Beyond belief

Entranced by their “simplicity and honesty”, Vasilii Polenov painted the Gospel stories with evocative realism. Even the Soviets loved his work, says Claire Wrathal

Towards the end of 1908, Vasilii Polenov (1844–1927) wrote to Sofia Tolstoya, wife of the great novelist, to invite her to his Moscow studio. “I will be very glad to show you my pictures From the Life of Christ (Iz zhizni Khrista), my Gospel cycle as I call them.” He had been working on the 70 or so paintings “for about 40 years,” he wrote. “They are the work to which I have dedicated almost my entire life.” The following year, 64 of them went on show, first in Moscow, then in Oryol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro) and Kazan. “The public – a huge one – looked avidly and experienced a sense of the sublime,” wrote the eminent Russian Impressionist Leonid Pasternak (his son Boris wrote Dr Zhivago). “It’s been a long time since I last witnessed such attentiveness and such focused interest.” Polenov’s style had caught the public imagination and, even after the 1917 Revolution, the series continued to be popular.

Despite their religious themes, their figurative style and celebration of the common man found favour with the People’s Commissariat for Education. So much so that, in 1924, a dozen of them were shipped to New York as part of a selling exhibition – the nascent Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was hungry for hard currency. The 914 works were intended, as the Russian art historian Eleonora Paston of the State Tretyakov Gallery has written, to reflect “the entire variety” of contemporary Russian visual art, as long as it was figurative and government-approved. The avant-garde was therefore largely overlooked, even if works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov were included in the 100 or so featured artists, also among whom were Léon Bakst, Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky, Boris Grigoriev, Konstantin Korovin, Ilya Mashkov and Zinaida Serebryakova. Held at the Grand Central Palace, an exhibition space (demolished in 1964) on Lexington Avenue, the Russian Art Exhibition opened on 8 March. About 8,000 people attended the preview and, as Nesterov wrote, “the reviews were very enthusiastic”, even if The New York Times judged it “insidiously mysterious [and] remote in feeling from the swift-flowing sparkling emotions of Western nations”.

Sales were less than buoyant, though among those who bought work were Louis Comfort Tiffany, Sergei Rachmaninov, Fyodor Chaliapin and Charles R Crane, an American industrialist, diplomat and collector of Russian art who purchased nine religious scenes by Polenov for a combined total of $21,500. The artist received only a fraction of the revenue he might have expected, however, and his unsold paintings were never returned to him. But, in recompense, the Council of People’s Commissars granted him and his family ‘lifetime use’ of the splendid riverside house he had built, 130km south of Moscow near a village now named Polenovo, using proceeds from the sale of Christ and the Sinner to Tsar Alexander III in 1889.

By 1926, he was a People’s Artist of the USSR. Two of the paintings that Crane bought, He that is without sin and He is guilty of death, were sold by Bonhams in 2011, for £4.073 million and £2.841 million respectively. And in March 2023, Bonhams offered a third, There were also women looking from afar off, one of the first to be chosen by Crane, who paid $3,500 for it.

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Taking its title from the Gospel of St Mark (15:40; the English translation is from the King James Version), it is a boldly unconventional depiction of the Crucifixion that focuses not on the Cross – “There is so much misery and filth in life that if art drenches you in horror and villainy, living becomes too difficult,” he wrote in 1888 – but on Jesus’s followers. They look east from another hilltop, towards Calvary and the distant Dead Sea, a barely-there horizon of celestial blue (it must have been a sunnier day than the cloud cover suggests) that fades into the mauve of mourning. (Pasternak declared himself “moved” by Polenov’s “artistic palette” and “harmony of colours”.)

The verse names the figures as Mary Magdalene, the demonstratively grieving figure on the left, half-hiding behind the wall in her reluctance to witness the unfolding horror; “Mary the mother of James the Less and of Joses”, the two men in the centre and possibly Jesus’s cousins; and Salome, later St Mary Salome (as opposed to the one with the seven veils). Later, the women will be present at the Resurrection. For the moment, they are keeping their distance. To be any closer might put them at risk. Polenov hints at but does not presume to show us their anguish.

Inspired by Ernest Renan’s controversial bestseller La Vie de Jésus, which examines the life of Christ as a biographer might, Polenov was interested in “seeking out the historical truth” and presenting Jesus and His followers as real people in authentic, not imagined, Middle Eastern landscapes, drawing inspiration from his travels in the Holy Land, Egypt and Syria. Look at the shawls on the heads of the women and the way he paints the blockwork of the buildings, and you might hazard he had stood by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a city he reached in 1882, where he painted An Olive Tree in the Garden of Gethsemane (now in the Tretyakov) as well as numerous landscapes. The son of an archaeologist who had spent three years as the secretary at the Russian embassy in Athens, Polenov grew up in St Petersburg, studying at the city’s Imperial Academy of Arts, where he won a gold medal for one of his earliest religious paintings, The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter. The scholarship that came with it allowed him to travel in Europe. In France, he and his contemporary Ilya Repin enjoyed the patronage of the novelist Ivan Turgenev. The ‘poetry’ of Turgenev’s non-fiction, notably Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, inspired Polenov’s landscapes, as did the Barbizon School artists. Indeed, Polenov has been credited with introducing the idea of painting en plein air to his Russian contemporaries. As the landscape painter Isaac Levitan wrote to him in 1896: “I am convinced that the tradition of painting in Moscow would not have been the same without you.”

On his return to Russia, he became a war artist, documenting the horrors of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, after which he joined the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, a group of painters who had quit the Academy of Arts, eschewing the formal ‘academic’ style in order to paint in what they believed was their own essentially Russian way. They sought to take their art to new audiences, organising exhibitions that toured provincial towns, regularly drawing thousands of visitors. For Polenov believed art should be accessible to all, at one point resolving to sell his work for little more than the materials he needed to make it, though – as one of his students, Sergei Vinogradov, recalled in his memoir – the upshot was simply that “the pictures were bought by profiteers who sold them at normal Polenov prices”. His intention was sincere, however, as was his desire to share his admiration for the New Testament. “I love the Gospel stories beyond words,” he wrote. “Their simplicity and honesty, their pure, high-minded ethics and the humanity that permeates their message. But most of all, I love [the] tragic, awful, awe-inspiring end.” That is precisely what he paints here.

Claire Wrathall writes for the Financial Times.

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Explore highlights from our auction on 20 March in London. For more information on the upcoming Polenov painting, contact Daria Khristova on daria.khristova@bonhams.com or +44 20 7468 8338