Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi (; – ) was a Russian Realist painter and

art critic An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...

. One of the most prominent artisans during Tsar Alexander II's reign, he is remembered as co-founding member and public frontman of the Peredvizhniki movement.

Life

Kramskoi came from an impoverished petit-

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...

family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the " Revolt of the Fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the '' Artel of Artists'' (""). Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863–1868, he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts. In 1871, ten years after Taras Shevchenko's death, Kramskoi created a portrait of the poet that became widely popular. He created a gallery of portraits of important Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures ( Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Shishkin, 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, 1876, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1879, Sergei Botkin, 1880) in which expressive simplicity of composition and clarity of depiction emphasize profound psychological elements of character. Kramskoi's democratic ideals found their brightest expression in his portraits of peasants, which portrayed a wealth of character-details in representatives of the common people. In one of Kramskoi's most well known paintings, '' Christ in the Desert'' (1872, Tretyakov gallery), he continued Alexander Ivanov's humanistic tradition by treating a religious subject in moral–philosophical terms. He imbued his image of Christ with dramatic experiences in a deeply psychological and vital interpretation, evoking the idea of his heroic self-sacrifice. Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting ("Nekrasov during the period of 'Last songs,'" 1877–78; "Unknown Woman," 1883; "Inconsolable grief," 1884; all in Tretyakov gallery). These paintings disclose their subjects' complex and sincere emotions, their personalities and fates. The orientation of Kramskoi's art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art exerted an essential influence on the development of realist art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century. Kramskoi was considered an eccentric for giving his works to customers in expensive frames and not charging money for it. He died from an

aortic aneurysm An aortic aneurysm is an enlargement (dilatation) of the aorta to greater than 1.5 times normal size. Typically, there are no symptoms except when the aneurysm dissects or ruptures, which causes sudden, severe pain in the abdomen and lower back ...

while working at his easel, aged only forty-nine.

Gallery

File:Iwan Nikolajewitsch Kramskoj 002.jpg, '' The Mermaids'', 1871 File:Taras Shevchenko - portrait by Ivan Kramskoi.jpg,

Taras Shevchenko Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (; ; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist, and ethnographer. He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the Brotherhood o ...

, 1871, after the 1859 photograph by Andrey Denyer File:Kramskoi vanamees karguga.jpg, Old man with a crutch, 1872 File:Christ in the Wilderness - Ivan Kramskoy - Google Cultural Institute.jpg, '' Christ in the Desert'', 1872 File:Iwan Nikolajewitsch Kramskoj 006.jpg,

Leo Tolstoy Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy Tolstoy pronounced his first name as , which corresponds to the romanization ''Lyov''. () (; ,Throughout Tolstoy's whole life, his name was written as using Reforms of Russian orthography#The post-revolution re ...

, 1873 File:Ivan Kramskoy - Портрет П.М.Третьякова - Google Art Project.jpg, Pavel Tretyakov, 1876 File:Iwan Nikolajewitsch Kramskoj 005.jpg, Ivan Shishkin, 1880 File:Maria Feodorovna by Kramskoj.jpg, Maria Feodorovna, 1880s File:1881 Kramskoi Frauenportraet anagoria.JPG, Portrait of a woman reading, 1881 File:Ivan Kramskoi - Mina Moiseyev - Google Art Project.jpg, Mina Moiseyev, 1882 File:Kramskoy Portrait of a Woman.jpg, '' Portrait of an Unknown Woman'', 1883 File:Inconsolable grief.jpg, ''Inconsolable Grief'', 1884 File:Vladimir-Solovyov.jpg, Vladimir Solovyov, 1885 File:Kramskoy Alexander III.jpg, Alexander III, 1886

Notes

References

Publications

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External links