The artist Isaac Ilyich Levitan was born in the town of Kibarty (Lithuania) in August 1860. He did not tell anyone about his childhood, so the descendants did not have any information about this period of his life. It is known that the father was some very small employee and did his best to give the children a good education. Isaac Levitan, whose biography begins with moving to Moscow, followed in the footsteps of his brother-artist, who took him to exhibitions, open airs, and studies. At the age of thirteen, Isaac was admitted to an art school.
Great teachers
The boy was very lucky with the teachers, but in general all the years of training brought him severe trials. By that time, he had remained an orphan, no one could help him with anything, all the problems at this young age had to be solved independently. Such a brilliant landscape painter as Isaac Levitan, the biography was complex. The abilities in it immediately showed remarkable, as the teachers turned out to be excellent: Vasily Polenov and Alexei Savrasov - the names themselves already said everything about these artists. In addition, the teacher, for example, Savrasov was excellent, raising a whole cohort of excellent students: Nesterov, both Korovin, Svetoslavsky, Stepanov ...
Levitan, whose biography is described in this article, felt that everything was easy for him, and was constantly afraid of this ease, worked hard and hard, was looking for his style. From the age of eighteen he took part in exhibitions, and they immediately started talking about his paintings. Isaac Ilyich Levitan immediately became a vivid phenomenon in the sphere of Russian culture. As an artist, Levitan was very inquisitive, but he explored nature, without dissecting it medically, as if he had a confidential conversation with her. And no one learned from her as many secrets as Levitan.
Biography
The artist did not like to leave far from his native nature, lived for the most part in Moscow, worked in the provinces of Tverskaya and Moscow, twice in the Crimea, and a lot on the Volga, since he was a member of the Association of Wanderers. He always lived quietly, there was no time for excesses, because work took away from him all the time, all his strength and all his love. Here are all of these life-breathing works that Levitan created - the biography is, the most authentic.
Vision and feeling
He overcame the scenic conventions of the romantic landscape, which in some places were preserved among the Wanderers. Man is unusually susceptible to any impressions of nature in all its manifestations, the artist I. I. Levitan and his painting - each! - this is every time foresight, "reading" of experience. Musicians have absolute pitch.
Levitan had an “absolute eye” or “absolute feeling” in the landscapes. The same applies to watercolor drawings, where the poetic mood, which was the essence of the artistic phenomenon of nature , is also accurately transmitted. In watercolors, Levitan, whose landscapes are always extremely reliable, avoided details, but boldly and accurately conveyed the mood that the picture of nature whispered to him.
Philosophy
Levitan’s “mood landscapes” have a rare psychological richness, a huge part of the human soul is invested in them. He knew how to peer into nature, as if all the secrets of being were concentrated in it (A. Schopenhauer was the artist’s favorite philosopher, by the way, which quite accurately explains his ability). Levitan’s paintings took on some of the innovations of impressionism, but the artist nevertheless could not surrender to the purity and joy of the play of light and color, because he didn’t stop staying in the circle of original Russian images, and they were always and surely fanned by the "world longing" characteristic of our souls.
Even the earliest works are exceptionally lyrical. The artist I. I. Levitan and his painting "Autumn Day. Sokolniki" seem to open for us his first period of creativity. In adulthood, Levitan, becoming a master of landscape, learned to turn even the simplest motive into a typical image of his native country. Creativity Levitan mature opens "Birch Grove." In all the years of his life, from time to time, the sun went from his canvases, and landscapes were born, filled with tragic forebodings, longing and loneliness. The artist was seriously ill, thoughts of a near death did not leave him. Nevertheless, he did not go to Italy for treatment. “Indeed, only in Russia can a real landscape painter work,” he explained.
Golden Reach
The works written by Levitan while traveling along the Volga with wanderers were poetically inspired. Levitan’s “Volga period” in creative returns is comparable to Pushkin’s “Boldinsky Autumn”. The antiquities of Sviyazhsk, the Old Believers crosses over the river, the harsh beauty of northern nature, the remoteness from everything magnificent, mortal, unnecessary - that is what artist I. I. Levitan found there. And his picture was born - real, iconic - "Over Eternal Peace."
The sketches of the abandoned churchyard were useful for starting work on the composition, so the landscape is real, as most often happened, but the artist gave it extraordinary depth and grandeur, and the earth connected to the sky, giving it the Volga region, drowning in evening lilac. In addition to this picture, Levitan painted in a multitude - excellent, warm, bright, rich in imagery: "Evening. Golden Reach", "Evening on the Volga", "After the Rain", "Fresh Wind", but truly characteristic, famous, is recognizable by everyone; nevertheless, it became - “Over Eternal Peace”.
Details
This picture has it all: silence, and the heavy rumble of a large bell, and cemetery peace, and the endless movement of life. The gray, cold power of the river is shown, as it were, from a bird’s flight height, and a narrow cape spread over the water with a wing, on which a small old temple was sheltered, and with it a graveyard. And the wind non-stop and demandingly tears the tops of aspens, and even the crosses are tilted, it seems, under its pressure.
But the temple window glows brightly, from which even the gray water and the dark purple of the horizon seem to brighten. Such is the eternally existing peace of the world, which was created by the Creator: this wind, it seems, does not drive clouds, does not tremble aspen, and time itself sweeps over this landscape quickly and irrevocably. There is no sign of human presence in this landscape. There is only space where the soul is not confused by either the smallness of the details, or the vastness of the world. So the paintings of Levitan break through to universal harmony.
About style
The very concept of style is a category of transpersonal. Starting work on a picture, the artist as if enters into the proposed game, accepting its conditions. Of course, he has the right to rebel against these conditions, to refute them with his own manner of writing. Something similar happened with Levitan. In his early works - "Village", "Road in the Forest", "Autumn Day in Sokolniki", "Water Mill", "Ostankino Alley", "Garden in the Snow", "Landscape. Dali" and others - the modernist style is clearly manifested , although "transpersonal", not directly.
The Moscow principles of the painting school, of course, dominate. However, in the aforementioned painting “Above Eternal Peace”, at the highest point of Levitan’s philosophical meditation, the Art Nouveau style makes itself quite loud. Although it is impossible to single out one style in his works. Pictures of Levitan - an endless search. Here are echoes of romanticism, and realism (landscapes!), And symbolism, and impressionism, and modernity, and expressionism, but they are all declared only in the most dense style combinations. The main thing for Levitan was to grasp the motive of the work in its natural state, and the ways to express it, he knew were different and used all as needed.
Composition and form
Compositionally, Levitan’s works are solved according to classical patterns, they have a balance, a kind of graphism. The composition is divided into conditional triangles. For example, like this: on the right in the foreground is the shore, then it is on the left, in the direction of the river, then again there is the ledge of the shore on the right, balanced with reeds on the left, so the river's exit to the horizon is sharpened. All this construction is completed by two boats, whose shape, as it were, continues the line tending to the horizon. As a result, both parts are combined into compositions: not strict symmetry, but rather, balance.
Volume and space are embodied and interact most clearly in architecture, but something similar must occur in painting - in the ratio of background and subject. And as Isaac Levitan wrote the paintings of autumn! The most vivid confirmation of this. His trees look very strong, the water is not only clear, but also wet, and the boats on it, even the tiniest, farthest, are seen hollow inside, light and soaring on the surface of the water.
Color and light
The artist’s favorite color is green, and he knew how to break it into a dozen shades of one emerald green paint. Even he never painted shadows in black. Thin layers, glaze - this is how Levitan achieved the fabulous picturesque nature of his creations. The artist feels the interconnection of color and light with genius: for example, the cold light of the moon intensifies with blue, even the greens turn slightly blue, and the water serves as a plane reflecting this light. In Levitan, the color does not cease to be intense, objects, moving away, darken very slightly.