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PRELIMINARY NOTE
RUSSIAN literature had always been strongly stirred by the question-"art for art's sake" or
"art for life's sake"? And this is undoubtedly due to the continual tendency of the Russian
-spirit (and in this it is similar to the English one) to approach artistic phenomena first of all
from a utilitarian "service" point of view. The proper interrelation of these two points of
view should lie in their mutual acceptance and their mutual differentiation and delimitation.
If whole schools of painting (as for example the English pre-Raphaelites and the Russian "peredvizhniki"*) cannot be explained in their creative impulse and the continued interest which they
hold for us, unless it is from the psychological or "literary" point of view, then it would also be clearly
one-sided to accept the purely formal approach alone. Thus it would only be possible to escape a
state of "remembrance" in aesthetic appraisals by rejecting the two extreme expressions of the artistic
directions from one's sphere of influence—the school of the so-called Russian "peredvizhniki" on the
one hand, and the French schools of the past decades on the other.
But this does not mean that both points of view are of the same importance to art; if even in
so essentially psychological an art as literature the purely aesthetic theory of pure poetry is nearer
to the roots of artistic creativeness, then this would apply all the more to a so naturally formal art
as painting. Along the "psychological" path it is too easily threatened by the danger of conversion
to simple illustration, in reality only aesthetic creation can be said to be "applied". The danger
of this tendency threatens the onlooker even more if he is inclined, in such cases, to look only for
the "subject" in the picture, to expect interesting themes from the artist as from a kind of producer
of subjects and, when approaching the canvas, to enquire first of all to what extent this demand has
been met: what and not how does the given picture represent.
This was the usual attitude of the mass of the Russian visitors to museums and exhibitions of
pictures, since the mass had been educated by decades of the "applicable" direction of Russian
painting. This it has now become again (though not wholly, but only partly).
Probably it would not be possible to find another example in the history of art of such a perse-
vering and, in its own way, logical artistic utilitarianism as this direction of Russian painting from
the middle of the XIXth century and up to recent years (and now again, but already with an ideo-
logical foundation--that of socialistic realism). Parallel to the utilitarian movement in literature
and under its strong influence, the view then developed in Russian painting that the formal side of
art plays no role at all, but that the question of the subject composes its whole natural contents.
This led not only to the loss of the former technical achievements of the art of the XVIIIth century,
but finally also to the increasing shallowness of the contents, which had been exchanged (from
profound spiritual generalizations, which were involuntarily found by the former "subjectless"
artists) for the pettiness of the everyday and chance "anecdote".
At that time Western painting was going along quite a different path, and especially that of
France, which had pre-eminently become the focal point of all that was new in creative painting
(beginning with the "barbizones"). In this difference lay the root differentiation in the attitude to
form of the characteristically "apollonistical" and plastic West and the characteristically dionistical
and literary-musical newest Russia (as in our times, beginning with 1925-30). Of course, Russia,
too, had known its very clearly plastic period of artistic creation, if we were only to call to mind
ancient Russian icon painting, architecture and handicrafts. But that was when Russia had been "Rus",
Yet in the days of the highest development of the great Russian psychological literature (and
music) there was probably no other cultured nation in the world which had drifted so far from the
understanding, feeling and even the wish to understand the plastic foundations of the plastic arts.
"Peredvizhniki": French, "Ambulants"; English, "Wanderers" ( Society of Wandering Exhibitors; 1870-1920)
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