Levitan and the silver birch

Apollo, July, 2004 by Averil King

Isaak Levitan's paintings are a highlight of the exhibition of Russian landscapes from the age of Tolstoy currently at the National Gallery, London. Averil King traces the use he makes of a key image, the silver birch, which is both a symbol of Russian identity and a link with new developments in landscape painting in France, Germany and Austria.

Isaak Levitan made telling use of the silver birch in his landscape painting. As a motif, it was lyrical, expressive and, above all, calculated to evoke feelings of affection for the Russian Motherland. Whereas his compatriot Ivan Shishkin, a fellow member of the Assocation for Traveling Art Exhibitions (the Pereduizhniki or Wanderers), (1) chose to commemorate the huge coniferous inhabitants of Russia's great forests, Levitau preferred to make this dainty, deciduous species, which grows so freely in central Russia, into a significant ingredient in his paintings, a motif which allows us, too, to appreciate the wider, European context of his art.

An exact contemporary of his lifelong friend Anion Chekhov, Levitan lived from 1860 to 1900. Having trained at the Moscow School of Painting from 1873, he painted in the Crimea in 1886 and on the shores of the Volga between 1887 and 1890. He made several brief tours of Europe, sketching in the French Alps, north Italy and Switzerland, familiarising himself with the art world in Berlin, Paris, Vienna and Munich, and exhibiting with the Munich Secession. He suffered from indifferent health, dying from a disease of the aorta aged only thirty-nine.

Levitan's early painting Birch grove (1885-89) (Fig. 1), painted at the time his friendship with Chekhov was deepening, is a view into a birchwood in springtime. With a low viewpoint and closely cropped both horizontally and vertically, it shows the birches' foliage and their white trunks in dappled sunshine. It is painted in a more Impressionistic style than Levitan had previously employed, and raises the question of how much the artist knew of the endeavours of Monet and his followers. Among his fellow Russian painters, the great master of genre Ilya Repin had lived in Paris from 1873 to 1876, yet had remained largely impervious to the early Impressionists' painterly innovations. More probably, Levitan had learnt about them from Koustantin Korovin (1861 1939), who had been overwhelmed by the lush colouring and free brushwork he had seen in Paris in 1885. In both Korovin's pictures and those of his friend Valentin Serov (1865-1911) the influence of Impressionism is clearly evident; Serov's famous Girl with peaches (1887) had an atmosphere new to Russian painting, suffused with light and fresh, warm colour.

[FIGURE 1 OMMITED]

As his career progressed, the silver birch continued to feature in many of Levitan's paintings, often as a compositional device: in The hollow (1898), for example, he uses birches in full leaf, their drooping fronds of summer foliage cascading like a woman's long skirt to frame the composition. In the panoramic, joyous Golden autumn (Fig. 2), painted in 1895 and one of several subjects celebrating the different seasons, Levitan features a grove of autumn birches. Beneath a calm, cirrus-streaked sky a winding river, cobalt-blue, runs among fields lined with the golden trees; a single yellow birch, straight as a sentinel, marks the opposite bank. The birches' glowing autumn foliage and shining white trunks combine with the green of the meadows to lend the picture a festive air. In the distance are several low wooden peasant houses, or izbas, and a dark strip of forest indicative of the vast coniferous taiga covering much of Russia.

[FIGURE 2 OMMITED]

The distinctive nature of Levitan's portrayal of the silver birch is made clearer by a comparison with the use made of the motif by his contemporaries. It was quite different, for example, from the epic character of Shishkin's well-loved forest landscapes. Born in 1832, Shishkin belonged to a slightly earlier generation of Russian landscapists. Throughout his work, two themes predominated--Russia's wide, abundant fields and her immense forests. Shishkin was drawn towards the magnificent, towering conifers of the taiga, portraying them in a meticulous, near-photographic style. These reverent commemorations, made at a time when many tracts of woodland were being felled by impecunious landlords, endeared him to a wide audience and met with approval from such critics as Stasov. (2)

Among Shishkin's paintings are some in which the silver birch is allowed to appear. In the birch tree forest (1883) is a charming scene with figures among tall birch trees (Fig. 4); in pictures such as Stream in the forest 1869), birches are interspersed among other deciduous species, their foliage and the dark furrows in their trunks, or lenticols, clearly delineated, so that an effect more solid and monumental than Levitan's much more lyrical representation is achieved.

[FIGURE 4 OMMITED]

The Ukrainian Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842-1910) also portrayed Russia's silver birches. Kuindzhi--viewed as something of a rediscovery in the exhibition of Russian landscape painting at Groningen and London (3)--brought to the subject an idiosyncratic sense of lighting and bold composition. First winning commendation for his pictures of the lush, wooded Ukrainian countryside at dusk or after nightfall, Kuindzhi used paints of his own manufacture to exaggerate the natural tonality of a scene and create harsh contrasts of primary colours. (4) Consequently, his Birch tree grove (1879), was highly dramatic. Here Kuindzhi deployed his characteristic 'cosmic' lighting and simplification of shapes. A weed-laden stream meanders away from the viewer through grass which is rendered lime-green by the bright sunlight, while the trees behind suffer from bulbous outlines not really reminiscent of the birch. Levitan's Birch grove, painted a little later and generally considered to be a plagiarisation of Kuindzhi's composition, is in fact a great deal more sensitive to the intrinsic beauty of these pretty, slender trees.