Artist Isaac Ilyich Levitan: biography, creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The artist Isaac Ilyich Levitan was born in the town of Kybarty (Lithuania) in August 1860. He almost did not tell anyone about his childhood, so there was no information about this period of his life for the descendants. It is known that the father was some kind of very small employee and tried 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, to plein-airs, to sketches. At the age of thirteen, Isaac was accepted into an art school.

Great teachers

The boy was very lucky with the teachers, but in general, all the years of study brought him severe trials. By that time he remained an orphan, no one could help him in any way, all problems at this young age had to be solved on their own. Such a brilliant landscape painter as Isaac Levitan had a complicated biography. The abilities in him immediately showed up remarkable, since 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, who brought up a whole cohort of excellentstudents: Nesterov, both Korovins, Svetoslavsky, Stepanov…

Levitan, whose biography is described in this article, felt that everything was easy for him, and was constantly afraid of this lightness, worked hard and hard, looking for his own style. From the age of eighteen he took part in exhibitions, and his paintings were immediately talked about. Isaac Ilyich Levitan immediately became a bright phenomenon in the field of Russian culture. As an artist, Levitan was very inquisitive, but he explored nature without dissecting it in a medical way, he seemed to be talking with her confidentially. And no one learned so many secrets from her as Levitan.

Biography

The artist did not like to travel far from his native nature, he lived mostly in Moscow, worked in the provinces of Tver 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 the work took away from him all the time, all the strength and all the love. Here are all these life-breathing works that Levitan created - the biography is the most authentic.

Seeing and feeling

He overcame the scenic conventions of a romantic landscape, preserved in places by his Wandering friends. A person unusually receptive to any impressions of nature in all its manifestations, the artist I. I. Levitan and his picture - each! - this is every time foresight, "reading" of experience. Musicians have perfect pitch.

Levitan had an "absolute eye" for landscapesor "absolute feeling". The same applies to watercolor drawings, where the poetic mood, which was the essence of the artistic phenomenon of nature, is just as accurately conveyed. In watercolors, Levitan, whose landscapes are always extremely authentic, 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 saturation, a huge part of the human soul is invested in them. He was so able to peer into nature, as if all the secrets of being were concentrated in it (the artist's favorite philosopher was A. Schopenhauer, by the way, which very accurately explains this ability of his). Levitan's paintings adopted 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, since he did not cease to stay in the circle of primordially Russian images, and they are always and certainly 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 maturity, Levitan, having become 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 left his canvases, and landscapes were born filled with tragic forebodings, longing and loneliness. The artist was seriously illthoughts of imminent death did not leave him. Nevertheless, he did not go to Italy for treatment. "After all, only in Russia can a real landscape painter work," he explained.

Golden Reach

The works written by Levitan during his travels along the Volga with his Wandering friends are poetically inspired. Levitan's "Volga period" is comparable in terms of creative output to Pushkin's "Boldino Autumn". Antiquities of Sviyazhsk, Old Believer crosses over the river, the harsh beauty of northern nature, remoteness from everything magnificent, mortal, unnecessary - that's what the artist I. I. Levitan found there. And his painting was born - a real, iconic one - "Above Eternal Peace".

Etudes of an abandoned graveyard were useful for starting work on the composition, so the landscape is real, as it most often happened, but the artist gave it extraordinary depth and majesty, and the earth connected with the sky, giving it the Trans-Volga distances, drowning in evening purple. In addition to this picture, Levitan painted landscapes in a multitude - excellent, warm, bright, saturated with imagery: "Evening. Golden Reach", "Evening on the Volga", "After the Rain", "Fresh Wind", but truly characteristic, famous, then is recognizable by all, yet it became - "Above Eternal Peace".

Details

This picture has everything: silence, and the heavy rumble of a big bell, and graveyard peace, and the endless movement of life. The gray, cold power of the river is shown, as it were, from the height of a bird's flight, anda narrow cape spread over the water like a wing, on which a small old temple sheltered, and with it a churchyard. And the wind unceasingly and demandingly tears the tops of the aspens, and even the crosses tilted, it seems, under its pressure.

But the temple window glows brightly bright, from this even the gray water and the dark purple horizon seem to brighten. Such is the ever-existing peace of the world, which was created by the Creator: this wind, it seems, does not drive clouds, does not shake aspens, but time itself rushes over this landscape quickly and irrevocably. There is not a single sign of human presence in this landscape. There is only a space where the soul is not confused by either the smallness of details or the vastness of the world. This is how Levitan's paintings break through to universal harmony.

About Style

The very concept of style is a transpersonal category. Starting work on a painting, the artist seems to enter into the proposed game, accepting its conditions. Of course, he has the right to rebel against these conditions, to refute them with his 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 Art Nouveau style is clearly manifested, although "transpersonal", not directly.

Moscow principles of painting school, of course, dominate. However, in the above-mentioned painting "Above Eternal Peace", at the highest point of Levitan's philosophical meditation, the Art Nouveau style asserts itselfquite loud. Although it is impossible to single out any one style in his works. Levitan's paintings are an endless search. Here are echoes of romanticism, and realism (landscapes!), and symbolism, and impressionism, and modernity, and expressionism, but all of them are stated only in the densest stylistic combinations. The main thing for Levitan was to catch the motive of the work in its natural state, and he knew different ways to express it and used them all as needed.

Composition and form

Compositionally, Levitan's works are based on 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 - the coast, then it is on the left, in the direction of the river, further - again the ledge of the coast on the right, balanced on the left by reeds, so the river exit to the horizon is sharpened. All this construction ends with two boats, whose shape, as it were, continues the line tending to the horizon. As a result, both parts are combined in a composition: not strict symmetry, but rather, balance.

Volume and space are embodied and interact most clearly in architecture, but something similar should happen in painting - in the ratio of the background and the subject. And how Isaac Levitan wrote autumn pictures! The clearest proof of this. His trees look very strong, the water is not only transparent, but also wet, and the boats on it, even the smallest, farthest, are seen as hollow inside, light and floating on the surface of the water.

Color and light

The artist's favorite color is green, and he couldbreak it down into a dozen shades from one emerald green paint. He never painted even shadows in black. Thin layers, glazing - this is how Levitan achieved the fabulous picturesqueness of his creations. The artist feels ingeniously the relationship between color and light: for example, the cold light of the moon is enhanced by blue, even greenery turns slightly blue, and water serves as a plane reflecting this light. Levitan's color never ceases to be intense, objects, moving away, darken very slightly.