Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov

Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov (born Jan. 7 [Jan. 19, New Style], 1865, St. Petersburg, Russia—died Nov. 22 [Dec. 5], 1911, Moscow) was a Russian artist whose works reflect a turning point in the style and weltanschauung of Russian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as the shift from realism by way of Impressionism to Art Nouveau.

Serov himself seemed to manifest the link between opposing artistic views and cultural eras. His father, the composer Aleksandr Serov, died when Valentin was six years old. His mother, a musician and writer, was a woman with progressive ideas who was close to the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”) group. Serov’s first teacher was Ilya Repin, and later, at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, he studied with Pavel Chistyakov. A student of the Peredvizhniki, Serov did not diverge from the style of his teachers. He exhibited with the Peredvizhniki (which he joined in 1894) and with the Union of Russian Artists, taught at the Academy of Arts and the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1897–1909), and was a member of the council of the Treyakov Gallery. At the same time, he was also a member of the group involved with Mir Iskusstva (“World of Art”; late 1890s) and the Munich Secession, which was disseminating the “new style” of Art Nouveau. Such was the dynamism of Serov’s growth that he managed in a short period to assume various aesthetic directions. The first modern formalist of Russian art, Serov was also the first artist to consciously choose a particular style out of the many then available.

His first famous portrait of Vera Mamontova—Girl with Peaches (1887)—displays his complete mastery of the Impressionist idiom. Yet another portrait of the same period—Girl in Sunlight: Portrait of Maria Simonovich (1888)—already shows a Post-Impressionist approach to form. The yellowish brown hues and the bravura of the brushstrokes of Serov’s Portrait of the Italian Singer Francesco Tamagno (1891–92) are reminiscent of Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velázquez, while the Portrait of the Italian Singer Angelo Masini (1890) shows some similarity to Repin’s style.

Serov always sought an allusive pictorial sign that would give depth to the theme of the subject painted. In his landscapes of the countryside surrounding Moscow, for instance, he adopted the lyrical landscape reminiscent of Aleksey Savrasov. In his later monochrome portraits (Mariya Yermolova, 1905; Feodor Chaliapin, 1905) and in his historical and mythological compositions (The Rape of Europa, 1910), Serov expressed, respectively, the essence of the St. Petersburg “painterly graphics” and the Art Nouveau style seen in much of the work of the Mir Iskusstva group.

Serov was unique in having discovered the intersection between the portrait genre and the formal ideal of Art Nouveau. At times Serov’s portraits border on exaggeration, but his mordant characterizations do not conflict with his subjects’ imposing qualities. Ostentation, ever the object of parodic portraits, is characteristic of Serov’s later works (Portrait of Olga Orlova, 1911). At times, as in Ida Rubinstein (1910), the striking portrayal expresses the very essence of an artistic persona.

Serov’s innovation is manifested not only in portraits but in other artworks as well. He almost merged genre painting with landscape, keeping a link with the peasant lyricism characteristic of the Peredvizhniki group. Serov also worked for the theatre: he designed the sets for his father’s opera Judith at the Mariinsky Theatre (1907), painted the curtain used by the Ballets Russes for its 1911 production of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and created a superb theatre poster with an image of a dancing Anna Pavlova (1909). Serov was one of the first Russian artists to use graphic art, which appears in his portraits, satirical caricatures, and illustrations of the fables of Ivan Krylov, on which Serov worked from 1895 until his death.

For many Russian artists of several styles, Serov embodied the high aesthetic mission of the ideal artist. In the years in which the gulf between so-called high art and the demand for realism was sharply felt, Serov managed in both life and art to overcome this apparent dichotomy.