The art of Vrubel, as well as Kyiv’s sacred places, are the glory of an ancient city which is losing, under the quick hand of the local authorities, the oldness and charm of its parks, streets, and squares. The exhibit “Vrubel and Kyiv” reminds us not only about the genius’s destiny, art, and role in restoring St. Cyril’s Church but also about tendencies in making a city whose traditional values are being ignored by early-21st-century timeservers.
Mikhail Vrubel lived in Kyiv for a short time, from April 1884 until 1889. In 1890 he began to work in Moscow under the auspices of the art patron Savva Mamontov. Vrubel had already been a mature master when he was invited there. The unique individuality was shaped in Kyiv. Vrubel embarked on his own artistic journey in the late 19th century, when impressionism was upstaging academism and realism, the Itinerants vied with academicians in Russia, and symbolism was popular in Munich and Vienna. He refused to accept these trends. With due respect for his teachers Pavel Chistiakov and Ilya Repin, he searched for his own themes and styles. His monumental and, at the same time, fleshly style of religious images in the amazing sketches Ascension, Resurrection, and Lamentation incurred the wrath of the St. Volodymyr Cathedral clergy. Throughout his short lifetime (1856-1910), Vrubel strove “to waken the souls from the trivia of life by means of majestic images.” He found his own way in a creative dialogue with the Byzantine frescoes of Kyiv, Ravenna, and Venice, and worked out an inimitable, “Vrubel-style,” system of painting.
He was more often misunderstood than accepted. The master’s oeuvres – not only in the early Kyiv period but also in the twilight of his life – were scornfully rejected: Demon Downcast may be interpreted as spiritual self-portrait of a lonely genius who paid with mental derangement for the exceptional gift of an artist, prophet, and innovator. An analogy to the destiny of Vincent van Gogh involuntarily suggests itself. Alexander Blok dedicated, quite aptly, the following dramatic verses to Vrubel:
How hard it is to walk among the people
And pretend that you never died,
And to tell the unborn
About the game of tragic passions.
And, peering into a terrible night,
To find a streamed line
in a reckless whirr of feelings
So that they know the life’s baneful fire
By the pale dawns of art!
But let us come back to the springtime of Vrubel’s life, when he, a 24-year-old student at the Imperial Academy of Arts, dreams of “glorifying beauty everywhere.” A pupil of the famous mentor Pavel Chistiakov, Vrubel was totally absorbed into studying the human body. He worked indefatigably. In 1883, when Vrubel and his fellow students Serov and Derviz competed in watercolor technique, choosing the topic “A female sitter in the Renaissance milieu,” the colleagues gave the palm to Vrubel. After some time, Chistiakov’s old friend Adrian Prakhov, a painter, art historian, connoisseur of Byzantine monumentalism, and the initiator of restoring the semi-ruined St. Cyril’s Church, came from Kyiv to see him. He wrote later: “I finally managed to persuade the church’s clergy to give me the right to keep frescoes totally intact, without restoration and additional painting in the altar’s right-hand corner… I took the trouble of finding in Petersburg a talented Academy of Arts student who could execute this commission in Kyiv, staying within the limits of the available scanty funds… I went to the Academy to see my old friend Chistiakov – and the ball comes to the player! Here is the artist! I can’t recommend anybody better, more ta-lented and more suitable to execute your commission” (from the reminiscences of Nikolai Prakhov).
In the spring of 1884 Vrubel came to Kyiv to paint four images for the iconostasis of St. Cyril’s Church. He was later allowed to lead the team of painters and restorers. Professor Mykola Murashko, in charge of the entire project, thus recalled his first meeting with Vrubel: “When I tried to bargain with him about the remuneration (‘you are still so young,’ etc.), he objected: ‘I am young in years but mature in mastery.’ Everybody liked Mikhail, and he inspired respect from everyone in our small steam” (from the reminiscences of Mykola Murashko).
It is not an exaggeration to consider Kyiv the cradle of Vrubel’s painting style. He came here as a third-year Academy student, with just three or four watercolors and a dozen drawings under his belt. He was shaped as maestro in Kyiv or, to be more exact, at St. Cyril’s Church. He also conceived the theme of Demon here and executed the first compositions. This theme received a po-werful impetus later in Moscow.
Vrubel painted watercolors to the themes of Mikhail Lermontov’s works at 1, Andiivsky uzviz, where he rented a room with a breathtaking view of the Dnipro. Prakhov’s son Nikolai wrote that what catalyzed the Demon theme was the Kyiv premiere of a homonymous opera by Anton Rubinstein and the baritone Ioakim Tartakov who sang the central part in it. The production achieved a resounding success. “Vrubel, whom our mother (Emilia Prakhova) invited to our place after the show, very strongly reacted to the stage production and the way Tartakov sang and played… When he saw a piece of paper and a small box of Fabera watercolors on the table, he began to paint enthusiastically.” This manner of painting and drawing anywhere and on anything, often without finishing the brilliantly begun paintings, and then gifting them away was typical for an impulsive Vrubel who was then in bohemia-style love with a female circus rider. He shocked many with his infatuation and the mindless waste of money even though he was chronically cash-strapped. Vrubel furnished food for gossips and fantasies, when he painted the figure of a circus girl astride a white horse on top of an ideally executed image of the Holy Virgin.
Philistinism does not forgive uniqueness and often avenges the artist by pouring scorn on his talent. For example, the Kyiv usurer Dakhnovych never paid Vrubel for his daughter’s portrait A Girl against the Persian Carpet, for he considered this kind of painting as daub. (Vrubel’s inconstancies and searches always found support from the Prakhov family. Emilia and her elder daughter Olena took care of Vrubel. They understood and accepted the fluctuations of his mood and his eccentricities – they were aware of this genius’s exceptional nature. Vrubel responded to the family with rapturous love.)
Vrubel had finished the monumental wall paintings at St. Cyril’s Church by the fall of 1884. It was time to paint the altar icons, for which he was in fact invited to Kyiv. Adrian Prakhov, who knew very well Vrubel’s powerful talent as well as his weakness in everyday life, advises the artist to paint the icons in Venice, in the aura of Torcello’s Byzantine mosaics and St. Mark’s Cathedral. Prakhov wants to tear Vrubel away from the bohemia-style Kyiv, and the artist accepts the proposal. He is happy to relish Italy’s antiques, but he is longing for home: “An artist’s wings are in his native soil and life. You can only study in a foreign land.”
By the end of April 1885, the four metal-painted icons had been brought to Kyiv and installed at the St. Cyril’s Church altar. It took only two weeks to paint each of the icons. “This is the shortest possible period for any artist, but not for Vrubel,” Prakhov noted.
The image of Emilia Prakhova was embodied in the icon of the Holy Virgin. The crowd could be heard saying: “We won’t pray to a living woman.” As for the true art lovers, they were aware of Vrubel’s innovativeness. For Vrubel added monumentalism, boundless sadness and vigor to the flagging tradition of the late 19th-century “sugary” sentimental icon painting, creating something that resembled the mosaics of early Christian churches.
Vrubel spent the summer of 1885 in Odesa together with his fellow student Valentyn Serov. The city’s commercial spirit depressed the artists. Vrubel returned to Kyiv in the fall of 1886. Although he was surrounded by friends here, the number of ill-wishers was on the rise. He was denied painting over St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, even though he knew the secrets of Byzantine monumentalists. In 1888 the artist was only commissioned to paint ornaments. Before the artist went to Moscow under the protection of Savva Mamontov, he worked hard on the image of Demon, painted (“had a love conversation with the sitter”), and, naturally, wrote, as he put it, “for a living,” for he always needed money.
Full of a necessity to make discoveries in art and feeling himself a master in Kyiv, he was often painfully aware of being unneeded. Optimism would give way to despair, and the prose of life produced depression.
Visiting Kyiv about ten years later with his wife Nadezhda Zabela, the artist’s muse and a talented singer, Vrubel said: “How beautiful is Kyiv! I wish I lived here! I love Kyiv!”
Olha Petrova is an artist, an art researcher, and a professor at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy
