Pride and the Politics of Nationality in Russia’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, 1757–1807
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2010.00782.x
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)European Political History Analysis
ResumoDetail of Vladimir Borovikovsky, Portrait of Murtaza Kuli, 1796 (plate 9). Vladimir Borovikovsky, Portrait of Murtaza Kuli, 1796. Oil on canvas, 284 × 189.5 cm. St Petersburg: State Russian Museum. Photo: State Russian Museum. In the first half of the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as a Russian school of painting. There was nowhere for Russian painters to acquire a comprehensive artistic education. Barely any of them had more than a local reputation. The infrastructure of an art market in the form of dealers, galleries, and exhibition spaces was non-existent, and those patrons who did buy secular painting preferred the work of foreign artists. The long and venerable tradition of icon painting was thriving, but, for contemporary Russians, icons were not works of art, but sacred objects whose primary function was to transport the viewer to a higher spiritual realm. While there were professional artists who made a living by selling paintings for secular settings, they were relatively few, and had yet to experience anything like the status or commercial success enjoyed by their western European peers. Compare the fortunes of the Englishman James Thornhill (1675–1734) and his contemporary, Ivan Nikitin (c. 1680–after 1742), both of whom feature among the preeminent painters of their generation in their respective countries. For his decorative schemes for St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, and some of Britain’s celebrated country houses, Thornhill was rewarded with a knighthood and retired to his family estate to pursue a second career as a Member of Parliament. Nikitin, by contrast, worked where the government sent him; he earned less than a third of the salaries offered to European artists working in Russia at the time, and he was exiled to Siberia for lampooning a high-ranking figure in the Russian Orthodox Church. In Russia, the concept of the independent, free-thinking painter, let alone a substantial, professional body of artists, simply did not exist. Yet by the second half of the nineteenth century, cultural commentators in Russia were largely agreed that a national school of painting had appeared, even if they fiercely debated what direction that school should now take. Many painters had become household names in educated Russian society, and a few had acquired pan-European renown. There were regular exhibitions of painting in Moscow, St Petersburg, and some provincial towns, and a new generation of patrons was collecting Russian art. From the 1860s, Russian painters were also exhibiting at international exhibitions, where Russian and foreign critics alike commented on the ‘national character’ of their art. As the history painter Viacheslav Shvarts remarked sardonically at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867: ‘civilized France was surprised that the barbarians have their style, and, moreover, an original one.’1 In short, there was now a collective identity among Russian painters, who had evolved from untrained individuals in awe of their western European counterparts, to proud professionals claiming their place on the international stage. This article traces the roots of that group identity by exploring the early history of the ‘Imperial Academy of the Three Most Distinguished Arts’, which was founded in St Petersburg in 1757. Following Holger Hoock’s lead in his impressive account of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, it seeks to explore the way in which the forging of a national artistic institution gave voice to cultural patriotism, even if, in Russia, conceptualization of the national role of the arts initially took place against a backdrop of dependence on foreign artists.2 In St Petersburg, the Academy’s champions aimed to professionalize painting, sculpture, and architecture, and to further the education and careers of Russian artists in all three disciplines. Painfully aware of the tardiness of their country’s artistic development in any modern, European sense, however, they acknowledged the absence of appropriate expertise within Russia to realize these aspirations. Instead, their plan required intellectual transfer from foreign artists, and the embrace of western European methods and imagery both as an expression of a modern sensibility, and as a didactic tool.3 As in other walks of life, the advancement of national interests was to take place by adapting practices which would put Russia on a par with the west, rather than by promoting alternative strengths to audiences abroad. Yet if those involved in the early years of the Academy relied on western European artists to galvanize local developments, there were other, more ambivalent attitudes towards foreign involvement in Russian artistic affairs. Indeed, one of the prime reasons behind the foundation of the new Academy was to counteract the dominance of foreign artists in Russia’s first Academy of Arts, which had existed within the Academy of Sciences since the 1720s. The early history of the new Academy thus reveals a web of conflicting loyalties – to nation, state, profession, and locality – which underpinned but also complicated Russia’s quest to create a body of art which it could call its own. By tracing the Academy’s attempts to regulate the teaching and practice of painting, this article addresses the way in which the institutionalization of artistic practice was shaped by the ebb and flow of nationalist rhetoric in the educational sphere. It then attends to the work of two of the Academy’s first great portraitists, Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky, in order to draw out the social and cultural context in which they operated, and the international dialogues into which they routinely engaged. The organization of art and artists in eighteenth-century Russia is thus considered not in isolation, but as a critical component of a wider European mainstream which can shed light on the realization (or otherwise) of a national school of art. Russia’s quest to establish an academy of arts dates from the early eighteenth century. Following various unsuccessful proposals to found an academy during the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), the Emperor envisaged provision for the arts within the Academy of Sciences, which was founded in 1724. As he wrote to Prince Boris Kurakin: ‘we have ordered an academy of sciences and arts to be founded here and have ordered our personal physician Laurentius Blumentrost to seek out and hire the necessary people.’4 Despite various attempts to create a separate artistic institution in the following decades, it was not until the scientist, writer, and future secretary of state Mikhail Lomonosov joined the fray in the middle of the century that progress was made in the establishment of an independent academy. Lomonosov made the tactically brilliant decision to conscript the support of Count Ivan Shuvalov, then a favourite of unassailable influence at Empress Elizabeth’s court, who submitted a report to the Russian Senate proposing the foundation of an academy of arts in late 1757. The proposal was readily agreed, and the new academy opened in Shuvalov’s palace in St Petersburg in early 1758. Why was it deemed so important to disassociate the arts from the Academy of Sciences? At the heart of this matter lies the shift in understanding of what constituted ‘art’ that took place in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century. In the early decades, projects for an academy of arts focused more on trade and craft skills than on the fine arts, and artists were conceived as craftsmen who could serve the interests of the state by illustrating scientific works and trade manuals; designing medical and technical instruments, medals and coins; drafting maps, charts and architectural plans; and producing imagery for festivities or diplomatic events.5 Such images were widely disseminated in engravings, which have been seen as ‘the essential figurative art-form of Petrine Russia’.6 Accordingly, in the 1720s and 1730s, the Academy of Arts within the Academy of Sciences was primarily a print-making facility, a list of its members of 1728 confirming that the majority of students were engravers at that time. The fact that painters rarely signed their work or portrayed themselves (Andrei Matveev’s Self-Portrait with Wife of c. 1729 being the only known self-portrait of the period) is a further indication of the inchoate position of painting as an established profession. As the century progressed, however, there was growing recognition among the educated elite of the more elevated status of painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as improvements in standards in all three disciplines. This was thanks in no small part to the employment of foreign specialists (a longstanding practice in Russia which accelerated under Peter the Great), and the training of local artists which they were contracted to provide. Yet this shift in understanding made little impact in the Academy of Sciences. A decree of 1726, for example, discussed various individuals who lacked the capabilities to engage in the ‘higher sciences’, but who nevertheless wished to acquire proficiency in ‘other arts of benefit to human life’.7 It is important not to overstate the distinction between the sciences and the arts: the Royal Society in London, revered by many in the Russian academic establishment, was founded to promote learning in general, and valued many arts at this time; the word ‘science’ did not emerge until the 1830s, ‘natural philosophy’ having been the normal term; and many occupational definitions remained fluid until the twentieth century.8 Nevertheless, notions of the visual arts as less demanding activities of secondary importance recurred in the Academy of Sciences throughout the century, regardless of changing perceptions elsewhere. The second-class status of the arts was even alluded to in its charter of 1747, which declared that those pupils of the institution’s gymnasium who were deemed unfit for admission as students of the Academy of Sciences would instead be sent to its Academy of Arts.9 These views of the Academy of Arts as a minor affiliate motivated the campaign to establish a separate institution which would both operate and be assessed on its own terms. There are two words for ‘art’ in Russian: iskusstvo, which in addition implies skill, proficiency, or craftsmanship; and khudozhestvo, which emphasizes a higher sense of artistry. It is significant that the new Academy adopted the latter term. Its prime aims were to establish artists as legally recognized professionals bolstered by a comprehensive and respected educational path; to create a forum to safeguard and further their economic interests; and to endow them with social standing commensurate with their experience and expertise. These concerns are common to professionalism in general, as Aaron Cohen explains: ‘Professionals translate specialized knowledge and skills into social and economic status, and they seek to mobilize an occupational space to protect their credentialing power, products, and markets from non-professional sources of authority.’10 In practical terms, such goals were realized at the Academy in multiple ways. Its first statutes of 1764 (published in 1765) exempted artists from compulsory (including military) state service and forbade the enserfment of any of its graduates, cementing their status as free professionals.11 Social recognition was conferred by granting all students who successfully completed the academic programme the title of Artist (later subdivided into Classed and Unclassed Artist) and the lowest, fourteenth rank in the Table of Ranks, the ladder of promotion devised by Peter the Great which could be climbed through military, naval, civil, or court service. Experienced artists could later apply for the title of Academician, which brought a state salary and pension, among other entitlements, and carried the tenth rank. Thus the Academy not only attempted to control entry to the ranks of artists and to monitor their conduct, as was common to the professions: it also gave the educational, social, and economic rights of artists statutory force. But this is only part of the story, for the founders of the new Academy were as anxious to establish the authority of Russian artists and create a stage for their work as they were to professionalize the arts, much as the fostering of a native school of art was a professed raison d’être of the Royal Academy in London a decade later. The root of this concern lay in the preferential treatment which foreign artists had long received at the Russian court. As early as the 1560s, Ivan IV had enticed English artisans to Muscovy with a promise of upkeep for life,12 and by the eighteenth century western European artists working in Russia enjoyed remarkably favourable terms. In 1702, Peter the Great had even issued a manifesto which afforded foreigners not only higher pay than was usual, but better living conditions and social status as well. Louis Caravaque’s contract of 1715, for example, entitled him to travel expenses, an apartment free of charge for three years, and exemption from customs duties and military service for ten years. There were exceptions, with some foreigners earning salaries commensurate with those of Russian artists. But by the middle of the century many foreign artists were earning an average of 1,500 roubles per annum, compared to salaries of approximately 500 roubles for Russian artists who worked at the Chancellery of Construction (the institution which Peter had founded in 1706 to oversee the construction of St Petersburg).13 So high were the rewards for foreign artists that Georg Christoph Groot’s annual pay of 1,650 roubles in St Petersburg (where he worked as a court painter from 1741 until his death in 1749) was more than ten times that of his father, even though Groot senior was himself a successful court artist in the family’s native Württemberg.14 The discrepancy in pay and working conditions led to resentment in Russian artistic circles (not least as some foreign artists had been known to mistreat Russian apprentices),15 and an anti-foreign rhetoric permeated even some of the early campaigns for an academy of arts. In 1725, the courtier Mikhail Avramov had declared the need to dispense with the services of foreigners by training Russian artists to a sufficient standard.16 Vasily Tatishchev then added fuel to the fire by claiming that his proposal for an ‘Academy of Handicrafts’ of 1730 had been stymied by the German-born courtier and diplomat Andrei Osterman, who ‘out of some sort of hatred suppressed the plan’.17 Matters came to a head following the reign of Empress Anna (1730–40), who had attempted to limit the power and influence of Russian nobles by elevating German Balts (largely an ethnically German population in what is now Estonia and Latvia) to high positions in military and court life. The Academy of Sciences was not exempt from such politics: by the accession of Empress Elizabeth in 1741, forty-four out of seventy-two foreigners who worked there were from ‘the Prussian or German nations’, and many occupied top posts.18 Jacob Staehlin, a German professor at the Academy of Sciences and director of its artistic operations from 1747, was unapologetic about his efforts to recruit his compatriots to work in Russia. ‘I will always strive to establish here those of my countrymen who have distinguished themselves through their art.’19 But the capital’s cultural politics became increasingly fraught with opposition to what was seen as excessive German influence at the Academy. In a report of January 1742, Johann Schumacher (the first secretary and librarian of the Academy of Sciences, as well as head of the Chancellery of Construction) was accused of neglecting the interests of the Russian state by failing to educate Russians. Instead, Schumacher was charged with training and employing mainly Germans, who would never commit as fully as Russians would to the promotion of Russia’s artistic interests.20 Andrei Nartov, an inveterate campaigner for an independent artistic institution, pointed out that not one Russian had been promoted to the position of professor in the entire history of the existing Academy of Arts.21 Most damning of all was a further report of December 1742 which claimed that the Germans in the Academy had been so negligent in their pedagogic duties that ‘a Russian would not be able to rise to their position in twenty years.’22 Thus perceptions arose of a pernicious coterie of German scholars and officials in the Academy of Sciences who deliberately obstructed the progress of Russians in order to safeguard their own position. To their critics, their loyalty lay not with Russia, but was shaped by the concern to advance their own and their compatriots’ careers. Such was the atmosphere of quasi-xenophobic sentiment and recrimination in which the new Academy of Arts emerged. Feeding off the disquiet which the apparent self-interest of Schumacher and other foreigners in the Academy of Sciences aroused, the champions of the new institution garnered support by proposing an organization which would provide a proper duty of care to Russian artists. This is manifest in the 1757 proposal, in which the mobilization of native artists was formulated explicitly as a corrective to the unwarranted dominance of foreigners. ‘It is essential to establish an Academy of Arts whose fruits, when they appear, will not only be to the glory of this Empire, but will also be of great benefit to those state and civic projects for which foreigners of mediocre knowledge are receiving substantial sums of money and enriching themselves, but who then return home without yet leaving a single Russian knowledgeable in any art.’23 The desire to promote Russian artists to the positions occupied by foreigners was clearly a prime concern. These arguments go some way to explain why it was deemed necessary to establish an Academy of Arts when one already existed: to recognize the status of the fine arts and of artists; to address the failings of the existing institution; and to counter the disproportionate authority of foreign artists, ensuring instead the proper education and elevation of Russian artists. But, as ever when one is dealing with questions of national pride and nation-building – in this case, nation-building in the form of institutionalizing a ‘national’ body of artists – things are never as simple as they seem. For while the proposal of 1757 declared that the new Academy would be part of Moscow University, it would be based in St Petersburg ‘for the reason that the best masters do not wish to go to Moscow, both because they hope [in St Petersburg] to receive work from the court, and because of the better allowances for foreigners here’.24 The authors of the proposal were clearly mindful of the higher remuneration for foreigners in the capital city, and of their greater likelihood there of winning commissions for the imperial court. As a result the new institution, for all its nationalistic intentions, put itself out to an extraordinary degree in order to entice foreign artists into its employ. In this, the new Academy succeeded, as the first artists to join its staff were all foreign. The inaugural painting classes were held in Shuvalov’s palace by the Italian history painter and engraver Pietro Rotari, who had come to Russia in 1756 at the invitation of Empress Elizabeth. Following Shuvalov’s written request to the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture to recommend suitable recruits, more formal arrangements were then made with Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain and Nicolas François Gillet, who arrived from France in May 1758 to head the painting and sculpture departments.25 The following year George Frederick Shmidt joined them to run the new engraving class. These men had impressive credentials (the Frenchmen as prominent members of the Académie, and Shmidt as a Prussian court artist), and their appointments strike at the heart of the dilemma which the officials of the Academy faced. Perturbed by the absence of native Russians in the faculty of the original Academy of Arts, they nevertheless felt compelled to draw on the expertise of foreign artists until such time as their compatriots could hold their own as teachers and practitioners of the visual arts. Count Aleksandr Stroganov, one of the first two honorary members of the Academy and, later, a fervent advocate of Russian artists during his presidency of the institution from 1800 to 1811, glossed over the unpatriotic implications of these appointments by lauding the achievements of Russian students under Shmidt in particular. ‘The Academy gave [Shmidt] a few pupils, whose rapid success under the leadership of a skilful master proved that the only thing lacking for our nation to distinguish itself in the arts has been good teachers.’26 By mentioning the previous absence of proficient teachers, Stroganov reiterated the earlier criticism of foreign instructors in the Academy of Sciences. Yet there was no escaping the fact that, for all their patriotic sentiment, the founders of the new Academy not only followed the longstanding practice of appointing foreigners to the top posts, but also bent over backwards to accommodate the preferences of these artists by basing the new Academy in St Petersburg. There is, of course, an obvious shift from the German power base in the Academy of Sciences to the French dominance at the new Academy, and there are many possible reasons for this. On a broad level, the shift reflected developments at court. If Empress Anna had favoured German Balts during her reign, Elizabeth (reigned 1741–62) dismissed and even exiled many Germans from Russian government, surrounding herself instead with Russian advisers, and establishing a resplendent Francophile court. Catherine the Great, for her part, was curious about French Enlightenment thinking, associating with philosophes as celebrated as Diderot and Voltaire. Catherine also sought to enhance her cultural capital by purchasing collections as renowned as that of Pierre Crozat, who had served as Treasurer to the King of France. (That the sale of the Crozat collection was brokered by none other than Diderot seemed a particular affront to those who had campaigned to keep the collection in France.) Catherine’s interests were keenly followed by the court-watching elite, which remained francophone long into the nineteenth century. Although it became increasingly common to speak Russian in upper-class society from the 1810s onwards, some noblemen continued to converse almost entirely in French even on the eve of the Revolution of 1917.27 In short, French fashions and habits served as a model for aristocratic Russian culture throughout the conception and early development of the Academy of Arts. Equally significant is the history of French–Russian encounters in the visual arts. As early as 1705–06 Andrei Matveev, Peter the Great’s envoy to France, had written an effusive account of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture founded in Paris in 1648. Matveev had likewise enthused about the Louvre and Versailles, which Peter himself admired, and both tsar and envoy had commissioned portraits from Hyacinthe Rigaud, a leading portraitist at the court of Louis XIV.28 The preeminent painter among the vast influx of foreign talent under Peter was also a Frenchman, Louis Caravaque, who arrived in Russia in 1716, and was appointed court painter in 1724. Like many of Peter’s foreign employees, Caravaque was charged with educating locals as well as undertaking court commissions. His contract stipulated that he not only paint ‘historical pictures, portraits, battle scenes, forests and trees and flowers and beasts in both large and small sizes, also very small portable portraits and histories’, but also that he ‘teach painting to such persons of the Russian nation as His Majesty shall send to him’.29 Such teaching inevitably reflected the French context in which Caravaque had first practised. Moreover, Caravaque’s proposal of 1723 for an institution of artistic education in Russia had made explicit his intention to follow French precedent by establishing ‘an academy of painted art, such as that established in Paris’.30 Caravaque apart, the Academy’s founding father, Shuvalov, was a fluent French speaker and confirmed Francophile who later frequented Paris’s literary salons with such enthusiasm that a contemporary termed him ‘Russian ambassador to the European literary realm’.31 His successor as president of the Academy, Ivan Betskoi, had also lived in Paris, and was personally acquainted with Diderot. These Francophile leanings shaped the new Academy in many ways. In the first place, the constitution of the Academy, set out in the statutes of 1764, was clearly influenced by that which Jean-Baptiste Colbert had established for the Académie exactly a century before. In Russia, the managerial, administrative, and teaching positions, collectively termed the sobranie or assembly, consisted of the president; three rectors and six professors of painting, sculpture, and architecture; two adjunct rectors; six adjunct professors; three professors of perspective, anatomy, history, geography, iconology, and mythology (the statutes did not make clear the correlation between six subjects and three appointments); an inspector, comparable to the Keeper at the Royal Academy, whose job it was to supervise the Academy school; the inspector’s assistant; and a secretary. The statutes also allowed for an unlimited number of Academicians and twelve Honorary Amateurs, and a further category of Honorary Free Associates (a title first bestowed on Falconet and Diderot) was added in 1766.32 These honorary positions matched those in academies across Europe with the exception of the Royal Academy, which chose not to elect honorary members. Significantly, while Academicians in St Petersburg could be foreign or Russian, preference was to be given to Russians in the election of Honorary Amateurs, as they would have a ‘national investment’ in the welfare of the establishment.33 For all its cosmopolitan pretensions, intimations of the Academy’s nationalistic agenda were present from the start. The governance of the institution was overseen by the Council, which initially comprised the president, four professors, and the secretary, though this varied as amendments were made to the statutes in the nineteenth century.34 (To compare, an annual General Assembly of all members of the Royal Academy in London elected a President and a governing Council of eight Academicians, half of whom were replaced each year.)35 Administrative matters were the responsibility of the director (re-designated vice president after 1799), who could be either a professional administrator, or elected from the ranks of professors. The senior managerial posts tended to be state appointments, and some professorships were filled by invitation, but the other positions were elected by the Council or by the wider assembly, and often required the submission of a particular body of work. Those who aspired to be elected an Academician, for example, first had to present work for which, if successful, they were ‘nominated’ (naznachennyi); this then gave them the right to apply for the title of Academician by completing a further work on a set theme, supervised within the walls of the Academy, which would be assessed by the assembly. Adjunct professors were chosen from among the Academicians by the assembly,36 and could be promoted to full professor through a further election which from 1800 required them, too, to submit a specific work. Such personnel broadly reflected the categories of the Académie. Indeed, the French model of staffing and membership prevailed in almost all of the academies of art which sprang up in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, and a huge number of Academicians of that period received part or all of their education in Paris.37 Unique to Russia, though, was the mapping of each position onto the Table of Ranks, with the right to the privileges and uniform attendant on each rank. Thus the president was granted fourth rank (the same as that awarded to a general-lieutenant in the army), while rectors, adjunct rectors, professors, and adjunct professors acquired sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth rank respectively.38 This formulation of academic appointments as civil service posts reveals a level of state control which was evident elsewhere in the Academy, too. In contrast to other academies, for example, the Russian institution had its own boarding school (founded in 1764) which students entered at the age of just five or six, progressing if sufficiently talented to the Academy proper after nine years, and graduating at the age of twenty-one. Those pupils who failed to qualify for the painting, sculpture, or architecture faculties were instead taught a vocational craft, such as metalwork, clock making, or joinery – a feature which reflects the commercial interests of many contemporary academies, which aspired to meet the exigencies of trade and manufacture as much as those of the fine arts.39 (Nearly forty years later, the Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Royal Academy was to reflect on this aspect of the Imperial Academy’s provision and wonder whether it was a feature which London, too, should adopt.)40 For Pevsner, the combination of boarding school, academy, and trade school all under one roof was a distinguishing feature of the Russian Academy, and one which he suggests stemmed from the underdeveloped state of Russian education in general at the time.41 Recent scholars have drawn attention to other factors, such as the state’s desire to mould the students’ moral development by isolating them from any pernicious influence in society at
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