Day 330 - Miscellany and Repin

 

February 3, 2023

Walking into gallery 827 feels like walking into a pre-Impressionist past - conventional, realistic canvases characterized  by precise, tight brushwork and often displaying  romanticized images of peasants.  But in fact, many of these works are contemporaneous with the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings I've been looking at in other galleries. The introductory signage explains that the paintings in the gallery exemplify "salon painting" of the kind endorsed by the Academie des Beaux Arts, and that such paintings were profitable and were especially popular among the Met's early patrons.   One can imagine that the paintings' French provenance,  their prettified, uncontroversial subjects,  and their technical proficiency made them highly suitable decorative objects - and worthwhile investments -  for wealthy Americans of the Gilded Age. 

The gallery also houses a number of paintings by non-French painters - artists I've never heard of, including Norwegians Fritz Thaulow and Christian Krone, German Max Liebermann, and Dutch Antin Mauve. I imagine the museum couldn't figure out a better place to put these works. A portrait by a Russian artist, Ilia Efimovich Repin, who returned to Russia after studying in France, grabs my attention. The subject is Repin's friend, the author Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin, a pacifist and idealist, and,  judging from Repin's depiction, a tortured soul. The painting, which measures about 40 inches high and 30 inches wide, employs a sober palette of blacks and grays and focuses attention on Garshin's hunched shoulders, disheveled hair, and piercing gaze. I suspect that this is not an image an early museum patron would have selected to adorn a home - it's far too disquieting.  According to the caption, Garshin committed suicide at age 33.

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