The National Portrait Gallery recently explored The Face of Britain in an exhibition of the same name curated by Simon Schama. Its new exhibition – a collection of portraits of writers, musicians, actors and artistic patrons lent from the superb Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow – might have been called The Face of Russia.
How different those faces are. Russia, in this gathering of cultural heroes from the later 19th century up to 1914, is intense, tortured and troubled. I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition. One of the women who does manage to bend her lips at all is the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel, whose husband was the brilliant and tormented artist Mikhail Vrubel. Soon after painting one of his many portraits of her, Vrubel was in a mental hospital. She didn’t have much to smile about after all.
Neither did the novelist and sometime political prisoner Fyodor Dostoevsky, who posed for his portrait by Vasily Perov in 1872. Dostoevsky stares downwards, at a bizarre angle to the picture surface, into a darkness only he can see. His skin is a taut nervous membrane stretched across the rugged bones of his skull. His hands are clasped all too firmly. His clothes seem thrown on. In short, he resembles one of his own literary characters: an underground man, a guilty criminal, a desperate fellow.
In letters to his brother, Vincent van Gogh shared his interest in the works of Dostoevsky. You can see what this pioneer of modern art had in common with the Russian author. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and other great Russian writers portrayed in this exhibition have been regarded since their time as radical and visionary creators of modern culture. As the recent BBC hit adaptation of War and Peace proved, their works are still capable of surprising and startling us today.
But the artists of 19th- and early 20th-century Russia are far less known. Russian modern art is often imagined to begin in the revolutionary era or just before, withMalevich’s Black Square (1915) or Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International(1919-20).
To discover how shallow this cliche about modern Russian art really is you need to visit Moscow’s Tretyakov – or, for starters, at least see this selection of its highlights. The faces may be famous but this exhibition introduces us to the remarkable artists who painted them, shamefully unknown in the west.
I counted two and a half smiles in the entire exhibition
Vrubel is a precocious, disturbing genius whose fractured vision sees the world through a distorted prism. His portrait of the railway magnate and his own patron, Savva Mamontov, is a stunning masterpiece of awe-inspiring chunky cubic forms painted more than a decade before cubism was invented in Paris. Vrubel sees his patron as a man of terrifying godlike power, an enthroned thunderer.
This spooky artist builds on the achievements of the earlier Russian realist school, whose tough eye for human frailty is what makes this exhibition so intimate and sombre. Vassily Perov’s portrait of the folklorist Vladimir Dal, done in 1872, just months before Dal died, is not really a picture of a famous man so much as a study of old age and imminent mortality: Dal, with his immense grey beard, looks death in the face; a figure of acute vulnerability and self-knowledge.
Nikolai Kuznetsov’s portrait of Tchaikovsky is as ruthless as any psychoanalyst in revealing the great composer’s emotional frailty. Tchaikovsky’s pain shimmers in his tightly controlled face.
These Russian artists of the age of Tolstoy share the sensitivity, honesty and the searching unease of the writers and composers they portray. It is clear that, far from the beginning of Russian modernism, the Bolshevik takeover in 1917 was the tragic end of a cultural golden age.
One of the last portraits here is Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaia’s glowing heroic vision of the poet Anna Akhmatova, painted in 1914. Akhmatova was to become one of the bravest witnesses of Russia’s 20th century fate, surviving the Siege of Leningrad and living to see Stalin’s persecution of everyone she loved. In this painting she radiates a dignity that history and suffering would only enhance.
• Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky is at the National Portrait Gallery, London from 17 March to 26 June.
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