ILYA IVANOVICH MASHKOV
. . . These fruits, loaves and meat are depicted with a skill almost comparable to that displaced by the masters of the Dutch still life in their achievements hitherto unsurpassed. Mashkov's canvases are not only truthful to the point of illusion but are possessed of a rare beauty and radiance. His use of colour resembles the swelling chords of an organ.
A. Lunacharsky
THE NAME OF ILYA IVANOVICH MASHKOV is associated above all with still-life paintings remarkable for an elemental intensity of colour which verges at times on the violent. Displaying a scope and boldness unusual in his contemporaries as well as an acute feeling for the materiality of things, Mashkov's bright canvases are striking for the breadth of their pictorial range, for the deep sonority of their colours.
Mashkov was one of the boldest innovators in Russian painting at the beginning of the twentieth century, an outstanding painter whose works contributed to the development of Soviet art, an experienced teacher who passed on his skill to many who would later become famous artists. Each of these aspects of his creative activity is instructive and deserving of special attention. Mashkov developed as a painter in the years preceding the Revolution, at a time when artistic life in Russia was unusually complex and full of contradiction. In the field of art there were clashes between various principles and ideas, manifested as a struggle between numerous schools. Painters of an older generation, — members of the Society for Circulating Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki), the World of Art and the Union of Russian Artists, — were still active. At the same time a host of aesthetic and artistic conceptions, precarious in their theoretical foundation, were receiving wide attention. The overthrow of traditional forms, aesthetic nihilism, the loss of firm links with reality could not, however, delay the development of art. The search for new paths and new creative principles went on, and Russian art was enriched by some remarkable achievements. Just in this period there appeared a number of talented young artists.
Despite the diversity of the new ideas and trends, one may clearly discern in Russian painting of this time a general tendency towards the perfecting of artistic form. Artists were striving for a certain synthesis, they wished to reveal the generalized meaning of phenomena not susceptible of concretization in time, and therefore not infrequently they refused to represent movement and action in their work. As a result of this loss of interest in the subject painting, the still life became the dominant genre. Landscape and portrait also occupied an important place. And particular attention was paid to the renewal of painterly techniques.
The evolving of a new system of pictorial representation advanced through a series of agonizing explorations, which were often far from successful. The principle of verisimilitude, which had prevailed in nineteenth century painting, was supplanted by that of conventionality. This testified to the inner bond linking the new trends in Russian painting with Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism, for the exponents of those schools sought support not in the traditions of European Post-Renaissance realism, but rather in principles adopted from the visual arts of different peoples and ages. The search for formal solutions appropriate to these new stylistic norms was of decisive importance. This tendency is not difficult to perceive in the works of such artists of the late nineteenth — early twentieth centuries as Ruble, Servo and K. Korovin. It was characteristic of the members of the World of Art and the Blue Rose associations, but most strongly developed in the work of artists of the Jack of Diamonds group and other representatives of the so-called avant-garde in the beginning of this century.
In the artistic movements at the beginning of the twentieth century there was much romanticism, much anarchic rebelliousness. Inner contradictions were most sharply revealed in the various trends of the avant-garde movement where subjectivism, having reached the limit of non-representational depiction, was opposed by the real achievements of a few artists of the Jack of Diamonds group, like Konchalovsky, Mashkov, Falk. Lentulov. Kuprin, Larionov and others. These painters discovered a successful balance in which expressiveness of colour, plasticity and decorative composition helped express a particularly intense, yet at the same time integral perception of reality.
Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov (1881—1944) was born in the village of Mikhaylovskaya in the Don area. His parents were of peasant origin. At the age of fifteen he lost his father, who had pursued various trades and had had to endure constant poverty. From an early age Mashkov displayed an aptitude for handicrafts; he also liked to draw. However, the cruel and degrading existence he was forced to lead (in his early youth he had been placed in the service of some local traders, supposedly as an apprentice) was least likely to further his attachment to art. He was already in his eighteenth year when he first heard that painting was something to be learned. In 1900 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. After completing his life class, he transferred to the studio of Servo and Korovin. A little earlier Mashkov had begun to give private lessons himself. During his first years in the School he studied avidly and diligently. Then there followed a period of doubt and disillusionment with the creative principles of his teachers, a period which ended with a complete change in his artistic orientation, as a result of which he was expelled from the School in 1910.
This liberation from "academic chains" was to a great extent prompted by Mashkov's first acquaintance with the Hermitage in 1907. In 1908 he went on a trip to Germany, Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Italy and Vienna, during which he got to know the masterpieces of classical art as well as contemporary French painting. Before his departure he had already become familiar with the Shchukin and Morozov collections, where fine examples of the most recent French art were represented, and in 1909 he visited the Golden Fleece Exhibition, which was displaying works by the Fauvists.
Mashkov's answer to his expulsion from the School was to take an active part in the creation of the Jack of Diamonds. The spirit of epater le bourgeois which accompanied the activities of this group prevented critics of the time from discerning the genuine artistic merit of the work produced by its members. The emergence of a new trend in Russian painting and the organization in 1911, by a number of young Moscow artists, of the Jack of Diamonds exhibition society was connected with an eager movement towards expressiveness, decorative quality and the concentrated use of colour — all entirely characteristic of the age. Their experience of European art enabled the artists to pass on boldly towards a generalized representation of nature, refusing to follow the principles of Impressionism. Opponents of narrative painting, illusion and aestheticism, they relied on experiment in pictorial techniques. Hence their impulse towards the detail and their preference for the still life, which was indeed to become the "laboratory" of their new endeavours.
Their fidelity to a constructive line of artistic thought allowed the painters of the Jack of Diamonds group to achieve a synthesis of colour and form in their representation of objects from the surrounding world. They profited by the experience of Cezanne and the Cubists, Cubism being for them not so much a system as a means of enhancing artistic expressiveness. This exploitation of formal expressiveness, as well as the concentrated use of all the resources of painting, led to innovations in the pictorial structure and style of their works. Many artists of the time were attracted to the problem of creating in painting a sui generis artistic equivalent of what was distinctively national in Russian life. Members of the Jack of Diamonds group interpreted this problem as the return of Russian painting to traditions preserved over the centuries in folk art. This link with the principles of folk art and the desire to appropriate its expressiveness of portrayal determined the character of their endeavours. They were full of enthusiasm for the Russian lubok (popular print), the house-painter's sign, the decorated tray, the folk toy. These painters thus enriched contemporary art with the achievements of Russian folk art. The strength of their work lay in the exaggerated emotionality and distinctiveness of their portrayals, in the intensity and concreteness of their colour and in their powerful optimism.
It is well known that the struggle carried on between the Jack of Diamonds and its various opponents did not in fact unite the members of the group. Harmonious as their first public appearance seemed to be, it was quickly followed by a number of internal disagreements, which eventually led to the society's dissolution in 1917. The first signs of Mashkov's divergence from the group date from 1911, the year of his initial rapprochement with the World of Art. In 1916 both Mashkov and Konchalovsky simultaneously went over to this latter association.
By the beginning of the First World War Mashkov was already an acknowledged artist. This was the time of his greatest popularity.
During the years of the Revolution Mashkov was engaged in strenuous social, organizational and pedagogic activity. There was scarcely any time for his own creative work. He was a professor at the Free Studios (the name of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture since the autumn of 1918). Attached to his studio were A. Goncharov, A. Deyneka and other subsequently famous Soviet artists. It was only in 1922, when art exhibitions began again, that the painter's creative activity regained its former scope. He took part in the exhibitions organized by the revived World of Art group and the Society of Moscow Artists (the former Jack of Diamonds).
On his own admission, the years 1923 and 1924 mark a perceptible turning-point in his views on the aims and purposes of art. This coincided with the general impetus of Soviet artists towards realism. In 1922 a new artistic group, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (the AARR), had already made its appearance, and this society was to play a positive role in the formation of realistic art. At the end of 1924 Mashkov, along with his pupils, went over to this organization where he set up art classes. Although he continued to participate in exhibitions held by the Society of Moscow Artists, his creative output in the second half of the twenties is mainly associated with the AARR. He took part in exhibitions of the AARR and was a member of its Board. He left the association in the spring of 1930, when its historical role had already been accomplished. In 1928, for his services in the realm of representational art, the Soviet government awarded Mashkov the title of Merited Artist of the RSFSR. In 1930 he left for his home in the village of Mikhaylovskaya where he lived almost continuously until 1938. He completed his last works in 1943, one year before his death.
Despite the vividness of his style, it is no easy task to define the individual quality of Mashkov's art in so far as it was the product of a whole movement, many features of which were characteristic of their age and common to a fairly wide circle of Russian painters.
Mashkov differed from those close to him in creative disposition by the extreme spontaneity of his artistic talent and by his fervent attachment to the world of objects. These are not, however, the only factors which determined the painter's style. Reflecting the personal element in his creative work. his style is clearly perceived through the plastic features of his pictures. Yet while emphasizing the strong side' of his talent, it is essential not to neglect the painter's weaker aspects, which are-of no small importance where Mashkov is concerned.
In the works completed before 1909, there is as yet no evidence of completely independent talent. Nevertheless, his Model (end of 1907—beginning of 1908), painted! in Serov's class, is well above the average for an apprentice's work.
The still life Apples and Pears on a White Background (1908) was the first won I to be completed after his journey abroad and is close to the principles of late Impressionism. Indeed, it suggests some knowledge of Cezanne's artistic conception. A work dating from the same time, Two Models against a Drapery (1908, Leningrad, private collection), seems to be a compromise between the principles of Impressionism and an impulse towards two-dimensionality and generalized decorativeness.
Mashkov first achieves an individual style in the works of 1909 and 1910. These were portraits, still lifes and landscapes, some of which were shown in Moscow during 1910 and 1911 at an exhibition of the Jack of Diamonds group, while other-were displayed in Paris at the Autumn Salon in 1910. In the paintings of this time-he proclaims a new and unusual conception of beauty. The exaggerated quality of their expression, the careless sweep of their contours, often painted in black, their polychromatic intensity—all this testifies to his denial of the artistic principles of an older generation. The striking starkness of method, the deliberate simplification of technique, reveal an attempt to invest the art of painting with pristine energy, to overcome the refined aestheticism of the fin-de-siecle, with its wavering forms and its faded colours, in short, to restore art to both youth and health. Inspired in his work by the products of folk art, Mashkov was guided largely by the formal expressiveness of the lubok
The Portrait of a Boy in a Patterned Shirt was painted in March, 1909. It is one. of the works which mark the beginning of Mashkov's creative career. As well as demonstrating Mashkov's habit of heaping his early canvases with contrasting colours. this painting already displays a disregard of psychological realism very close to the polemical spirit which would later characterize the works of the Jack of Diamonds group. The artist makes no use of local colour. The pinkish hue of the boy's face is reinforced by the gold of the forehead and the greenish tint of the eye-socket. The hands are painted in contrasting reds, pinks and greens, while a cold shade of pink is also introduced into the dark-green leaves which form a pattern in the background.
Refusing to treat the problem of perspective in a traditional manner, Mashkov reduces the elements of modelling to a bare minimum, as if stretching the image out over the canvas and thereby achieving some intense combinations of colour, largely independent of the representation of light and shade.
In other portraits of this early period—for example, those of V. Vinogradova (1909). E. Kirkaldi (1910), Rubanovich (Portrait of a Lady with Pheasants, about 1910), Mashkov is not only searching for expressiveness of colour, but is also concerned to organize his canvas on two-dimensional lines. In these portraits perspective is almost ousted by surface design. In his Model Seated executed in 1909, for example, the two-dimensional effect disappears under the accumulation of contrasting colours, the artist deliberately avoids exaggerated ornamentality, the picture's thematic and spatial elements remain dominant, the vital connection between model and still life is preserved.
Inspired by the principles of folk art, Mashkov sought to express the immutable essence of thing's through form, dimension and colour. The medium he most consistently used for these endeavours, as well as for his attempts to discover new principles of composition, was the still life. He did not aim at thematic variety; portrayals of fruit and berries on a round dish or plate are frequently encountered in his work. In some instances the artist would strictly adhere to such motifs, as in Still Life with a Pineapple or Still Life. Fruit on a Dish (both about 1910). Sometimes the motif becomes a detail in the total composition, as in Still Life. Berries with a Red Tray in the Background (about 1910), Still Life with Begonias (before 1911), Still Life with Grapes (early 1910s), etc.
The emphatically naive, "primitive" method of portrayal revealed in Still Life with a Pineapple, the bright intensity of its colours, and their use in simplified combinations, bear witness to Mashkov's attempt to view the world through the eyes of the masters of folk art. In his yearning to penetrate the essence of things, to reveal their fixed, "eternal" qualities, he acted decisively, sacrificing subtlety of design and colour and achieving considerable decorative expressiveness. He moved on to various experimental techniques, combining the representative functions of painting with certain qualities inherent in the applied arts. The "fortuitousness" of impressionistic composition was opposed by a blunt emphasis on "structuring". Everything was subordinated to the principles of symmetry and rhythmic alternation. The oval shape of the frame is often repeated both in the disposition of objects and in the outlines of some of them. A plate with a pineapple surrounded by apples, is placed in the centre of the canvas and enclosed by a number of large, multicoloured fruits. The point of view chosen by the painter looking down on his subject from above, allows him to gain an effect of "spatial compression", while the individual objects are portrayed three-dimensionally. The black outlines emphasize the depth of objects and create an impression of stability, subduing the illusion of perspective.