Nikita Balagurov
Doctoral student
NRU HSE, St Petersburg
Department of History
One Show to Please Them All: Selling Status and Nationalism
in Late Imperial Russia
My paper approaches the Travelling (Peredvizhnye) Exhibitions in late 19th
century Russia as a common space where the broad spectrum of ranks and classes of
the capitals and central provinces – from the emperor and the courtiers to rich
entrepreneurs and merchants, from intelligentsia to petit bourgeoisie – found means to
exercise social practices they would like to be associated with. The site-study of the
Travelling Exhibition, a space filled with several dozen paintings – with meaningful
alterations – moving from St Petersburg to Moscow and then to the provinces, enables
to pinpoint social characteristics of different groups by critically examining the
practice of art show attendance. Noteworthy is the fact that the organizers of the
exhibitions, the Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), were the first to recognize these
distinctions and to capitalize on them. Furthermore, suggested analytical framework
allows me to explore how the geographical broadening of contemporary art audience
brought about by the Travelling Exhibitions gave birth to discussions (and the notion)
of appropriateness of art pieces for the general public. After the scandalous appearance
of Repin’s Ivan the Terrible at the Travelling Exhibition in St Petersburg in 1885
censorship of art shows was imposed and discussions of what may and what may not
be shown in the provinces (to the people) would follow after almost every new
Wanderers’ show opening in St Petersburg.
The argument of the paper is built on the material of two case studies both
dealing with the Travelling exhibitions.
The first offers a detailed inquiry into Alexander III’s attendance of the
Wanderers’ exhibitions. It reveals a cunning strategy that the emperor applied to outwit
his key rival in collecting national school of art, Pavel Tretyakov. Playing on the threat
of newly launched censorship of art exhibitions, Alexander used his position, or rather
allowed the Wanderers use his position, to protect problematic paintings from being
censored out of the exposition. In return, Alexander obtained a priority in choosing the
pieces he wanted to buy for the museum of national art, thus leaving Tretyakov with
the second-choice option.
The second case study addresses completely different pragmatics of art show
attendance, that is, the symbolic consumption of art by the provincial middlebrow
visitors. My argument here is that in the context of poor art education in the provinces
the quality and subject of the painting were of the secondary importance for them.
Rather, the gilded frame became an embodiment of luxurious lifestyle. A poor picture
dressed in faux gold frame became the feather in its owner’s cap and filled the most
noticeable place on the wall in the anteroom or living-room. This practice was so
widespread in the middle and second half of the XIX century that rare living-room
interior description in fiction, memoirs and letters of the time went without mentioning
a painting, an engraving or an oleograph usually placed over the sofa1. Typically very
few authors of such descriptions clarified what kind of a picture was placed in the
frame – the sheer fact of its presence, the quantity of framed items and most of all the
type and condition of frames, often mentioned together with furniture, characterized
the taste and the social status of the owner. And it were the gilded frames (or rather
faux gold, painted with a bronze paint) that turned to be the most typical decorative
element in petit bourgeois living-room interior. Therefore a painting in gilded frame
became an object of symbolic consumption: by showing it to the guests the owner of a
house tried to demonstrate his or her place on the social ladder, each step of which was
marked by a special suite of luxury goods. Artists, buyers, audience and critics were
aware of the special value of the frame in comparison with a painting itself and
articulated it.
1
The observation is based on the analysis of several dozen texts of the second half of the XIX century,
which contain interior descriptions. The Russian National Corpus, a reference system based on a
collection of Russian texts in electronic form (http://ruscorpora.ru/), was used as a research tool.