Saint Petersburg, Russia

Where it all began, the Fortress and Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul on an island in the Neva River. The towering spire is 375 feet in height, the tallest structure in the city. Designed by the Italian architect, Domenico Trezzini, it seems more steeple than church.
All the tsars are buried there.

Yesterday (below) I wrote about my exciting two-hour stay at the Hermitage Art Museum. Today, let me tell you about our two day stay in the venerable old art palace's place of residence, Saint Petersburg, Russia. After having toured the capitals of all the major northern European countries, Copenhagen (Denmark), Tallin (Estonia), Helsinki (Finland), Amsterdam (Holland), Berlin (Germany) and Stockholm (Sweden), they all tend to run together, melding into a single entity which, in retrospect, I have to ponder at least momentarily to recall as individual cities and cultures.  No so with Saint Petersburg. The Russian culture is so dominant, so historic, so vibrant, exuberant, ostentatious, tragic, and probably a half-dozen other appropriate adjectives as to tower powerfully over all the rest. Moreover, though no longer the capital of Russia, Saint Petersburg perfectly exemplifies all that is and has been unique, historic, extravagantly beautiful, and rotten to the core about Russia.

Church of the Resurrection on the Spilled Blood marks the site of the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881.

As Baltic cities go, Saint Petersburg, as a whole, is big, bodacious, and beautiful. Justly called the "Venice of the North," the city, as compared to most others in Europe, is relatively young,  little more than 300 years old. It was founded by Tsar Peter the Great on May 27, 1703. How many other cities can cite the day, month, and year of their founding? Ten years later, and after a carefully planned, but rapid, imperial building project unmatched by any city since, Saint Petersburg became the capital of Russia, a title it held for all but four years from 1713 to 1918. Today, it's Russia's second largest city with a population of almost five million. The tsars left it one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.  The Communists, in just 72 years, managed to make it one of the ugliest. Not even in Moscow is the visual contrast between the classical Western European culture and Communist Eastern European dominance so stark. (Berlin stands a close second, however). Fortunately, this contrast seems to be fading in the 21 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian tour guides are most happy to point this out.

The Saint Petersburg Stock Exchange,
19th century Russian architecture at its best (now a naval museum).

The history of art is full of pendulum swings--from Renaissance to Baroque, from Classic Revival to the Romantic era, from Academicism to Modern Art. What happened in Russia after the Communists was not a swing but a jarring disconnect. Whether viewing Saint Petersburg's culture, art, architecture, music, literature, you name it, seldom in history has there been such a 180 degree turn from all things bright and beautiful to everything drab, dull, unimaginative, repetitive, and downright ugly. There were extenuating circumstances, of course (there always are)--abject peasant poverty on an unimaginable scale juxtaposed with pretentious tsarist opulence nearly as unimaginable (the Romanov clan deserved what they got), coupled with two devastating world wars, centralized economic controls, poor to horrible leadership, and a host of lesser evils. Despite what the tour guides tell you, Saint Petersburg still bears scars from all of this.

Often such mass Communist era housing scars the cityscape for endless blocks.
This one is typical.

In viewing Saint Pertersburg, Communism was like a bad dream. The old is solid, well-conceived, and still classically beautiful. The new is often strikingly rich, colorful, lively, and for the most part, fairly attractive. What happened in between (and Saint Petersburg grew massively under the Communists) can best and most politely be considered blah (above). Cookie cutter modernism always is. The distinctive beauty of the blending of east and west that made Saint Petersburg so unique gave way during the soviet era to massive quantity over quality in the name of efficiency and a desperately unsuccessful dash to compete or surpass the West. In Saint Petersburg, perhaps the most lasting image of this era is that of crumbling concrete.

Normal Russians being normal, Victory Day, May 9, 2012, Saint Petersburg, Russia

The palaces, the cathedrals, the museums, the fortresses, monuments, myriad waterways, and modern development are far too much to even see, much less absorb in just two days. First impressions are vital but lasting impressions come only months later as the trivial fades and nuanced memories gel. May 9, (our second day in the city) was the day the Russians chose to celebrate their victory in WW II. The holiday atmosphere, ordinary people being ordinary, flags flying (even the Communist party flag) fireworks (shot off at noon, for some idiotic reason), picnics, modern day street vendors, sun worshippers, local tourists, perfect weather, all mesh to form a lasting, vibrant, impression of the vitality and stubborn endurance of the Russian people. Yes, the Russian government is still the most paranoid I've ever encountered (bottom), but hey, despite what recalcitrant old cold warriors here in the U.S. might have us believe, the people, in Saint Petersburg at least, are pretty much just like you and me.

Thou shall not--the Russian twelve commandments. 
I'm still not sure what some of the icons mean.

The Hermitage

The Hermitage Art Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia, (as seen from the Neva River) is sometimes referred to as the Winter Palace, though that is only one of six structural
portions of the massive architectural landmark.

I have a dream. It's not as noble as that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and no more likely to be fulfilled in my lifetime than was his. I have a dream of visiting every major art museum in the world. In mid-May my wife and I returned from a transatlantic cruise, coupled with a nine-day cruise of the Baltic Sea and all the major capitals of Northern Europe. The highlight of that far off adventure was two days spent in St. Petersburg, Russia. I'll be writing about various sites and cities during the coming week but let me start today with the the highlight of the highlight, the Heritage Art Museum.

Dance, 1909, Henri Matisse

I have a confession to make. We spent 21 days on the seas and a total of five weeks away from home to allow me a meager two hours to peruse the holding of one of the largest art museums in the world. Worse, part of that time I was lost, searching for the main entrance so that I might rejoin our tour group and not spend the rest of my life in Russia. But that's par for the course.  I seldom go to art museums and not get lost. It goes without saying that the Hermitage (pronounced er-mit-TAJ) is huge, on a par with the Louvre in Paris an the Met in New York. Moreover, it has not been "twenty-first-centuryized" as have the most other world-class museums. For instance, only one floor, the former servants quarters of the palace, containing the museum's modern art, has been air-conditioned (not that it mattered since we were there in May when the whole city of St. Petersburg is air conditioned). Here was to be found Matisse's famous Dance(above), as well as works by Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Vlaminck, Derain, Malevich, van Gogh, and just about every other name one might recognize from modern art (plus a few I didn't recognize).

The Russians learned art and architecture from the French and Italians,
but never quite mastered the art of subtlety.

Like the Louvre, the Hermitage is a hand-me-down, a onetime palace dating from 1764 before the Tsars moved to the suburbs to spend most of the year away from the big city. Besides the Summer Palace there's also the "Small Heritage" (which isn't), the "Old Hermitage," and the "New Hermitage" stretching out in an extended linear progression to rival Versailles--which undoubtedly was the tsars' intentions. Like the Louvre, the Hermitage is not an ideal structure to house a billion-ruble (or billion-dollar) art collection. In the 1989, the Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei tamed the Louvre. I wish he would do the same for the Hermitage. The main thing the Hermitage has going for it is sheer scale. And if crowds were evenly dispersed among its hundreds of rooms and galleries, this scale would somewhat mitigate its organization shortcomings. Unfortunately, that's not the case. The main galleries are often shoulder to shoulder while the remote venues seem downright lonely.

Crouching Youth, 1530-34,
Michelangelo

Now, having complained about the museum's many faults, let me dwell on its strengths. If you like the Baroque, you'll  love the Hermitage. Management sometimes refers to it a Russian Baroque, and indeed, there is a distinct difference. Russian Baroque is more baroque than its southern European kin. Though I'm a painter and I love looking at paintings in museums, in that regard, the Hermitage is simply too much of a good thing. Leonardo is represented by his Madonna Lita (1490-91), Titian by his St. Sebastian (1570s), Raphael by a couple of his many Madonnas, Giorgione by his Judith (1504). The Hermitage collection also includes works by Tiepolo, Carracci, Caravaggio, Velasquez, El Greco, Rubens, van Dyck, and over 20 works by Rembrandt.

Sculpture, on the other hand, was, for me, the most memorable of all the museum's offerings. There was literally tons of it, the best of the best the Baroque world had to offer by virtually every sculptor working at the time. There's even a minor Renaissance piece by Michelangelo, Crouching Youth (left, 1530-34). Names such as Canova, Rossellino, Bernini, Giuseppe Mazzuoli, the Venetian Antonio Lombardo, Riemenschneider, Houdon, Eugene Falconet, Rodin, and Versailles own A.Coysevox dot the landscape. There was much more as well. The Hermitage, being an old Russian palace, has its share of ornate domestic furnishings from gold leaf thrones (the Russians love their gold leaf) to porcelain sculptural pieces that would look good on my coffee table. There were carriages (more gold leaf), clothes, china, crystal, silver, and tapestries representing two centuries of Russian tsarist extravagance and impoverished suffering by the peasant masses. If you've ever pondered the cause of the 1917 Russian Revolution, you need look no further than the Hermitage or any number of similarly ostentatious palaces decorating this former Russian capital.

No palace would be complete without a throne room, here the impressive Hermitage Romanov version.

Star Wars Art

George Lucas, may the creative Force be with you.

It was not your typical art show. Yes, there were over fifty pieces of framed art on display, spread over five-thousand square feet of exhibit space. Over one million people saw it following the exhibition's opening at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, in October of 1997. And it's quite likely at least that many more saw the show as it traveled around the country over the next several months. What kind of art show was it? Well, if this is any clue, it didn't open at the National Gallery in Washington but next door at the Air and Space museum, and it was not about old masters but Jedi masters. It featured the art work of Ralph McGuarrie, the artists in charge of giving visual form to George Lucas' wildest imaginings. It was modern art like no other modern art ever seen before, unless you're a Star Wars fan, in which case this showcase of props, costumes, sets, special effects, video clips, and a few old fashioned paintings of new fashioned science fiction was still pretty impressive.

The show eventually made it to London
where it left the British equally enthralled.

Those attending who expected to find any kind of traditional art gallery were either disappointed or stunned beyond words. Upon entering, the viewer went down a hallway straight to the Death Star and the disembodied voice of James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. At the end of the hall was a wall-size mural of a galaxy far, far away. Just beyond was Jabba the Hut, a gigantic slug on a rug, and not far away, a Wampa Ice Creature, one of the additions Lucas made in special effects form to the updated re-release of The Empire Strikes Back.  It was all rather overwhelming as all around came a bombarded of sights and sounds from the four movies the exhibit celebrated at the time. Music and video clips were interactively available at every turn. Never before had it been so dramatically underlined the interrelatedness of the arts as they are drawn together by the movie industry that today can make "real" what a generation ago couldn't even be imagined. Make that two generations ago, as the Star Wars saga made its mark on an audience that wasn't even born when it first hit the silver screen twenty-two years earlier.

Star Wars conceptualist and illustrator, Ralph McGuarrie,
took George Lucas' complex visions to the next level.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the creative minds of young people, regardless of their age, struggling to make their first marks in art, can tell you, the science fiction genre is a major source of ideas and inspirations for these aspiring artists. Whether it's dogfights between X-wing fighters and Federation interceptors, or seductive depictions of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, "teenagers" of all ages have claimed sci-fi art as their own. The Star Wars exhibit boasted some 30 mannequins, 35 production models, and numerous set pieces giving one the feeling of moving back and forth between museum and sound stage--the present and long, long ago. And lingering over it all was the aura of classical mythology, of good versus evil, which Lucas borrowed from any number of ancient cultures and beliefs. And for those wanting to take some "art" home with them, there was the ever-present mega-marketing gift shop just beyond the last star-trooper.

Several of the Star Wars figures as originally conceived by McGuarrie

John Trumbull

John Trumbull Self-portrait, 1777

One of the most persistent comments any artist hears in exhibiting his or her work before the public is, "I'd never have the patience to do anything like that." It's a fair comment and a tribute to their perseverance that the artist should welcome. In fact, all too often, many would-be artists fail to succeed simply because they lack the patience to learn their craft and produce their art. I'm not sure, but I have an instinctive feeling that patience may be a factor that today is waning among artists no less than among the general population as well. For example, could you imagine any artist today working thirty years on a single painting. (I once worked on one for thirty days.) Okay, it was a BIG painting, but thirty years? It was an important painting too, depicting The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, and anyone who knows anything about American history will remind you there were 56 names signed on the dotted lines. (I only counted at most 44 heads in the painting.) And, I'll grant you, it takes a while to paint even just 44 portraits, but even at that, thirty years Incredible!

General George Washington, Before the
Battle of Trenton, 1792, John Trumbull

The artist, of course, was John Trumbull, and anyone who has ever cracked an American history book has, no doubt, seen the painting. Trumbull was fortunate enough to have been a young man when he started it. He was born in 1756 in Lebanon, Connecticut, and it takes very little math to quickly realize that date and place, just twenty years before the American Revolution puts the man front and center for one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the whole world. Trumbull was just finishing up at Harvard when the war started. He'd already begun a painting career studying with John Singleton Copley in Boston, and not unlike many young men inconvenienced by impending war, he split the country. He went to England to study painting with fellow countryman, Benjamin West. Perhaps feeling guilty however, he returned shortly to find himself appointed as an aide-de-camp to no less than the commanding general, Washington himself.

The Declaration of Independence, 1795, John Trumbull

The connections Trumbull established during the war years were to serve him well later on. Shortly after the war, Trumbull decided to pick up his art studies where he left off and returned to England.  Dumb move--he was picked up and charged with treason. Eventually the charges were dropped and he learned there how to paint in the English Grand Manner of West, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Returning to this country, his head full of big ideas about painting the grand war in the grand manner of the Grand Manner, he started his epic, thirty-year painting. In the process, he quickly became regarded as the best portrait painter around, except for Gilbert Stuart. And when his rival was out of country, he did well, traveling up and down the East coast, capturing in oil sketches the likenesses of the men whose faces would fill his grand masterpiece. In the meantime, he managed to paint very competent portraits of nearly all the military and political figures of his time. Late in his life, building upon the popular success of his Declaration of Independence painting, he received a government commission to do four enormous history paintings for the rotunda of the new Capitol. But by that time, old and tired, and bitter over his having never received the credit he felt was due him as a great artist, he was well past his prime. The Capitol works are at best, stale and academic. In his declining years, an annuity from Yale College in exchange for his personal collection of paintings, saved him from poverty and in the process, established the Yale University Trumbull Museum. He died in 1843 at the age of eighty-seven, the most patient artist who ever lived.

Since 1976, the reverse side of the much-maligned two-dollar bill  has
featured a slightly cropped etching of Trumbull's thirty-year painting effort.

John Sloan

John Sloan Self-portrait, 1890

Every time an artist receives a rejection slip from a major juried competition he or she had their heart set upon "making," there usually wells up from within feelings not only of dejection and dismay, but very often the urge to rebel as well. It's a universal feeling and probably a healthy venting of pent up anger too. Individually, we feel helpless before the megalithic "art establishment" but in sharing these feelings with other artists, sometimes we can "make a difference." Among rebellious artists at least, the revolt of the French Impressionists against the Academy des Beaux-arts during the turbulent years of the 1870s rises to historic proportions just short of that given world wars or great depressions in the general history books. But we're tempted to think of this as some kind of albeit monumental, but nonetheless isolated incident. Strangely enough however, it wasn't. Similar "wars" have taken place in Italy, Germany, England, and in this country. France was just the first of many.

Roofs, Summer Night, 1906, etching, John Sloan.
In the days before air-conditioning, a heatwave in
New York City was not a pretty sight.

In this country, it happened in 1908. The Rebels were nicknamed by the press "The Eight," and the art establishment, as in France thirty years before, was our own, National Academy of Design. The Edouard Manet of the group urging them on was Philadelphia artist and teacher, Robert Henri, and the Claude Monet leading the rebellion was John Sloan. Outraged that his paintings of New York street scenes, and those of his friends, were rejected outright by the Academy for their yearly exhibition as being too "raw," depicting subjects unworthy of an artist's attention, Sloan led "The Eight" to MacBeth's Gallery where they staged their own version of the infamous "Salon des Refuse" to perfectly coincide with the Academy Exhibition. Already horrified by the group's macho painting style and gritty, gloomy subject matter, the Academy was further angered by this deliberate affront to their previously sacrosanct dominance of the New York art world

Wake of the Ferry II, 1911, John Sloan

Sloan was a hard-bitten Philadelphia newspaper illustrator, well fitted for the artistic trench warfare employed by what later came to be called the Ashcan School. Born in 1871, he was a mixed breed, part reporter, part artist, no stranger to the streets of Philadelphia. His illustrations having been replaced by photochemical reproduction at the "Philadelphia Press," Sloan packed up his newlywed wife and followed Henri to New York in 1903 where he struggled in poverty to paint and still earn a living by working at various commercial art jobs. He brought with him to New York and to his painting a reporter's appreciation of the hard facts unhampered by the "rules" of academic standards. His 1907 The Wake of the Ferry II (above) and his 1912 McSorley's Bar (bottom) are typical of the social (as opposed to photographic) realism he brought to his subjects. "The Eight" show was both the opening shot and the turning point of the war. Soon after, Sloan began to have work accepted in shows at the Pennsylvania Academy, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Commissions began to come in to providing etchings to illustrate books. Still it was 1913 before he sold his first painting, and 1924 before he again found a steady job, this time as an instructor at the famed, Art Student's League. And it several years after that before his work came to be grudgingly accepted by the National Academy. He died in 1951 at the age of eighty, no longer a rebel, but still a battle-scarred veteran of the war of "The Eight."

McSorley's Bar, 1912, John Sloan

John Rogers

Sculptor, John Rogers with a typical work
in clay.

Every so often, as I peruse (devour might be a better word) various volumes on the subject of art history, a name jumps out at me. That's what happened when, several years ago, I came upon the name of John Rogers. Why? Well, John Rogers was the name of my mother's father--my maternal grandfather. It's just a coincidence, of course. They weren't even the same generation, though my mother's family did hail from Massachusetts where the sculptor, John Rogers, was born in 1829, so there's always the possibility he might be a distant ancestor. He could have been my grandfather's grandfather, but I don't think so. In any case, I love his work. In many ways, his genre sculpture groups would make him something of a 19th century, 3-D Norman Rockwell, except that many of his works had a very serious subject matter.  He was an abolitionist zealot. His first major work, Slave Auction gained him almost instant fame as it was co-opted by the abolitionist movement as a visible, tangible depiction of all that was detestable in the institution of slavery.

The Fugitive's Story, 1869, John Rogers

Rogers wanted to be an artist, even as a boy, but an economic disaster effecting the family fortunes forced him to become a mechanic instead. Still, in his spare time, he liked to model small, realistic figures in clay. Eventually he saved up enough money to travel to Europe (conveniently during the Civil War years) where he immersed himself in Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. Though the anatomical studies perhaps served him well, when he returned, his style was little changed. He was not interested in carving Italian rocks but modeling American clay. While other American sculptors were carving pristine, white marble nudes in a Neoclassical mode, he turned his hand toward groups of figures.  His 1869 grouping, The Fugitive's Story, is typical.  It depicts John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, and William Lloyd Garrison (all leaders in the Abolitionist Movement) grouped around a small desk, listening intently to a young mother with an infant in her arms, telling of her daring escape from slavery.

1875, John Rogers

Later, as his popularity grew, he turned to more lighthearted subjects such as Checkers, up at the Farm (1875).  Rogers was the first sculptor to copyright his works. And, capitalizing upon their popular appeal, he set up a factory to cast them in plaster. Each grouping, approximately two feet tall, sold for as little as ten to twenty dollars. Some of the castings reached issues of up to ten thousand copies. New pieces were eagerly awaited by his devotees. For several years he put out up to five new works per year. Eventually, more expensive versions came to be cast in bronze. Each grouping was quite realistically modeled with a wealth of narrative detail, easily making him the most popular American sculptor of the nineteenth century--also the richest. Of course this too would lead me to believe that he was not one of my mother's distant relatives. Insofar as I know, there is no history of great wealth on the Rogers side of the family. And alas, not on the Lane side either.

The Council of War, 1868, John Rogers, depicts
Grant, Lincoln, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton 

John Frederick Kensett

John Frederick Kensett in his studio, 1866.

There are three areas of this country where painting in the form of landscapes have their strongest hold. Basically they mark three of the four "corners" of our map--the Northwest, the Southwest, and the Northeast. Florida, I guess, has so many other things going for it (also no mountains) that it seems to be pretty much on a par with the rest of the country with this regard. Naturally, having been settled the longest, it is the Northwest with the longest and strongest landscape tradition, dating back six or seven generations to the Hudson River School and the work of Alvin Fisher, Thomas Doughty, and Thomas Cole. And lest you think only of rocks and hills and rivers and trees, these and other landscape painters in this area also strolled out along the coast adding seascapes to their portfolios. It was, and still is (despite the encroachment of "civilization") one of the most beautiful parts of our country for a painter.

Bash Bish Falls, 1855-60,
John Frederick Kensett, (one of many)

Marking the second, of the six or seven generations to have painted the scenery extending up the Hudson into the Catskill, Adirondack, Berkshire, and White Mountains, the name John Frederick Kensett comes to the fore. Born in 1816, about the time the first generation was just beginning to paint the region, as with so many beginning young artists of the time, Kensett first studied engraving. It seems to have been a practical way to earn a living and study the arts at the same time in early American times. And, like nearly every other would-be painter of the time, he made the obligatory trip to Europe. He stayed seven years. And when he came back, his landscapes were nothing like the busy, often idealized, supernaturally realistic paintings of the first generation.

Lake George, 1860-69, John frederick Kensett

Kensett's landscapes and seascapes were picturesque, pristine, clean looking, and always, suffused with light, so atmospheric one almost forgets to look at the land in the landscape. And always there was water, either the sea, or Lake George in the Adirondacks (above), or Bash Bish Falls (above, left, don't you just love that name) in the Berkshires. He even ventured so far as to paint the granddaddy of them all at the time, Niagara (bottom). Kensett was no slave to the landscape, though. If it would improve his composition, he quite often rearranged the landscape, moving trees, islands, even whole mountains at will (the original man who could move mountains, no doubt). It would appear he was a painter of landscapes, not a landscape painter.  And when he passed the brushes to the next generation of Northeastern painters, they found the simplified grandeur of his work just one small step from the American Impressionism that was shortly to follow.

View of Niagara Fallls, 1855, John Frederick Kensett