I've been reading about 19th century Russian painting, and several books on the topic have mentioned that the artists were influenced by an 1853 essay called "
The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" by
Nicolas Chernyshevsky.
By all accounts this essay was a kind of manifesto for the Russian painters and was a particularly significant influence on its leaders, such as Ilya Repin, Ivan Shishkin and Kramskoy. It explains why realism flourished longer there than it did in Western Europe.
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| Ivan Shishkin, Mast Tree Grove, 1898 |
For example, compare this painting by Shishkin in Russia in 1898....
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| Paul Cezanne, The Bathers, 1898-1905 |
...to this one by Paul Cezanne in France at the same time. What was different about the aesthetic philosophy in Russia?
The central notion of Chernyshevsky's essay is that reality is greater than art. At best, art is an attempt to replicate or reproduce reality, and therefore art is on a plane lower than reality.
This is a very different idea from the aestheticism of J.M.W. Whistler and others who suggested that it is the business of art to improve on nature.
Whistler said, "
Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent, even that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong."
Around the same time that Chernyshevsky's influential essay was published in Russia, related ideas were published in England and America. John Ruskin's
Modern Painters and Asher B. Durand's
Letters on Landscape Painting (1855) preached a version of Truth to Nature that had a great influence on the movements Pre-Raphaelitism and the Hudson River School in English speaking countries. The main difference with Chernyshevsky is that he seems to lack the moralizing tone of Durand and Ruskin.
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| Ilya Repin, Portrait of Aleksei Pisemsky. 1880 |
All these thinkers advocated that the artist should have a reverence for the concrete facts of reality and to allow as much as possible for the painting to be a clear window to that reality. Repin's portrait of Pisemsky is a good example, where the technique is subordinated to the force of personality, made manifest in concrete facts.
Ruskin, Durand, and Chernyshevsky all advocated that artists—students especially— paint as faithfully from nature as possible, but since absolute leaf-for-leaf imitation of external details is impossible, artists should re-create (Durand used the word "represent") on canvas the truth they have experienced, penetrating to the Platonic essence.
In Shishkin's case this meant painting scenes that seemed "found" or "photographic" to the untrained eye, but were in fact carefully constructed using his deep knowledge of natural effects.
It took him a lifetime to discard the conventional formulas of the picturesque in landscape, and to invent a way to interpret the reality of a forest interior in oil paint.
Many contemporary realists place a great value on the aesthetics of brushwork, paint texture, and composition, but Chernyshevsky would have regarded this preoccupation as a foolish distraction, like focusing on the scratches and skips on a phonograph record instead of listening to the music. Just as a phonograph record aspires to deliver the experience of a live concert, a painting aspires to the fullness and presence of reality. (The concert/phonograph analogy is my own, and of course the phonograph came after his time; Chernyshevsky actually uses the analogy of an original painting versus an engraved reproduction of it).
Here are some excerpts of Chernyshevsky:
- A reproduction must as far as possible preserve the essence of the thing reproduced; therefore, a work of art must contain as little of the abstract as possible.
- Art expresses an idea not through abstract concepts, but through a living, individual fact.
- The essential purpose of art is to reproduce what is of interest to man in real life.
- Reality stands higher than dreams.
In order to grapple with these ideas, I imagined a conversation between myself and Chernyshevsky.
Please note that Cherny's comments are my supposition of how he would answer.
Me: Can a camera or a high resolution motion picture achieve this result?
Cherny: No. The excitement that the human being experiences in the presence of reality can only be evoked by an artist with an inquiring mind who can imaginatively see into the structure and essential features of the subject, and express what it is about that subject that makes it interesting.
Me: Is the imitation of reality what we're after?
Cherny: No, the mere copying of external features will only lead to boredom, both for the artist and the viewer. There's a big difference between mindless copying and insightful reproduction of nature.
Me: Aren't such insights highly subjective? Science in recent decades has shown that there is no such thing as objective reality. Our perception of the world around us is a construct of our perceptual systems. Therefore, shouldn't we paint the world in a personal style that matches our own subjective view of the world?
Cherny: You make too much of that. Painting in the way you suggest is just an excuse for laziness. Two careful artists with good training will produce studies that match each other very closely. But such studies are just the beginning. It takes a lifetime to create works that address the deep experiences of life.
Me: What about the Surrealist's goal of painting what is inside the mind, the world of dreams and nightmares?
Cherny: Your dreams ultimately come from reality. Imagination plays a key role, but the aim of the artist is to use the imagination to see into the heart of reality itself, which is the source of everything in its fullest and purest form. Reality is also full of latent mystery that cannot be fully understood by either the poetic avenue of art or the fact-based avenue of science.
Me: If reality is greater than art, of what value is a visit to the art museum?
Cherny: If it's a choice between the two, artists should look to reality for their chief inspiration; otherwise their work will become second-hand and mannered. But it is extremely valuable to study the means by which great artists of the past have expressed the essence of reality. Look for artwork that brings you closest to the feeling that you are in the presence of real life, and then try to understand how those effects are achieved. The challenge when you leave the art museum is to leave behind the conventions of past art movements, and to see reality for yourself without preconceptions.
Me: What categories of art are most worthy—sublime, comic, tragic, or beautiful?
Cherny: They are all important. A sensitive person will respond to the problems presented by life, and will want to create art that speaks to those problems, so that a fellow human can gain wisdom and insight from the art. Those impulses can run the gamut of emotions. Whatever way you respond to nature should be the subject of your art, but it should be conveyed in concrete, material terms.
My concluding thoughts: I don't think Chernyshevsky's idea is completely tenable intellectually for me. I can't get past the idea that "reality" is a provisional thing, constructed in our own minds, and subject to the whims of our very selective and subjective visual systems. I also resist the notion that abstraction must always be avoided. Of course I love the Russian realists, but I also feel that a pulsing sense of life can emerge from certain highly abstracted forms of art, such as hand-drawn animation or comic art.
But Cherny's idea that reality stands on a plane above art is for me an extremely useful driving concept that helps focus my mind when I'm out painting from nature. I often achieve my best results when I try to capture what's in front of me without trying to "improve" on it in any way. When I compare the immense complexity, subtlety, and richness of the real world to my own paltry efforts, I'm left with a sense of how far I have fallen short of the truth in front of me.
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"
The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" by Nicolas Chernyshevsky.
Nicolas Chernyshevsky on Wikipedia
Recommended book:
The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin
by David Jackson
(1832-1898) that offers a helpful introduction for the new fan or the confirmed collector of the great Russian realist who specialized in forest scenes.
that came out in 2011 is now out of print and costs well over $60, and the one on 
is also out of print and costs over $100. So people have been snapping these up, and I'm sure the Shishkin book will be no exception.
(shown in the middle of the photo above) is comparable in scope and coverage. It's a little larger, about 9.5 x 13 inches. The color in the reproductions is a little better, but some paintings are reproduced smaller than they need to be.
. It's shown on the left in the photo above. You can still get this one in its paperback form as a used book, but it's rather expensive. The book is about 254 pages long, and the reproductions are quite good, with many of Shishkin's plein air studies.
Books:
