Exhibition of Stepan Yaremich in the Russian Museum. Review

The State Russian Museum continues a series of exhibitions dedicated to artists biographically associated with this collection. The exhibition “Stepan Petrovich Yaremich. 1869-1939″. Very chamber (5 paintings and 17 graphic works), but historical: during his lifetime, Yaremich did not have personal exhibitions, and only in 1969 the Academy of Arts honored his memory. Browser “Kommersant” Kira Dolinina thinks it’s unfair.

It is difficult to say that the Ukrainian painter and graphic artist Stepan Yaremich was a great artist. He wasn’t, and he didn’t see himself as such. He was one of those multifunctional cultural figures for whom art itself was a profession, and service to it was a job. These pathetic words may seem banal, but for Yaremich and others like him, this was the essence of the attitude to life. As a result, we owe Yaremich many hundreds of works of art he found, which, thanks to him, did not disappear, but ended up in the funds of state museums. Timing in this series is the first of the beneficiaries.

Shamefully little is known about Yaremich’s childhood and youth. Although, according to the memoirs of Alexander Benois, who became his bosom friend in St. Petersburg, “Stip” “did not talk about his past, nor about his origin, nor about his relatives, and only by chance, many years later, I learned that his father belonged to spiritual rank.” Other biographers claim that he came from a wealthy peasant family, and someone recalled that his father was almost a musician. Friends respected this mystery and described their friend not by origin, but by first impression, in which almost every one of them emphasized the Ukrainian dialect. Before Benois in 1900 “appeared a rather tall, somewhat thin man of about twenty-five, no more, a reddish blond, with a head on his neck of a somewhat exaggerated length, with a beard trimmed in a wedge and with surprisingly pink, completely infantile “cheeks”. He spoke with a barely perceptible Ukrainian accent, which, however, gave a peculiar charm to his speech. Dobuzhinsky, who entered the circle of the World of Art a little later, recalls how he liked “long, thin Yaremich, who squinted slyly and ruthlessly snarled with his khokhlat wit.”

Yaremich came to the capital with practically no formal education, but with experience: for five years he studied at the icon-painting workshop of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, and then there, in Kiev, at the Murashko Drawing School, took lessons from Nikolai Ge and helped Mikhail Vrubel with the murals of Vladimirsky cathedral. It was Vrubel who would become the hero of his main book, and he was the person who brought Yaremich and Benois together, determining not so much the artistic path of his protégé as the professional one. He turned out to be an ideal World of Art student – an excellent graphic artist, a skilled painter, an easy-to-hand stylist and, most importantly, a walking encyclopedia of art history and a person with a sharp eye for artistic finds.

At first, the magazines and exhibitions of the World of Art used these abilities of his, and then, after Paris (1904–1908), where Yaremich managed to collect “an amazing collection in which, next to excellent Italian drawings of the 16th and 17th centuries, there were many French ones, and among them even such names as Watteau, Fragonard, Hubert-Robert, ”it became clear that his connoisseur skills were much brighter than his own artistic ones. At the beginning of the 20th century, connoisseurship (orientation to the eye, taste, observation, ability to compare) was the basis for the idea of ​​what art history, which has recently become a scientific discipline, is. In this sense, Jaremych is the ideal hero of his time. When, after the revolution, the protection of art treasures became an obvious necessity, the best of the best “experts” entered the councils and staff of museums. Benois, Prince Argutinsky-Dolgorukov and Vereisky worked in the Hermitage, Yaremich got a job both there and in the Russian Museum. He will also divide his huge private collection between the two collections.

Those who were able to leave by the beginning of the 1920s, one might say, were lucky. Those who, like Yaremich, remained, would have to sign acts of transferring masterpieces for sale already in the early 1930s. Yaremich’s widow believed that his “night farewells” to the paintings in the Hermitage and the paper tug-of-war for what exactly would be given away shortened his life a lot. One way or another, with these signatures, he went down in history as a participant in that madness, and we still don’t really know how much he was able to resist – many documents have not yet been published. We only know that Benois, who was angry with his tongue, saw in him “a certain shakiness of his own convictions.”

Of course, these details are not at the exhibition in the timing. The museum celebrates its 125th anniversary as conformally as possible. It is proposed to remember Yaremich based on his works. Not from books and articles, but from painting and graphics. And, of course, they are crafty and sweet. Even critics who were very sympathetic to him, like Voloshin and Benois, first of all mentioned the “gray coloring” of his works: it was “something organically inherent in him (bright colors, and especially green ones, he hated), and depending on this he developed a whole doctrine that a painter can quite manage with just three colors: “bone” (black paint), yellow ocher and whitewash. Funny self-restraint. In it, Versailles, and St. Petersburg, and the Crimea are still solemn and majestic. The illness and busyness of the 1930s at least prevented him from descending to socialist realism.