The Makovskys were an important artistic family in 19th century Russia. All three brothers and also the sister became painters. No wonder, since their father was already very open to art and their mother was a composer. Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky grew up in this educated middle-class environment. Like his siblings, he was not only interested in the sensitivities of the Russian bourgeoisie, but above all in the fate of the simple rural population and its hardships.
Vladimir Makovsky, born in 1846, studied at the renowned Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. At the same time, in 1863, some students of the St. Petersburg Academy of Art rebelled against the conservative views of the teachers. They demanded to take a close look at social reality and thus followed a path similar to that followed by the realists around Gustave Courbet in Paris. The Russian students were dismissed and then founded the progressive artists' group of the Peredwischniki, which can be translated as "The Wanderers". Makovsky joined this group around Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi; in Moscow, he himself had already gotten to know a far more progressive view of art. Vladimir Makovsky became one of the most important personalities of the Wanderers. The Peredwischniki took their name from the fact that they wanted to travel through the country in order to record and paint reality and also because they wanted to make their work known at travelling exhibitions. They exhibited not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mainly in various provincial cities. Like his comrades-in-arms, Makovsky rejected classical mythological themes, instead he painted realistic scenes of everyday rural life and unembellished Russian landscapes, often spiced with a good dose of humour. Thus he created groundbreaking works of peasant women with their children at work or a "visit to the poor" by philanthropic city dwellers, which he rather ironicized. Paintings such as "The Condemned" were also devoted to social reality. This close observation of reality went hand in hand with great artistic mastery. In the 1880s, Makovsky took part in the Democratic Art Movement in Russia and created paintings like "The Liberated Prisoner" or "The Bank Bankruptcy. His work became darker and more pessimistic over the years. Especially a work on the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday of 1905 shows where his sympathies lay: there, soldiers of the Russian ruler are seen shooting at defenseless people. Vladimir Makovsky was also a great master of portraiture, for example he presented Empress Maria Fyodorovna in full regalia. Both were not mutually exclusive for him.
In the first years after the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917, he raised the flag of unideological realism in Russia despite the incipient tendencies of so-called socialist realism. Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky died in 1920 and is one of the most important painters of realism in Russia.
The Makovskys were an important artistic family in 19th century Russia. All three brothers and also the sister became painters. No wonder, since their father was already very open to art and their mother was a composer. Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky grew up in this educated middle-class environment. Like his siblings, he was not only interested in the sensitivities of the Russian bourgeoisie, but above all in the fate of the simple rural population and its hardships.
Vladimir Makovsky, born in 1846, studied at the renowned Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. At the same time, in 1863, some students of the St. Petersburg Academy of Art rebelled against the conservative views of the teachers. They demanded to take a close look at social reality and thus followed a path similar to that followed by the realists around Gustave Courbet in Paris. The Russian students were dismissed and then founded the progressive artists' group of the Peredwischniki, which can be translated as "The Wanderers". Makovsky joined this group around Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi; in Moscow, he himself had already gotten to know a far more progressive view of art. Vladimir Makovsky became one of the most important personalities of the Wanderers. The Peredwischniki took their name from the fact that they wanted to travel through the country in order to record and paint reality and also because they wanted to make their work known at travelling exhibitions. They exhibited not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mainly in various provincial cities. Like his comrades-in-arms, Makovsky rejected classical mythological themes, instead he painted realistic scenes of everyday rural life and unembellished Russian landscapes, often spiced with a good dose of humour. Thus he created groundbreaking works of peasant women with their children at work or a "visit to the poor" by philanthropic city dwellers, which he rather ironicized. Paintings such as "The Condemned" were also devoted to social reality. This close observation of reality went hand in hand with great artistic mastery. In the 1880s, Makovsky took part in the Democratic Art Movement in Russia and created paintings like "The Liberated Prisoner" or "The Bank Bankruptcy. His work became darker and more pessimistic over the years. Especially a work on the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday of 1905 shows where his sympathies lay: there, soldiers of the Russian ruler are seen shooting at defenseless people. Vladimir Makovsky was also a great master of portraiture, for example he presented Empress Maria Fyodorovna in full regalia. Both were not mutually exclusive for him.
In the first years after the Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917, he raised the flag of unideological realism in Russia despite the incipient tendencies of so-called socialist realism. Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky died in 1920 and is one of the most important painters of realism in Russia.
Page 1 / 2