a book on Russian genre painting. Simultaneously, this comprehensive, beautifully crafted study offers western historians of Russian art an occasion to celebrate their field's arrival at a new stage of maturity. Blakesley's publications taken together with those of the scholars cited in her extensive notes and bibliography permit an understanding of Russian art that is vastly more nuanced and sophisticated than the accounts that have tended to prevail since the 1970s and 1980s.
Blakesley begins with the founding of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1757. Long a bugbear of Soviet art history and characterized in modernist histories as hopelessly retardataire, the Academy of Arts is shown in Blakesley's account to have played a more constructive role in Russian art than previously imagined. Rather than regarding such institutions as the Saint Petersburg Society for the Encouragement of the Arts or the private art school established at Arzamas in 1767 as challenges to its authority, the Academy engaged them in a symbiotic relationship, bestowing ranks and awards upon successful graduates of other institutions and recognizing their contributions to the development of Russian art.
A virtue of Blakesley's work is the extent to which she aligns her research on the Imperial Academy of Arts with recent work by scholars examining the internal debates of art academies in other parts of Europe, notably the Royal Academy of Arts in Great Britain (established 1768) and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Spain (established 1744). In so doing, she underlines the extent to which the Academy of Arts in Russia was part of common European project in which various nations sought to create a “national school” of art, even while acknowledging a shared European agenda. Cleverly, Blakesley makes use of Dmitry Levitsky's portraits of pupils from the Smolny Institute to refute the notion that east European artists engaged in a desperate game of catch up with their western peers, showing that Levitsky deployed the stylistic canons of European portraiture in a creative way, making iconographic choices in response to specifically Russian circumstances.
Blakesley devotes welcome attention also to the Academic system of sending its graduates abroad for study, a practice sometimes seen as reinforcing the dependence of Russian artists on foreign models. As Blakesley rightly points out, prolonged residence in Rome, Paris, or some other European capital was a normal career move for young artists of many nationalities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than limiting themselves to slavish copying of past art, Russian artists abroad actively explored contemporary trends, including, for example, the intimate genre painting of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin in France. Once again, the Academic system for educating Russian artists appears not as deleterious but as vital to the healthy development of Russian art.
Although the Academy played a dominant role in training Russian artists, it quickly lost its monopoly status. The most important alternative institution was the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (incorporated 1843), to which Blakesley devotes significant space. Although its curriculum resembled that of the Academy of Arts, subtle differences marked the Moscow School—a greater emphasis on Dutch painting as a model, more attention to the painting of genre scenes. Still, as Blakesley points out, the overall relationship of the two institutions was far from adversarial.
Calls for a national art are a leitmotif in the history of Russian art, continually varied and repeated, subject to countless fluctuations of meaning. As Blakesley shows, a call for the development of a national school was present even in the initial charter of the Academy of Arts. If originally the notion of a national school involved simply the training of Russian artists to replace imported talent in decorating churches and aristocratic residences, the idea quickly came to embrace Russian subject matter, and the official guardians of Russian culture were far from unresponsive. A desire to validate national subject matter clearly played a role in the Academy's willingness to recognize the work of Vasilii Tropinin and Aleksei Venetsianov or in the commission for Volga River landscapes offered to Nikanor and Grigorii Chernetsov by the Ministry of the Imperial Court in 1838.
In discussing Russian realist painters of the 1860s and 70s, Blakesley once again integrates events in Russia and parallel developments in western European art, nibbling away at concept of Russian exceptionalism. That Russian realists were “relatively indifferent to the conservative versus progressive rifts in Western European art,” (255) simply aligns them with a majority of their west European peers, with whom they shared a broad range of social concerns. By 1881, the date Blakesley chooses for her conclusion and coda, the Russian art world had—she argues—achieved maturity: it could boast a fully developed infrastructure for education, exhibition, and patronage; and the longstanding desire to create a national school of art had borne fruit in social realism, in historical painting, and in the painting of indigenous landscapes. In homage to this last, most emotionally powerful, trope of Russian identity, Blakesley concludes her account of Russian painting with a celebratory discussion of Arkhip Kuindzhi's The Dnieper in the Morning (1881).
In The Russian Canvas, Blakesley offers a narrative that is sophisticated in presentation and sure to be read with pleasure by specialists in Russian art and history. Suitable for classroom use, it also has potential appeal for any educated general reader. Yale University Press is to be congratulated on the book's handsome design and color illustrations, the quality of which provides decisive visual support for the case that Blakesley puts forward in writing. In its variety, technical finesse, creativity, and intellectual interest Russian art fully deserves a place of honor within the European canon.
