Turn right behind the Repin Academy of Fine Arts, in an old alley in Petersburg, where the former home of the landscape painter Kuyinzhi is located. The cold air of Petersburg is filled with a gloomy atmosphere, and the old stories are engraved in the old appearance of the old alleys. In today's St. Petersburg, this story is not remembered by the city, and the atmosphere of the story is thousands of miles away from the atmosphere of the city. In fact, it is only more than ninety years away from us, but it seems to be very far away, and thinking of them is like entering a story of crossing. Most of the buildings in the old town of Petersburg were built at least a hundred years ago, and the slightly more graceful buildings will be nailed with bronze plaques on the doors, indicating the date and designer of the construction, and there is no difference in appearance between the one hundred years and the two hundred years old. Old Petersburg, in its old town, the old building does not really care about the functional division, can be inhabited, can also be used as an office building. In the small building where Ku Yinzhi lived, there were offices and apartments mixed upstairs and downstairs, and he lived on the fourth floor. An old-fashioned elevator with iron doors and chains going up and down is the only thing I've seen in a nineteenth-century film to date. Circular doorways, huge patios enclosed by residential buildings, and renovated stone slabs in the courtyards are made more and more like the tastes of today's Europe. At that time, Ku Yinzhi walked in and out of the courtyard, and huge works were transported in and out. In the distance, he saw the glass dome on the fourth floor of the unit building in the corner—it was his studio.
The studio is huge. The large skylight occupies half the roof – this is the most elaborate studio, and the people who paint the colors pay attention to the light from the oblique top to the canvas. I have been to the studios of countless painters, and such a skylight is extremely rare to encounter again. Light comes in. An oily-looking easel with a medium-sized landscape on it. A brush that looks like it hasn't been washed in five years. The paint spread out on the palette was adjusted so gray that it was impossible to tell what hue it was—his much-talked about use of cobalt green, which was originally produced by the contrast between the color on the canvas, was seen today, if it was placed on the palette, it was comparable to the color of the discard. Next to it was a cooked ochre that he had squeezed, and for a moment a thought wanted to squeeze out to draw two strokes with it—I once heard an old Russian painter say that since learning to paint in the 60s, the quality of Russian pigments has become worse and worse, and the pigments of a hundred years ago do not know what texture they are. In the studio, there are several small works, as small as the size of a palm, and several medium-sized works. Kuyinzhi's original works are mostly in museums, and his paintings are rarely seen in the Russian art market now, and even the reference price is difficult to locate. Some painters have a price and a market, some painters have a price and no market, Ku Yinzhi, priceless and marketless.
Before Kuyenzhi moved in, it was the house of the artist Kramskoy. Ke Shi painted a portrait of people here, and suddenly fell to the ground and died. This method of death is very artistic, very heroic plot sense. In this huge studio with a huge skylight, imagine him collapsing in front of the easel, a beam of light shining through the huge skylight, shining on the back ridge of the black overalls, and the brush marks on the color palette are like the veins of autumn leaves.
The most concerned by the Chinese people are his classics "Moonlit Night on the Dnieper River" and "Birch Forest", both large-scale paintings of nearly two meters in size, one in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, and one in the Mosttrechakov Gallery. Both works are legendary. In 1880, he held a solo exhibition, and a long line of spectators crowded into the hall and found that there was only one work in the large hall—the moonlight glowing green on the dark waters of the Dnieper River. A year later, in 1881, he held another solo exhibition, and the audience once again lined up in a long line to squeeze into the hall, and once again found that there was only one work in the large exhibition hall, this time his "Birch Forest", which also had a large area of green, which was slightly warmer than the green of the moonlight of last year's screen. At that time, he was between the ages of 38 and 39, and if Ku Yinzhi lived today, he might be like the young artists in Songzhuang, daring to do performance art and dare to use partial comprehensive materials. At that time, Kramskoy left a special "Note": he was afraid that the color of the work would change after tens or hundreds of years, so that the audience did not understand why the moonlight of Kuyinzhi was so attractive at that time. Cobalt green was still a relatively new pigment at that time, and it has not been tested by time. In fact, the oxidation resistance and sun fastness of cobalt pigments are superior. It is a bold guess that if the blue in the green landscape of the Sui and Tang dynasties is not stone blue but cobalt blue, it may be brighter than it is now. Later, in China, cobalt blue was only used in blue and white porcelain. Monet used cobalt purple to depict the fog and the train steam, and now the gas is still fresh because the paint is fresh. The green of the moonlight we see now should be no different from 130 years ago. I don't know if he knew exactly the moment he squeezed cobalt green out of the paint tube. He was luckier than Van Gogh: van Gogh's favorite chrome yellow was a new pigment at the time and has now proven to lack stability.
Repin said that Serov is like a spirit, which is a compliment, but Serov's penmanship is slightly clumsy - "clumsy" is by no means derogatory, and behind the two words is the ancient visual sense, which can be understood as a picture effect that is naturally formed by temperament, and can also be interpreted as a deliberate operation of some kind of expressiveness. But Ku Yinzhi is really as flexible and sensitive as Lingti and carries a kind of spiritual breath. If you change it to Repin's sense of free brushwork, or Surikov's caution like a pen chiseled on the canvas, or the slightly raised texture expression of landscape elements such as the branches and leaves of Shishkin, it will also be beautiful, but it is less of a spirituality, a watery thing. The Belarusian State Museum of Art in Minsk houses a sketch of him, a painting of a sunset sprinkled on the sea, and the entire structure has only a ray of light, a simple patch of color. Many of his pictures are sometimes deconstructed and split under the composition law to analyze the slightly monotonous, but the picture effect is not monotonous, vivid, lively, and rich. This is a talent, the innate sensitivity of beauty, it seems that it is easy to grasp the sense of beauty, reaching out can grasp it, and sometimes it may not be learned the day after tomorrow. Zao Wou-Ki said that good works should be very tiring to draw but look relaxed. Ku Yinzhi's works look relaxed, and the simple composition rules create a simple visual sense, simple and not cumbersome, with a spectrum and order, and exquisite trade-offs. Sometimes I imagine myself as the author, sitting in front of the picture, how can I conceive of such a composition, and I guess the process must be tiring, because the constituent relationships have been managed to the point where they can no longer be reduced. Painting is a very rustic, hand-performed work. Few of today's artists have such a thoughtful and spiritual craftsmanship. The soul of the craftsman hides in the crevices of the warp and weft threads of linen.
Kuinzhi's works are the first among Russian painters to show decorative colors. The beauty of authenticity is sometimes not a large-scale creation—Kur's is actually a much larger number of short, small-scale improvisations than large-scale creations. Paint the light of the forest, paint the reef on the seashore, draw a clump of clouds, draw a twisted trunk. Later, decorative colors flourished in Russia: regardless of the non-mainstream decorative styles of the Soviet era and the realist decorative appearance of the 1970s, Kuyenzhi was alive, and the works of Serov and Vrubel had tended to be decorative and symbolic. It is far-fetched to say that the decorative elements of Serov and Vrubel come from Kuyinge, because we cannot see the direct lineage from Kuinzhi, whose stylistic language comes from Western European modernism. The style is conclusively derived from Kuyinzhi is the landscape painter Leilov, who graduated from Kuyinzhi's studio, and the sense of color block, light arrangement, and geometric layout are all inherited from Kuyinzhi. His "Clear Skies," which coincided with the turn of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, was given political symbolism in the Soviet Propaganda Role. In his teacher's time, the prevalence of realism was voluntary and had no political impetus driven by propaganda. Tianqu has been lost since then, like an irreparable mood.
Stripped of the details of life and their speech and demeanor, the artists in art history are like faces in photographs, which is very symbolic and symbolic. In fact, they are all flesh and blood, just like your neighbors, they will sneeze, they will cough, they will scold people when they are anxious, they will vomit when they drink too much, they will not have an aura, they will not be on the altar. I saw a precious photograph at the great exhibition of the Russian Museum Kuinzhi: he and the chemist Mendeleev sat opposite each other, playing chess. Mendeleev lived in the teaching building of the University of St. Petersburg, close to the Academy of Fine Arts where Kuinzhi worked, and the older brothers probably chatted a lot. In the history of Russian landscape painting, a pendulum must be placed in Kuyinzhi, and at the same time it must be posed with Shishkin. Hirshkin's former home is not far from the Kuinzhi House, at the southern tip of Vasily, north of the Repin Academy. The Repin Academy of Fine Arts is dotted with countless former residences of the masters. The old residence of Relov, The great disciple of Kuinzhi, is also here, as is the former residence of the art critic Stasov, who was good friends with the famous artists of the touring exhibition school. It's just that Shishkin's former home is not open, only nailed with gold-depicted marble nameplates at the door. His studio is also here. Standing downstairs and looking up, I don't know which window he was smoking a pipe behind that window, and his hair was fluffy.
At that time, Shishkin and Ku Yinzhi did not befriend each other. As a result, Heath later had no place in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Petersburg (now the Repin Academy of Fine Arts) and left in anger. When the masters turned against each other, events were often interpreted as a phenomenon of cultural peaks that were not opposed, such as Ingres and Delacroix, Lu Xun and Hu Shi. In fact, looking at them now, many things are nothing more than a battle of wills. At that time, Shishkin and Ku yinzhi each led a landscape studio at the Academy of Fine Arts. Kuyinzhi's studio has changed hands several times, and among the leaders are moiseyenko and Faming in the Soviet era, and the old site is just behind the main building of the Repin Academy of Fine Arts, a separate bungalow, which is called "stable" by Chinese students because of the stables for feeding sketching horses. Hirschkin's studio did not know which one it was, but it should be in a long, narrow and dim corridor with glowing light bulbs hanging from the roof, because all the studios of the Repin Academy of Fine Arts were like this.
The painter has a relationship with the work, no matter what kind of mental wandering observation, how much upward observation, how to look up, how to swim, and pick up the brush, it is only within a distance of one meter, and between this distance, the color is outlined, and the gaze is concentrated. So much so that it can be said that in the painter's studio, the work itself becomes more and more self-aware, even in the way the viewer looks at it loosely. Pleasing expression, contemplative expression, expression of thought, conscious expression, are all things in the studio, in which the poetry and painting are quietly settled. The heavens and the earth where mental images and objects intersect construct the true state of our vision. The painter's residence is the origin of the birth of the work, bearing the accumulation and evolution of each work, and the attribution of the work is embodied in the place where the painting is located.
As far as the painting subject of landscape painting is concerned, from the perspective of the history of European landscape painting, pastoral themes are rarely grand works. The landscape themes of the Venetian School are large, their focus is on the city, they cannot do without warm life, and they always have a strong taste of human affection. The Barbizon school painted the Parisian countryside, and their treatment was particularly sculpted, with a subtle taste of small size. But Shishkin came to control the forest theme, really calmly holding his breath as a large scene painting to layout. If you replace the trees with characters, the use of the composition line is no simpler than the large scenes of the Repins! There is no warmth, no warmth for worldly life, and the intuitive senses of the picture compared to Western Europe carry a kind of coldness. Painting is a specialty of the art, and the more refined the achievement, the more specialized the subject. Qi Baishi's "Twelve Screens of Landscape and Water" was once valued at Poly Auction for 1.5 billion yuan, and I sometimes think that the opening and closing of his landscape is like the opening and closing rules of flower and bird paintings. If you think about the expressiveness and modeling language of landscape topics every day, it is often longer than this and shorter than the other. I have seen Ku Yinzhi's portraits, the shape is actually in place, but the texture, body processing, brushwork, temperament is slightly thin, the expression is poor, compared with the giant of the figure painting, separated by several layers of window paper. Hirshkin painted a forest path in which a pair of men and women strolling by Polenov.
Kuinzhi is from Ukraine, and it is no wonder that his works are calm and the pictures are full of tranquility. The character of ukrainians is slightly quieter than that of Russians. Like Ukrainian, which resembles a Russian dialect, it sounds sticky and syllables like it is half an octave lower than Russian. The accent of Petersburg is the best tone in Russian, like a Beijing film in Chinese, with a fluttering voice that vaguely brings out a kind of high coldness. Petersburg is the most luxurious city in Russia and occupies the first place in the city. In Kuyenzhi's time, the magnificence and primacy were particularly great, and at that time, Petersburg still had a cultural centripetal force for Europe. Russians always like to imagine the cultural glory of that year, and always like to say that a hundred years ago the French all went to Petersburg to watch ballet. However, there is a strange phenomenon that none of the first-class landscape painters in the history of Russian art who have lived in St. Petersburg do not paint cities. Of the four great landscape painters (Savrasov, Hirshkin, Kuinzhi, Leviathan), both Shishkin and Kuinzhi were citizens of the capital (the capital was in St. Petersburg at the time). Hirshkin's focus is on the forests and countryside of West Russia, and Kuyenzhi's focus is on Ukraine's coastal Crimea and Ukraine's vast hinterland. In fact, not only the Petersburg painters, but also the masters of Russian landscape painting rarely dabbled in urban subjects. Vasiliev, a genius painter who died young, lived only twenty-three years, just like his teacher Savrasov, whose focus was on drawing a long radius of countryside in the center of the Moscow suburbs. Both the Russian Museum and the Tretchakov Gallery have vasiliev's independent exhibition halls, which are viewed one by one, as if the natural field scenery is concentrated, a very strange visual experience. I have written a thesis on the topic of Impressionist urban landscapes, the growth environment and childhood life of Impressionists slowly emerge in the data pile, the connection between the painter's growth environment and the work, this is a very interesting subject, the French Impressionists all grew up in the city, it is not difficult to explain why they are always passionate about urban themes. Russia's first-class landscape painters lived mostly as children far away from urban environments. Hirshkin grew up in the large town of Yebugara in the Tatarstan region, which is now an economic zone developed by the Russian federal government and a semi-pristine town during the Tsarist era. Kuinzhi grew up on the outskirts of the southeastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol (a city that was named after the Pro-Statesman Zhdanov during the Soviet era). Not long ago, Ukrainian government forces and militias fought here, making the name of the city a news hotspot for a while). It was Serov, a Russian expatriate who grew up in Paris, who loved to paint noble ladies and gentlemen.
Kuyinzhi and Shishkin live in the capital, next to the lights of Nevsky Prospekt in the city center and the bustling city of drunken gold fans. Their residence is at the southernmost tip of Vasilievsky, across the Neva River from Neva Avenue. In their time, most of Vasilievsky was on the outskirts of the city, where civilians were buried. The location of their house is between bustling and deserted. Neva Avenue, which was decorated by Gogol's Infinite Prize, and the old town center of St. Petersburg, which was extremely praised by Pushkin, are actually indifferent to them. In 2007, the Russian Museum held a large exhibition of Kuyinzhi, and I only saw a few street scenes with churches in his early years. He stared at the Ukrainian countryside, where Repin said he was "poetic in light." Years of persistence have become a sentiment, and the memory of the origin of life is written on the canvas, and there is a kind of mature beauty of life.
Russian literary critics considered Kuyinzhi's paintings to be poetic. Poetry is often alienated in a variety of aesthetic concerns and positions. Behind the creation of the beauty of the picture is the lyrical factor as the driving force. The aesthetic elements of Ku Yinzhi's works, in the constructed imitation, the driving force of lyricism jumps and flashes here, with poetic interest and aesthetic value points. We can try to enter the concept of Russian poetry, which is vague in the perspective of Chinese, and the word "poetic" is extremely important in the Chinese cultural context, pervasively permeating all levels of literature and art. Moving into the Western context, the poetic concept is naturally stretched, extended, and seems distorted. The literary temperament of today's Russia is very different from that of the nineteenth century. And with the classic literary complex, we are still looking for and feeling. Behind this is a cultural identity of an inner aesthetic experience. It seems to enter the general routine in the psychology of art, the perception of artistry and artistic value, always the empathic role of aesthetic experience and aesthetic identity. It's like Chinese always find homesickness in the moon. This bright moonlight also appeared in Kuyingzhi's pen, depicting a place that was precisely the hometown of Kuyinzhi , Ukraine. But it is just a coincidence, at the point of interpretation of European culture, there is no homesickness behind the cultural symbol of the moon, and there is no Chinese expression of forgetfulness on the poetic cultural foothold. The Soviet-era Ukrainian film master Dudurenko's "Land" tells the story of the protagonist Vasily dancing under the moonlight after the first tractor drove into the village, the shadows of the trees in the garden, the silver moonlight sprinkled on the bleak land, the Ukrainian artist again, the moonlight again, and the coincidence. Russian poetics does not have the concept of "artistic conception", which is a diaphragm and bizarre concept for Russian writers and artists. Similarly, in their poetics, there is the concept of "elephant", which can be understood as an image, which can be visual sense, and can be a picture sense. The Russian idylls carefully managed this concept, allowing it to form a language art technique with great expressive power. Yesenin's work is the best example of this approach and an important link in the value chain of his work as a language arts. Like the expressiveness of the phonological rhetoric of Mayakovsky's works, the two young men of eighty years ago are still indelible figures in the poetic context. Film critic Plovkin said that the calm scenes before the opening of Soviet war films always have a shocking power, and the tranquility of Kuyinzhi is also a sublimation for the artistic quasi-object that carries communication and communication with the artwork. The contemplation of the art form is the carrier and the converter.
On Vasilievsky, around the former homes of Kuyinzhi and Shishkin, the old-fashioned walls are mottled, the linden trees are old, and the empty streets are scattered with people's backs. The place where poetry is born is often not poetry. At the place where the artwork was born, see the withered yellow leaves on the tarmac condensed into gray. Somehow, that gray feeling is very landscaped in memory, and the visual experience of it leaving its birthplace on display in the museum. All art tends to poetry, and the art of poetry begins with a return to the original point. The consideration of fragments brings us closer to the origin of the essence of landscape painting. But the combination of this fragment is different for each viewer, each with their own combinatorial experience, constructing their own different opportunities in the painting. (Author: Yu Xiaomu)
Yu Xiaomu introduction
Yu Xiaomu is an oil painter and prose writer. Born in 1989 in Jinan, Shandong Province. Master of Oil Painting and Doctor of Arts of Russian State Pedagogical University. He is a member of Shandong Artists Association and a director of Shandong Young Artists Association.
Published literary monographs such as "St. Petersburg Snow" (China Drama Publishing House). He held solo exhibitions such as "Yixin Jiaxue - Yu Ping and Yu Xiaomu Father and Son Works Exhibition (Yantai Station, Weihai Station, Rizhao Station)", "Peter's Corner - Yu Xiaomu Oil Painting Exhibition", "Daily Boundaries - Yu Xiaomu Landscape Painting Exhibition", etc. He has published more than 20 academic papers in domestic and foreign journals in the field of art.
