"Six-winged Seraphim" and other artistic heritage of Mikhail Vrubel

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

Mikhail Vrubel is a mysterious personality and an outstanding artist rolled into one. His creative path is littered with complex metamorphoses, which invariably led him to depict characteristic compositions, where the use of a brush alone was not enough.

The nature of Vrubel's creativity

The artist was a multifaceted personality. He traveled a lot and repeatedly visited the world centers of art: Italy, France, Germany. Mikhail Alexandrovich was greatly interested in Greece and Switzerland. Having visited many galleries, studied history and met many characters along the way, Vrubel made human existence and the moral and philosophical aspects of life the central theme of his work.

The artistic culture of the 19th century was quite controversial, the artist had to fight for the opportunity to convey his vision of the world on canvas, constantly undergoing difficulties in depicting spiritual ways to solve problems.

Vrubel is an artist with bright individualism and even a certain mysticism. His work met with mixed reviews, and for a long time werenot fully accepted.

The origins of the artist's creativity

M. Vrubel, whose paintings often served as illustrations for literary works, often refers in his painting to the romanticism of the Renaissance, as well as ancient mythology. Due to the peculiarities of his activities, he was forced to be interested in the history of the development of folk tales.

Due to the lack of strict limits in the artistic style of that time, Mikhail Aleksandrovich often uses techniques from different schools in his works. The artist's favorite means of conveying images are the mysterious and ephemeral techniques of early Russian symbolism.

Mikhail Vrubel is an artist with an ambiguous stylistic position. Being a versatile and sensitive person, he dreamed of combining life and art in one canvas. To this end, he resorted to complex artistic solutions, using an ornamental pattern that brought him very close to the followers of Russian Art Nouveau.

Significant works of the master

One can list many names of artists who would be equally good at working on portraits, landscapes and still lifes, but none of them can boast of such unprecedented mysticism and complexity of technique as Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel. Extraordinary visual solutions, along with the plot load, were reflected in the following works of the master: the triptych "Faust", "Morning". Here the viewer can trace the trend of the modernist school.

In an attempt to "expose" the human soul and prove its unity withnature, the artist creates paintings "Pan", "Lilac", "Toward the night". However, this was not enough for Vrubel. Having moved to Kyiv in 1884, the master begins to work on a cycle of icons, and also finds his purpose in painting the walls of temples. He was engaged in this craft for 5 years and was somewhat disappointed, because he could not embody his ideas in his works - he was forced to serve the ventures of bourgeois society.

There is a process of metamorphosis when Vrubel sees that all his dreams and vision of human nature diverge from the reality around him. He becomes obsessed with the idea of creating works of monumental art, global works. An example of Vrubel's attempts to recreate his ideas on canvas is his famous "Six-winged Seraphim".

Moscow period of Vrubel's work

In Kyiv, the artist was crowded and he went to Moscow. Here he took up the decorative arts in earnest. The prerequisite for this was Vrubel's entry into the art circle of S. I. Mamontov. Since then, the artist has been working on panels and easel works, such as "The Fortune Teller" and "Venice".

In the capital, new opportunities opened up for Vrubel, and he began to participate in the design of performances, create architectural sketches. During these years, Vrubel began fruitful work on illustrations for Lermontov's works.

"Six-winged Seraphim" seems to be a complete creative antipode to the famous painting "Demon", on which the artist worked hard in 1890. The theme of good and evil becomes a key one inworks of Vrubel in his Moscow period of creativity. Oddly enough, it was the image of the demon that allowed the painter to reveal himself as much as possible in the symbolism of his personality, to show the daring nature of the hero, the rebel, the man who does not accept all the baseness and everyday life, forced to suffer from deep loneliness because of this. The technical techniques of the image on the canvas convey to the viewer all the tension of the artist, all his empathy and identification with himself. Symbolically, the picture resembles the confession of a man who managed to comprehend a lot in life, but did not overcome its resistance.

Mikhail Vrubel "Six-winged Seraphim"

Mikhail Vrubel was a very educated person, and this both hindered and helped him in life. His “Six-winged Seraphim” from an artistic point of view surpasses the well-known work “Demon Defeated”. Few people were able to appreciate all the work invested by the artist in the image of the prophet. With a deep study of the canvas, comparing the purity of the lines and the degree of expression, we can conclude that the “Six-winged Seraphim” is the quintessence of the artist in search of images of good and evil. Here all the accumulated skills of Vrubel were mixed up. He managed to put an end to the hope of monumental art with this picture, showing that he is still tormented by memories of the demon, but is no longer alone.

The canvas is painted with a dense mosaic stroke, the color accompaniment of the picture conveys the mysticism of the other world, which the artist wished to show us through the fragments of stained glass windows.