Илья Иванович Машков
ILYA IVANOVICH MASHKOV
. . . These fruits, loaves and meat are depicted with
a skill almost comparable to that displaced by the
masters of the Dutch still life in their achievements
hitherto unsurpassed. Mashkov's canvases are not only
truthful to the point of illusion but are possessed
of a rare beauty and radiance. His use of colour
resembles the swelling chords of an organ.
A. Lunacharsky
THE NAME OF ILYA IVANOVICH MASHKOV is associated above all with still-
life paintings remarkable for an elemental intensity of colour which verges
at times on the violent. Displaying a scope and boldness unusual in his
contemporaries as well as an acute feeling for the materiality of things,
Mashkov's bright canvases are striking for the breadth of their pictorial
range, for the deep sonority of their colours.
Mashkov was one of the boldest innovators in Russian painting at the
beginning of the twentieth century, an outstanding painter whose works
contributed to the development of Soviet art, an experienced teacher who
passed on his skill to many who would later become famous artists. Each of
these aspects of his creative activity is instructive and deserving of
special attention. Mashkov developed as a painter in the years preceding
the Revolution, at a time when artistic life in Russia was unusually
complex and full of contradiction. In the field of art there were clashes
between various principles and ideas, manifested as a struggle between
numerous schools. Painters of an older generation, — members of the Society
for Circulating Art Exhibitions (the Peredvizhniki), the World of Art and
the Union of Russian Artists, — were still active. At the same time a host
of aesthetic and artistic conceptions, precarious in their theoretical
foundation, were receiving wide attention. The overthrow of traditional
forms, aesthetic nihilism, the loss of firm links with reality could not,
however, delay the development of art. The search for new paths and new
creative principles went on, and Russian art was enriched by some
remarkable achievements. Just in this period there appeared a number of
talented young artists.
Despite the diversity of the new ideas and trends, one may clearly
discern in Russian painting of this time a general tendency towards the
perfecting of artistic form. Artists were striving for a certain synthesis,
they wished to reveal the generalized meaning of phenomena not susceptible
of concretization in time, and therefore not infrequently they refused to
represent movement and action in their work. As a result of this loss of
interest in the subject painting, the still life became the dominant genre.
Landscape and portrait also occupied an important place. And particular
attention was paid to the renewal of painterly techniques.
The evolving of a new system of pictorial representation advanced
through a series of agonizing explorations, which were often far from
successful. The principle of verisimilitude, which had prevailed in
nineteenth century painting, was supplanted by that of conventionality.
This testified to the inner bond linking the new trends in Russian painting
with Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism, for the
exponents of those schools sought support not in the traditions of European
Post-Renaissance realism, but rather in principles adopted from the visual
arts of different peoples and ages. The search for formal solutions
appropriate to these new stylistic norms was of decisive importance. This
tendency is not difficult to perceive in the works of such artists of the
late nineteenth — early twentieth centuries as Ruble, Servo and K. Korovin.
It was characteristic of the members of the World of Art and the Blue Rose
associations, but most strongly developed in the work of artists of the
Jack of Diamonds group and other representatives of the so-called avant-
garde in the beginning of this century.
In the artistic movements at the beginning of the twentieth century
there was much romanticism, much anarchic rebelliousness. Inner
contradictions were most sharply revealed in the various trends of the
avant-garde movement where subjectivism, having reached the limit of non-
representational depiction, was opposed by the real achievements of a few
artists of the Jack of Diamonds group, like Konchalovsky, Mashkov, Falk.
Lentulov. Kuprin, Larionov and others. These painters discovered a
successful balance in which expressiveness of colour, plasticity and
decorative composition helped express a particularly intense, yet at the
same time integral perception of reality.
Ilya Ivanovich Mashkov (1881—1944) was born in the village of
Mikhaylovskaya in the Don area. His parents were of peasant origin. At the
age of fifteen he lost his father, who had pursued various trades and had
had to endure constant poverty. From an early age Mashkov displayed an
aptitude for handicrafts; he also liked to draw. However, the cruel and
degrading existence he was forced to lead (in his early youth he had been
placed in the service of some local traders, supposedly as an apprentice)
was least likely to further his attachment to art. He was already in his
eighteenth year when he first heard that painting was something to be
learned. In 1900 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and
Architecture. After completing his life class, he transferred to the studio
of Servo and Korovin. A little earlier Mashkov had begun to give private
lessons himself. During his first years in the School he studied avidly and
diligently. Then there followed a period of doubt and disillusionment with
the creative principles of his teachers, a period which ended with a
complete change in his artistic orientation, as a result of which he was
expelled from the School in 1910.
This liberation from "academic chains" was to a great extent prompted
by Mashkov's first acquaintance with the Hermitage in 1907. In 1908 he went
on a trip to Germany, Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Italy and Vienna,
during which he got to know the masterpieces of classical art as well as
contemporary French painting. Before his departure he had already become
familiar with the Shchukin and Morozov collections, where fine examples of
the most recent French art were represented, and in 1909 he visited the
Golden Fleece Exhibition, which was displaying works by the Fauvists.
Mashkov's answer to his expulsion from the School was to take an active
part in the creation of the Jack of Diamonds. The spirit of epater le
bourgeois which accompanied the activities of this group prevented critics
of the time from discerning the genuine artistic merit of the work produced
by its members. The emergence of a new trend in Russian painting and the
organization in 1911, by a number of young Moscow artists, of the Jack of
Diamonds exhibition society was connected with an eager movement towards
expressiveness, decorative quality and the concentrated use of colour — all
entirely characteristic of the age. Their experience of European art
enabled the artists to pass on boldly towards a generalized representation
of nature, refusing to follow the principles of Impressionism. Opponents of
narrative painting, illusion and aestheticism, they relied on experiment in
pictorial techniques. Hence their impulse towards the detail and their
preference for the still life, which was indeed to become the "laboratory"
of their new endeavours.
Their fidelity to a constructive line of artistic thought allowed the
painters of the Jack of Diamonds group to achieve a synthesis of colour and
form in their representation of objects from the surrounding world. They
profited by the experience of Cezanne and the Cubists, Cubism being for
them not so much a system as a means of enhancing artistic expressiveness.
This exploitation of formal expressiveness, as well as the concentrated use
of all the resources of painting, led to innovations in the pictorial
structure and style of their works. Many artists of the time were attracted
to the problem of creating in painting a sui generis artistic equivalent of
what was distinctively national in Russian life. Members of the Jack of
Diamonds group interpreted this problem as the return of Russian painting
to traditions preserved over the centuries in folk art. This link with the
principles of folk art and the desire to appropriate its expressiveness of
portrayal determined the character of their endeavours. They were full of
enthusiasm for the Russian lubok (popular print), the house-painter's sign,
the decorated tray, the folk toy. These painters thus enriched contemporary
art with the achievements of Russian folk art. The strength of their work
lay in the exaggerated emotionality and distinctiveness of their
portrayals, in the intensity and concreteness of their colour and in their
powerful optimism.
It is well known that the struggle carried on between the Jack of
Diamonds and its various opponents did not in fact unite the members of the
group. Harmonious as their first public appearance seemed to be, it was
quickly followed by a number of internal disagreements, which eventually
led to the society's dissolution in 1917. The first signs of Mashkov's
