Vasily Ivanovich Surikov

Vasily Ivanovich Surikov (born Jan. 12 [Jan. 24, New Style], 1848, Krasnoyarsk, central Siberia, Russia—died March 3 [March 19], 1916, Moscow, Russia) was a Russian historical painter, one of the few members of the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”) whose work has withstood the test of time.

Surikov, who was of Cossack descent, was born in Siberia in a community that had retained much of its traditional way of life (dating from the pre-Petrine times of Yermak’s conquest of Siberia in the 16th century), including public executions in town squares. So isolated was his community from the rest of Russia that there was no nearby rail link. Having made up his mind to study art, Surikov had to travel to the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg with a caravan transporting frozen fish to the capital. As a result of his birth and upbringing, his contemporaries described him as “a 17th-century man who happened to turn up in the 19th century.” The historical authenticity of the subject matter in Surikov’s main trilogy (The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, 1881; Menshikov at Beryozovo, 1883; and The Boyarynya Morozova, 1887) stems from actual childhood impressions.

And yet in his painting, Surikov was less than precise with the historical facts. For example, he was well aware that the streltsy were not executed in Moscow’s Red Square (as depicted in his painting) but rather in the village of Preobrazhenskoye. He also knew the actual configuration of the boyarynya (noblewoman) Feodosiya Morozova’s fetters—and yet he portrayed them as having an unusually long chain, to suggest a free spirit transcending her captivity. Metaphor permeates his paintings: in Menshikov at Beryozovo, the figure of the disgraced and exiled Aleksandr Menshikov is out of proportion in relation to the space he inhabits. He would not be able to stand up straight in his peasant hut. Further, the candle and candlestick in the centre of the painting obliquely suggest a cross. Surikov, who viewed history as deeply tragic, knew well the difference between the actual event and its emotional or empirical reality. Distortions of perspective in his paintings are meant to make the space of history separate from the space of the viewer’s present. In this way the sledge with the boyarynya rides—in the visual sense—into a dead end, and the actual movement becomes an emblem elevating the heroine above worldly passions and transporting her into history and eternity. The figure of the boyarynya is a black spot against the background of light patterns of the onlookers’ clothing (the painting shows the influence of both French Impressionism and the 16th-century Venetian school), and the observers in the painting view her with compassion as a martyr. Similarly, in The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy, Surikov does not depict the actual events (the execution itself, for instance) but shows a frozen moment in the objective flow of historical time in which no one is innocent or guilty and in which the death of some is inescapable.

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The trilogy of paintings described above, portraying Russia at the end of the pre-Petrine era, was Surikov’s best work. Particularly in The Boyarynya Morozova he reached the pinnacle of his art, almost completely absorbing his subject into pure colour. It is not by chance that the impulses for these historical panels were purely painterly: the image of a black raven on the snow served as the initial motivation behind The Boyarynya Morozova, and the reflection of a candle in the twilight of early morning moved him to produce The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy. In his later work the balance between the idea and the pictorial impulse lessened. In his “apologist” compositions of the second half of the 1890s—such as Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia (1895) and Suvorov Crossing the Alps (1899)—the triumphant patriotism of the subjects no longer corresponds to the dynamism of colour.

Russian historical painting reached its culmination with Surikov’s trilogy. Artists of the following generation—for instance, the painters of the modernist Jack of Diamonds group—saw Surikov as their forerunner.