Remarkably enough, the only painting in Repin’s legacy that has “battle” connotations, The Zaparozhye Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1891 fig. The critic later acknowledged that he mistakenly attributed a “battle scene” he discussed in the essay to Repin (the essay was not illustrated). I am talking about American art critic Clement Greenberg’s theoretical turned-highly influential essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in the 1939 fall issue of Partisan Review. Here Repin became one of the principal anti-heroes and embodiment of “academic kitsch” in Greenberg’s fight for the modernist cause. In light of the latest retrospective of the artist, it is useful then to recall that one of the earliest introductions of Repin to western scholarship resulted from his first large-scale retrospective in the USSR in 1936. Petersburg.Īlthough late nineteenth-century realist painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930) has always been a household name in Russia, his prolific artistic legacy has remained largely unknown in the West, at least until recently. 1, Installation view of the exhibition at the State Russian Museum with visitors in front of Ilya Repin’s The Zaparozhye Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan, 1891.
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