The light, warmer tones of the river and bank are in stark contrast to the dark, shadowy group of men in the centre. The strenuous and exhausting work is evident from the posture of the figures, who are slumped over from the physical exertion. It depicts 11 male burlaks, or haulers, dragging a barge upstream on the Volga River. It is no surprise that Repin was approached by the Tsarist state to produce works that would turn the same searing clarity to their favor nor that a Socialist Realism mimicking Repin's style became state policy under Stalin.īarge Haulers on the Volga was the first painting completed by Repin after he left the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. As a hyper-naturalistic art of social commentary it was, in a sense, purpose-build for the aims of political propaganda, providing leading messages while apparently staying true to 'reality'.
Repin's career in painting summed up a tensions in the aesthetics of Realism.Exhibiting the grandeur of scale of Shishkin's wheatfields and forest glades, Repin filled his scenes with scores of individuals, each characterized with the same dazzling emotional clarity as one of Kramskoi's sitters. Ilya Repin became renowned for genre paintings which, in a sense, split the difference between these two approaches. Within the Peredvizhniki there was a contrast between painters such as Ivan Shishkin who depicted the beauty of the Russian countryside and those such as Ivan Kramskoi, the great portraitist, who were more concerned with the human form and spirit.Their work contributed to the international flowering of Realist painting across the Western world during the nineteenth century, from Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon artists in France to the Hudson River School in the United States. A group of Russian painters who rejected the institutional prestige and neoclassical trappings of Russian academic art, the Peredvizhniki created realistic art documenting the lives of ordinary citizens. Ilya Repin was amongst the most gifted of the Peredvizhniki group, though he remained at the fringes of the movement.
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