talk about the great landscape painters of the 19th century like these little-known Russians because we don’t know how to describe what they were doing. They wanted to show the extraordinary beauty of nature: not just how it looked, but how it was. They were trying to show the essence of it, the soul, to extract the beauty from the everyday with their skill. But we don’t talk about soul or essence anymore because we don’t know what they mean. The artists themselves, though perhaps individually as ambitious as modern artists, were self-effacing in their art, trying to be transparent, pointing to something else. Instead nowadays art is all about ego. We go to a modern exhibition to be impressed by an individual’s artistic talent, their particular vision. The only place they’re trying to point us to is an appreciation of their own genius. The whole way that art is presented to us now is as a succession of individuals whose life stories are treasured as exemplifying some sort of struggle of genius against conformity. An idea of art as attempting to convey the beauty of nature would be seen as hopelessly naive.
The exhibition catalogue is a sad affair, since the quality of reproduction just isn’t good enough. I did come away with one good reproduction, “Rye” by Ivan Shishkin, which is wonderful. The trees in the field of rye are placed with a random precision that a Zen master would be proud of. It’s clear though, after you’ve been looking awhile, that the trees (elms?) are enormous, and are painted that scale to add to the astonishing sense of the immensity of the landscape that you get. [Indeed if there’s a theme to the exhibition that’s it: the immensity of the Russian landscape. There’s one small painting, called “The Steppe” which at a distance is just bottom half green, top half white, but closer up is amazing in the way it suggests vast distances.] But I doubt that Shishkin wanted the observer to notice that detail: he wanted to convey immensity and that’s one of the devices he used. The painting is so successful, for me, because, to put it plainly, it takes you there at the same time as being beautiful.
Maybe that’s why in general I prefer photography nowadays. Someone like Cartier-Bresson (BBC2 tonight) understood, and personified, that idea of self-effacement that I find so attractive in these Russian landscape artists.
The National exhibition closes on the 12th of September, so hurry. It’s a small exhibition, but how could anyone with poetry in their souls not want to see a painting with a title like “Moonlit Night on the Dnieper”?
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