A Birch Grove.
1879. Oil on canvas. The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.
A Birch Grove.
1879. The variant-sketch, Oil on canvas.
The Art Museum of Nizhniy Novgorod, Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia.
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A Birch Grove.
1901. Oil on canvas.
163 x 115.
The Art Museum of Belarus, Minsk, Belarus.
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Kuindzhi painted romantic landscapes and sought to render the highest expressiveness in illuminating states of nature. He used intensive colours and unusual perspectives to achieve a decorative vibration within the painting.
Kuindzhi developed a new vision in his next painting, Birch Grove (1879). It is both realistic and conventionalized; it looks as a condensed essence of reality.
The treatment of the landscape in this painting has nothing reminiscent of the national tradition or popular ideals. The image of a sublime and perfect nature suggests the artist's desire to reach a full-blooded evocation of life, an approach that would be echoed in the dream-like fantasies of the artists of the next generation.
Nature in the Birch Grove is both real and conventionalized; it looks as a condensed essence of reality. Kuindzhi's imagery tends towards the symbolic concentration and generalization of the fundamental features from all similar phenomena. The pure plasticity of the painting differs from a mundane approach to beauty.
Kuindzhi created an autonomous poetic world, confined within a realm of fanciful beauty and seperated by invisible borders from ordinary life. This tendency was quite typical of Russian art and literature at the beginning of the twentieth century-the creation of an imaginary world full of symbolic undertones, riddles and revelations, the conveying of a sense of starry cosmic space were among the major characteristics of Russian art in that period.
The art of Kuindzhi, sharply differing from the mainstream of the Itinerants' realism and of still deeply entrenched academic art, could not be understood by his colleagues, baffling even his ardent well-wishers. It appeared that they all were not quite ready to perceive his message. For his contemporaries a correct evaluation of Kuindzhi's art was diffucult because it was difficult for them to understand and accept the new principles of romantic art being evolved by the artist. Kuindzhi greatly narrowed the gap between decaying academic romanticism and burgeoning new romantic art. But at that time his romantic works produced an impression of a lonely quest. He still had to languish in waiting for support that would come at the beginning of the twentieth century through the work of his pupils.
It was probably this circumstance that led Kuindzhi to a withdrawal from an active public career and a seclusion in his studio. His colleagues who saw in his art only illusory colour effects, could not support Kuindzhi's romantic searchings. Any painterly innovation finally works itself out. That is why the public was indifferent both to the second version of the Birch Grove (1882), in which the effect of moonlight was again re-created. Probably the clue to the artist's long retreat into silence lies in his own words which were quoted by his contemporary: «. . . the artist must participate in exhibitions as long as he has, like a singer, a voice. And once the voice has weakened, you should withdrew so as not to be ridiculed.»
Involved in this creative mainstream, Kuindzhi still retained his bond with the mother-nature, where everything down-to-earth was of vital value for him. This is an idea underlying his third version of the Birch Grove (1901). The generalization of colour masses was there even more daring than in the second version. However, Kuindzhi emphasized the three-dimensionality of birch-trunks there in the same way as in the second version. He did not recourse to the flattened approach by built up the space in depth by the brook, birch-trees and forest flanking the central perspective, and by diminishing the intensity of colour with the distance. The world presented in the third version of the Birch Grove resembles a magical edifice of nature existing in some other-worldly dimension.
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Afanasiy Fet
I have come to you with greetings...
1843
I have come to you with greetings
To tell you the sun has risen,
To say that its burning light
Through the leaves has sent a flutter;
To say that the woods have waked,
Every corner, and every twig,
Every bird has taken wing
Full of appetite for spring;
To say I have come again
Full of passion, just like yesterday,
To tell you my soul is ready
To serve happiness and you;
To tell you that all around
Gaiety is wafting on me,
To tell you I really don't know
What I'll sing, - but that a song is coming.
A. Wachtel, I. Kutik and M. Denner
www.russianpoetry.net
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