Early Munich sketches by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky

Matyunina Dar'ya Stanislavovna PhD in Art History Associate Professor; Department of Fine, Decorative Arts and Design; Institute of Culture and Arts of Moscow City Pedagogical University 125363, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Fabritsiusa, 21, of. 101 matdarya@ya.ru Other publications by this author     Sizova Irina Nikolaevna PhD in Pedagogy Associate Professor; Department of Fine, Decorative Arts and Design; Institute of Culture and Arts of Moscow City Pedagogical University 125363, Russia, Moscow, Fabricius str., 21, office 218 sizovain@mgpu.ru

Khizhnyak Elizaveta Andreevna PhD in Pedagogy Associate Professor; Department of Fine, Decorative Arts and Design; Institute of Culture and Arts of Moscow City Pedagogical University 125363, Russia, Moscow, Fabricius str., 21, office 101 HijnyakEA@mgpu.ru

    Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, "the wandering enthusiast", ^{[16, p. 5]} is the author of a series of St. Petersburg and Petrograd landscapes executed in an artistic graphic manner, as well as views of the Russian province and late graphics and theatrical projects of the emigrant period. The graphics of Dobuzhinsky's "heyday", the period of his participation in the World of Art association, have been deeply and comprehensively studied and described in the art history literature. Conceptually and stylistically illustrating the artless passeism, retrospectivism, and expressing, in the opinion of most researchers, the rejection of modernity, man-made civilization, and technological progress, Dobuzhinsky's graphic works also have a special poetic charm. The usual "anti-Urban" interpretation of the content of his urban landscapes in the responses of contemporaries, art critics and researchers is often supplemented by definitions of "poetization" and "poetry" as a characteristic feature of the master's work. The purpose of this article is not, of course, to debunk Dobuzhinsky's reputation as an anti–Christian and a passeist, but to make his contribution by adding to the already existing layer of publications interpreting his works as neo-romantic, an analysis of two early, previously unexplored, "pre-Petersburg" and "pre-miriscus" studies, which, according to according to the authors of the article, poetic qualities.

    Most of the monographs, albums, catalogues of Dobuzhinsky's works begin the chronology of the master's work with an analysis of graphic works from the early 1900s, executed in a refined, recognizable manner ^{[3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20]}, or dedicated to his illustrative and theatrical work.the decorative activity of the miriscusnic and emigrant periods, which is natural, since it is these periods that represent the conceptually and stylistically mature work of the artist to the viewer. In the first half and the middle of the twentieth century. early things of the Dobuzhinsky period of apprenticeship quite rarely became the subject of close attention of researchers, in recent decades it is necessary to note the increased interest in their study, especially in the period from 2005 to 2015. – the years of the 130th and 140th anniversaries of the artist, research active and fruitful ^{[2, 10, 18, 19, 22]}. In our opinion, the artist's early student works pave the way for a poetic interpretation of reality characteristic of his mature work. In them, one can definitely and clearly see poetry, which in mature late work is "synchronized" with Passeism and anti-Urbanism.

    Two sketches: "Munich. The workshop of the A. Ashbe School" (circa 1900) and "Street in Munich" (1899-1901) were created by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky in late 1899 – early 1900, when he was a student of Anton Ashbe in Munich. Germany, and in particular Munich at the end of the XIX century, was a place of attraction for Russian artists who came here to get acquainted with the richest collections of the Old and New Munich Pinakothek and Schackgalerie (galleries of Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack), for international exhibitions held in Glaspalast ("Glass Palace", an unsealed Munich copy of the "Crystal Palace" in London), as well as studying at the school of popular teachers: draftsman Anton Ashbe and Shimon Holloshi. In addition, Russian artists were "attracted" by the anti-academism and progressive aspirations of the Munich Secession, formed in 1892, in whose exhibitions many future artists would participate, and the atmosphere, the "sphere" of modern art, which Mstislav Dobuzhinsky writes about in his letters to his father:  "I took out an understanding of the elegant and looked at contemporary art" ^{[7, p. 61]}, then emphasizes: "Here I am in the field of art" [ibid.].

    Mstislav Dobuzhinsky first came to Munich in the summer of 1897, and then in the autumn of 1899 he arrived there with the firm intention of studying drawing. He was not accepted into the workshop of Professor Gizis, an "avid academician", but on his advice he went to the school of the famous Slovak teacher-draughtsman Anton Ashbe. In his "Memoirs" Dobuzhinsky gives a detailed description of the Ashbe studio and the impressions of the first day at school: "The studio with a high full-length window, through which the autumn foliage was golden, was full of pupils and pupils" ^{[6, p. 148]}.

    Once he turns out to be an Ashbe student, he goes through the same "initiation" procedure as others: the teacher rules the drawings of all new students in his own way and very unexpectedly, "stunning" them: "The new student was immediately stunned by the proofreading. He painstakingly drew "eyes", "curls" and "fingers" with nails. Ashbe, on the other hand, took a thick piece of coal and ruthlessly drew a fat line through all this timid rubbish." <> "Nur mit grossen Linien arbeiten" (to work only with "big" lines) – this was Ashbe's principle, which was the opposite of academic methodology. The "Kugel method", or Ashbe's "ball principle" (the rule to lead a drawing from a large form to details, achieving the impression of a generalized volume in the image) ^{[6, p. 149]}, Dobuzhinsky gradually masters and, judging by the Munich sketches, tries to follow the method not only in academic drawing, but also in paintings. Both sketches – the interior of the workshop and the street in Munich – are painted in a generalized, somewhat "loose" manner. Dobuzhinsky identifies and, with the help of tone, correctly takes and solves the "big forms", discarding the "small".

    According to Ashba, in painting, only color can solve the problem of reproducing surrounding objects. He considered it important to take the color relations correctly, for this it was first necessary to achieve the fidelity of the tonal relations on the canvas. Ashbe's students actually began to study painting with grisailles, using ochre-earthy shades in the palette. Obviously, under the influence of this technique, Dobuzhinsky creates a "Munich Street", where we see a combination of warm "earthy" tones with cold bluish-gray ones. In Dobuzhinsky's "Memoirs" and letters, Munich is presented both in a romantic and everyday way: the artist writes about "an amazingly beautiful sunny autumn" and a cold winter, elegant facades of baroque churches dusted with snow, street spectacles (student "torches"), lack of coal and bad weather… At Ashbe school, he gets used to it pretty quickly. Already in November, he wrote to his father, V.P. Dobuzhinsky: "Now he is completely involved. Standing is not tiring. <  > I have been going to evening classes all week" and rejoices at the well-deserved praise of the teacher: "Ashbe informed me that I have an artistic flair (which, however, I did not doubt myself), and the data that I will work well, that my business is going forward" ^{[7, p. 57; 58]}.

    The remarks about the "strange climate" and the "coal famine" in a February letter to V.P. Dobuzhinsky paint a picture of the changeable Munich winter and domestic disorder: "For exactly three days... it was wonderful spring weather. and now it's strange to remember this, because it's a fierce winter again, everything is covered with snow and there is a great demand for coal (which is not in the whole city: this year there is a "coal famine" everywhere). A strange climate" [ibid., p. 59]. In another letter, he tells his father about the Munich autumn weather: "It's autumn, rainy days have come, in the morning I run to the workshop through the fog." [ibid., p. 60]. At the same time, in the autumn of 1900, talking about his educational achievements, Dobuzhinsky notes with satisfaction: "... things are now finished with me, the drawing becomes soft, and I assert myself in my own manner..." and "During all this time spent in Munich, I have gained a lot in terms of aesthetic understanding" [ibid., p. 61]. Then he reports about his transfer from Ashbe's school to Shimon Holloshi: "I went to Hollosi's school, but I study at Ashbe's only in the evenings" [ibid.].

    Probably one of the autumn rainy evenings mentioned by the artist in correspondence is depicted in the pastel sketch "Munich Street", dated 1899-1901. In the sketch, the perspective of a small street goes deep along a complex trajectory of an intricate pattern of light and shadow on the pavement: a spot of bright light picks out the left side of a deserted alley, "whitening" the sidewalk in comparison with on the right, the shady side, where both the sidewalk and the paving stones of the roadway sink into deep shadow, and then, in the background, the light spreads almost all over the street, which makes a left turn. From the contrast of the spots of light and shadow, it is obvious that the light comes from local sources: in the background, on the left, there is a lantern on the sidewalk, and around it the street is flooded with light. The figure of a lone passerby in the foreground in the lower left part of the work is given in a dark silhouette, in a contour. The yellow plastered wall along which a passer-by walks, a dry tree behind it and the red firewall of the house with rare windows behind (in the background on the left) are brightly illuminated. The facades of the houses on the right side of the street are completely immersed in shadow, but their side walls are brightly illuminated, perhaps by the rays of the setting sun, since the light of the lanterns cannot reach such a height, or by moonlight. The sky is heavy, leaden gray, so it is quite difficult to imagine where the cold harsh light is coming from, creating a chiaroscuro conflict and introducing romantic and mystical notes to the mood of the sketch. Judging by the low blue sky and the bare branches of the tree on the left, it shows deep autumn or winter.

    The space and the perspective depth of the street seem endless, going to infinity due to the "broad" manner of the artist, the blurring of contours, the uncertainty of silhouettes. The restraint of the palette, its limitation by combining a warm brick-ochre scale with cold diluted and gray tones, leads the perception of the landscape more into a graphic plane than into a picturesque one. The graphic character is also given by the clear spatial construction of the landscape: the architectural forms (houses on both sides of the street) are massive and stable, and despite the considerable "shakiness" of the contours, all the lines of perspective construction, the horizon line, the figure in the foreground fit into the rigid, geometrically "correct" frame of perspective. The space is also confidently "disassembled" into plans: a dark foreground outline, caught by the light of a lantern (and moonlight?) the middle plan and the blurred distance of the street, led away into a smoky veil. An organized airy and color perspective coexist conflict-free with a special color "mood" created by the harmony of almost monochrome, muted, "discolored", diluted gray and ochre colors. The "quiet poetry" of this study, "a sedate, unhurried narration about everyday life, about the lyrics of everyday life" ^{[12, p. 305]} and the ability to surprisingly subtly "convey the simplest, everyday phenomena" [ibid.] are characteristic features of the artist's work of absolutely any period, be it early Munich, miriscus or late emigrant. O.O. Likhachev, a researcher of the artist's work, writes about this quality: "He could say about himself in the words of F. Sologub: "I take a piece of poor and rude life, and create a sweet legend out of it – for I am a poet" [ibid.].

     In the same poetic vein of "intimate realism", the sketch of the workshop of Anton Ashbe (circa 1900) was written. The color scheme here is blurred black and graphite tones combined with green and pearl gray. The artist paints the interior of the studio, where full-scale classes are held, from above, probably from the mezzanine. The spacious workshop with extremely high ceilings and a huge window, behind which is a sunlit summer landscape, is filled with students working at easels. At the bottom edge of the canvas, a model reclining on a podium covered with maroon drapery, posing for artists. Dark flat cones of additional lighting lamps hang from the ceiling, which, apparently, are not lit on this clear, fine day. It can be assumed that the drawing lesson is depicted: artists work without additional tools, they do not have palettes in their hands, there are no stools with brushes and paints next to the easels. All these details are not revealed immediately, since Dobuzhinsky's painting style here is free, sketchy: he outlines silhouettes of people in the interior with a wide brush in several strokes, designates dark chandeliers in the foreground with large long strokes, the walls of the workshop, the landscape outside the window in delicate green and bluish tones. After carefully examining it, the viewer distinguishes outside the window a house with a gable roof and blue patches of shadows on it, next to it a thin white birch trunk with a yellowish-green crown, the forest and the sky behind. The spatial depth of this study and the indistinctness of the contours of all the depicted objects are comparable to the pastel "Munich Street" and even, perhaps, the picturesque "Workshop" surpasses the graphic "Street" by the conventionality and vagueness of the pictorial language. There are no color contrasts in the sketch, contrasts of cold and warm colors, intense and lightened, in fact, there is only, as in a pastel landscape, a contrast of dark tones in the foreground (the ceiling of the chandelier and the ledge of the wall on the left) and lighter grays and greens of the second and farthest. The bright second and background plans are "broken" by the rather dark vertical wall of the workshop, in which a large window of complex shape is cut through. The huge ceiling height, a giant window in the wall gives some idea of the architecture of the building in which Anton Ashbe conducted classes. Mstislav Dobuzhinsky describes it in his Memoirs: "The school was located on Georgenstrasse and, to my surprise, was located in a large log hut of quasi-Russian style with cockerels and carved towels. This studio house used to belong to the artist Freiwirt* Lutzow, who built it in this "Ropetov style", fashionable in our country in 1870-^[18]80 g[odes], in memory of Russia, where he lived for a long time. This curious house stood off the street and was completely surrounded by trees" ^{[6, p. 148]}. The interior of the studio, first seen in autumn, the artist also describes in detail:  "The studio with a high full-length window <...> was full of pupils and female students" [ibid.].

    The coincidence of the workshop's images in verbal description and pictorial execution is absolute. The special atmosphere of the art studio is conveyed subtly, convincingly and accurately. At the same time, the sketch of the workshop naturally combines in the viewer's perception with the equally poetic pastel landscape "Munich Street", despite the fact that the mood of the landscape is dominated by "gloomy" evening autumn notes, and in the "Workshop" - positive "summer" poetics. Here I would like to add a review conceptually important for our analysis of Dobuzhinsky's work by Alexander Benois, who discusses in his memoirs the nature of this poetry, which he considers a symptom of the sincerity and truthfulness of Dobuzhinsky's art: "For me, after all, the main thing in art has always been (and still remains) that, for lack of another word It has to be called the hackneyed word "poetry" or an even more reprehensible word these days – "content". <> ... it's not about the "plot", which can remain alien, incomprehensible, and unsuspected, but here it's all about some kind of mystery that penetrates to the depths of our being and arouses incomparable hopes, hopes, thoughts, emotions and in general what is called "soul movements". In my mind and in my unshakeable conviction, this mystery is art <...> Dobuzhinsky's art <...> it is really a modest, quiet art; "Cela na case rien" (it does not represent anything extraordinary – author's translation) <...>, however, in this modest and quiet art lies that grain of authenticity which should be especially appreciated and which many other and very proud, famous and brilliant works are deprived of. This extraordinarily sincere art fully testifies to the sincerity and spiritual truthfulness of the artist" ^{[1, pp. 337-338]}.

    Concluding the analysis of the figurative expressiveness of two sketches of Dobuzhinsky's early Munich period, I would like to emphasize that, despite the absence of a special recognizable graphic style of the artist formed later in his student years, both of these early sketches are certainly united by their mood, poetic experience and sincerity of feeling and stand in line with the works of the mature period of the master's work, representing in a technical sense – the early stage of the evolution of his creative manner, in a figurative and meaningful way, is the determined and consistently implemented author's position.