Studio: international art (53.1911)

Reviews and Notices

tained none of the paintings belonging to public
■collections, and moreover, many works belonging
to private owners were missing; while the earlier
period of the artist's ceuvre was incompletely
represented, mainly because it was Ivanoffs habit
to burn wholesale those of his early studies and
sketches which had ceased to satisfy him. But
even in this somewhat laconic shape the exhibition
with its hundred and fifty items revealed a highly
interesting personality and one that Russian art
critics have by no means duly appreciated.

Serge Vassilievitch Ivanoff, who was born in 1864,
combined the instinctive temperament of a painter
susceptible to colour-impressions of every kind
with that modern type of Russian intellect which
never ceases to react on the often intolerable
politico-social relations of the country. Among
Russian artists such types are not rare,
especially in the older generation, and it was
they who piloted the group of " Peredvishniki"
(Itinerants) into that impasse where so much
genuine talent came to grief. With Ivanoff the
painter always remained supreme, but there is no
denying that the conflict between his artistic
nature and his social leanings often had the effect
of checking and impoverishing his production, and
at certain periods may have been the cause of that
" Slav unproductiveness " which has been imputed
to him.

Even in his earliest essays, mostly of the genre
species, dating from the second half of the eighties,
Ivanoff showed himself to be an artist with an
exceedingly fine sense of colour, and an habitual
preference for gentle, harmonious tone relations,
and in later years he repeatedly made use of the
same colour-motives. Thus at the exhibition
there were works, such as a street scene as viewed
from the studio window, a wooden shed in a
village, and various studies, which had been
painted with so much sense of tone and with
such harmony of colour that not very many
pictures by artists of that period would have stood
comparison with them. Under the influence of
the "Peredvishniki," Ivanoff then sought his
motives among those Russian emigrants who
wander thousands of miles eastwards across the
Steppes in search of new land to cultivate, but few
records of this period remain extant. Towards
the end of the nineties Ivanoff devoted himself in
chief measure to the painting of historic genre
pictures and found here a field in which he reaped
his greatest successes. Readers of The Studio

are familiar with several of these works in which
Russia's past, as seen by the prismatic vision of
a modern artist, has been characteristically por-
trayed with historic fidelity, and in which incident-
ally Ivanoff was able to express his hatred of the
barbaric and servile elements in the character of his
countrymen. While they never descend to the level
of propagandist achievements, there is often to be
found in these works a strong social note. This
is true with still greater force of certain pictures
and sketches to which the revolutionary period of
1904-5 gave the impulse, and which one had an
opportunity of admiring for the first time in the
posthumous exhibition under notice.

Among this group of works interest was
focussed on the Episode of the Year 1905, here
reproduced, which I should be inclined to regard
as one of Ivanoff's best works. He has here
interpreted with consummate mastery the dramatic
tension which marks this encounter between the
military and the band of scarcely visible demon-
strators with their red flag, the breathless still-
ness of the tragic moment, and also the colour-
contrast of the grey square with the luminous
red and yellow walls of the houses. I would
mention also his every expressive sketch of a
popular orator addressing a meeting with passion-
ate gesticulations, as well as that of a troop of
mounted gendarmes occupying the courtyard of the
Moscow University. In these works Ivanoff's very
pronounced talent for composition impresses one—
his gift for marshalling figures and arranging them
effectively—a point in which generally speaking very
few modern Russian painters excel. Along with
his great ability as a draughtsman, and the intensity
with which he grasps the characteristic features of
a subject—in this connection many of Ivanoff's
studies of peasants betray an affinity with Mal-
yavine's method of painting these types—this gift for
composition is certainly to be regarded as one ot
the chief qualities of the deceased painter. In
another country and under more favourable con-
ditions Sergius Ivanoff would assuredly have attained
to a much higher status than he did in his native
country. P. E.

REVIEWS AND NOTICES

The Painters of Japan. By Arthur Morrison.
(London: T. C. and E. C. Jack.) ^5. $s. od. net.
—A valuable contribution has been made by Mr.
Morrison in this work towards giving a systematic
and comprehensive survey of the development of

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