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Ivan Nikolayevich
Kramskoy (Russian: Иван Николаевич Крамской; 8 June
[O.S. 27 May] 1837 - 5 April [O.S. 24 March] 1887)
was a Russian Realist painter and art critic. 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.
Kramskoi came from an
impoverished petit-bourgeois 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 ("Артель художников").
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 while working at his easel, aged only
forty-nine.
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