Nikolai Petrovich Krymov - an artist who created in the last century. His favorite genre was landscapes. Fields, forests, rural houses drowning in snow or light - Krymov wrote his native nature and did not change his chosen path despite the turbulent events taking place in the country. He survived three wars, knew poverty, but in his works he never touched on politics or topical issues, just as he never strove to creatively please anyone.
Family is the beginning of everything
The artist N.P. Krymov was born on May 2 (April 20 according to the old style) in 1884. He was not one of those creators whose parents were categorically against following the child along the path of art. Nikolai’s father, Pyotr Alekseevich, was a portrait painter, worked in the manner of “Wanderers,” and taught painting at Moscow gymnasiums. He and his wife Maria Egorovna noticed the boy’s talent early. The head of a large family (Nikolai had eleven brothers and sisters) from an early age instilled in children a love of nature, the ability to see the beauty of the world. He became the first teacher of Nikolai Krymov.
Teachers
In 1904, the boy entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the architectural department. In 1907 he transferred to painting. Among his teachers were well-known artists: V. Serov, who made many transformations in the educational process, L.O. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak's father, illustrator of Leo Tolstoy's works, N. Kasatkin, an artist-wanderer of the younger generation. However, as Krymov himself writes, the artist, who became his main teacher, died before Nikolai became a student. It was Isaac Levitan. His work had a significant impact on the work of Krymov.
First success
Nikolay Krymov is an artist of a happy fate. His talent was appreciated during his stay at the school. The study “Roofs with Snow”, written in 1906, impressed the teacher A. Vasnetsov, the brother of a famous artist. He bought a painting from a young master, and two years later it was bought by the Tretyakov Gallery. Krymov was then only twenty-four years old.
Blue Rose
Of course, Krymov is a landscape painter: he defined his favorite genre only when he began his career, but his style of writing underwent changes throughout his life. In 1907, Nikolai Petrovich became one of the youngest participants in the Blue Rose exhibition. The masters who participated in the exhibition were distinguished by a special manner of depiction. They were able to notice the secret in everyday beauty, to convey the poetry of the familiar. Krymov placed three works at the exhibition: “Toward Spring” and two versions of “Sandy Slopes”.
The artists who participated in the exhibition became known as the “Blue-pinks”. Their works were full of inner harmony and special silence. Representatives of the direction, including Krymov, tried their hand at impressionism. This genre was close in spirit to the “Blue-roozovets”. Impressionists sought to convey in the works a fleeting impression, the beauty of the moment in his movement. However, with the development of Krymov and his comrades-in-arms, who had tried themselves in the young direction that was emerging in France, they began to move away from him, realizing new ideas, sometimes opposite to impressionism, in canvases.
Further creative search
The craving for symbolism, characteristic of the “Goluborozovites,” artist N. Krymov fully satiated while working on the design of the magazine “Golden Fleece”. The paintings of that period (1906-1909, “Under the Sun”, “Bullfinches” and others) were reminiscent of tapestries by some blurry colors and resemblance to a midday haze.
At the same time, Krymov’s writing style began to change. Symbolism and understatement began to give way to irony, joke and grotesque. Paintings "Windy Day", "Moscow landscape. Rainbow ”,“ After the spring rain ”,“ New Tavern ”gravitate towards primitivism and convey new impressions accumulated over many years of life in Moscow with its fairs and holidays. Krymov’s new landscapes are filled with children's perception. Light paintings literally breathe in fun and mischief, joy due to simple and familiar events: the appearance of a rainbow, sunlight or new tall houses on the street. And the artist conveys this with the help of bright colors and shape geometrization, which replaced the careful study of color combinations. However, this manner of writing became only an intermediate stage in the creative development of Krymov.
Unattainable harmony
Since the 1910s, classical motifs characteristic of 17th-century French landscape painters began to appear distinctly in Krymov’s works. Claude Lorren and Nicola Poussin developed a composition with three plans, each of which was dominated by a certain color: brown, green and blue in the background. Pictures painted in this manner combined reality and fantasy at the same time. They conveyed completely terrestrial landscapes, but the harmony that reigned on the canvas was unattainably perfect.
Nikolay Krymov is an artist who never blindly repeats after teachers or recognized geniuses of the past. In his works, he combined the classical manner of Poussin and Lorren with primitivism, as in the painting Dawn, and later with his own theory of tone. Over time, he moved away from painting landscapes only from nature. Nikolai Petrovich began to supplement what he saw in reality with fantasy, reproducing plots from memory and creating that very harmony, the dream of which was haunted by most masters of the beginning of the last century.
Winter and summer
From nature, Krymov wrote only in the summer, when he and his wife were leaving the city or visiting friends. The artist always looked for housing with a balcony in order to be able to work in the air and depict picturesque landscapes.
In winter, the master created from memory, supplementing real pictures with new elements. These works, like those written from nature, conveyed the beauty and harmony of nature, its secret and explicit life. One of the paintings thus created by the artist Krymov is Winter Evening (1919). Even if you do not know the name of the picture, the time of day on it is beyond doubt: the shadow gradually covers the snow, pinkish clouds are visible in the sky. Due to the play of color and light, the artist was able to convey the severity of the snowdrifts under which the earth sleeps, the play of the rays of the setting sun, not visible on the canvas, and even the feeling of frost, driving travelers home to the warmth of the hearth.
Tone system
In the memoirs of contemporaries, the artist Krymov, whose paintings are now stored in museums and private collections, appears to be a principled and consistent person who has his own point of view on everything. Among his views, the “general tone” theory, developed and repeatedly tested by him, is especially distinguished. Its essence is that the main thing in painting is not color, but tone, that is, the power of light in color. Krymov taught students to see that evening colors are always darker than daytime colors. Outlining the theory, he proposed comparing the white color of a sheet and a starched shirt. Nikolai Petrovich substantiated in his articles, and then showed in his works that the naturalness of the landscape gives exactly the right tone, and the choice of color becomes a secondary task.
Through all the vicissitudes of the era
An unearthly harmony, a play of light and shadow, peace and a captured moment - all this is the artist of Krymov. The painting “Winter Evening”, as well as the paintings “Gray Day”, “Evening in Zvenigorod”, “House in Tarus” and others, convey the beauty of the world in general and nature in particular. In this work, Nikolai Petrovich did not depart from this theme, despite all the turbulent events that were happening then in the country. Political slogans and instructions of the party did not penetrate its canvases. He developed his “tone system” and passed it on to his students. Nikolai Krymov died on May 6, 1958, having managed to transfer the science of painting to many young artists, who later became famous artists.
The contribution of Nikolai Krymov to the theory of painting is invaluable. Today, the work of the master can be seen in museums in the country. Many of Krymov’s paintings are in private collections. The artist’s canvases are still admired, and his capacious and accurate statements among artists have long become winged expressions.