Vasily Surikov

Agrippa, and the conflict with paganism, in his study of rival marriage customs, The Judgement of the Prince.

In the 1880s, however, Surikov discovered and explored his real theme: Russia's struggle with its past in embracing Western civilisation. He did this by treating certain key episodes on the largest possible scale, by paying detailed attention to accuracy of costume, physiognomy, architecture and custom, and by ignoring completely everything which was going on in European art at the time, concentrating entirely on the most dramatic and vivid presentation. This made him, at a stroke, a great history painter. Indeed, he can be considered the last of the great history painters. His Morning of the Execution of the Strel'tsy (1881), the first of the series, presents the grim public execution, by Peter the Great, of the soldier-patriots, the Old Believers, who stood between the monarch and his plans for progress. The background is the tremendous shape of St Basil's Cathedral. The martyrs are bound and bitter, exalted and fearful of eternity, trying not to shiver in the icy cold. Their wives and families are weeping and shouting prayers. The soldiers and executioners are half-expecting a thunderbolt from Heaven, and terrified. Peter sits on his horse, determined to see the dreadful task through, but nervous and superstitious also. There are over a hundred figures in the picture, which is painted with tremendous panache and reckless theatricality. There is something of Tintoretto in Surikov's courage and unselfconsciousness.

Six years later Surikov brought off an even greater coup de main. The Boyarynya Morozova tells the story of a Christian princess and mystic who fell foul of the Church-state authorities and was condemned. Surikov shows her being sledged off to solitary confinement (and death by starvation), surrounded by a vast crowd of people, some laughing, others rejoicing, many drunk, but many also screaming and praying to Heaven for vengeance and divine intervention, as they kneel to receive the princess's blessing. Her face is a study in exaltation, and might have been sculpted by Bernini. This is another vast collection of figures, and it is remarkable how the artist managed to impose order and instant recognition of his arguments on such a swarm of movement, for the whole canvas surges and shakes with powerful emotions. Here, Surikov is saying, is Russia, as she was, is and always will be: a theatre of tragedy, a cockpit of past and present, a brutal mingling of almost bottomless pathos and low comedy, with no winners—only losers—but somehow holy still. That is indeed a grand theme, and it is carried through to a tremendous climax as the saint on the brink of lunacy is borne off to death and eternity in the centre of the picture.

These are Surikov's two greatest works, but he painted others almost on the same level. His oeuvre, considering the time, care and preparation he devoted to each picture, is monumental. His Subjugation of Siberia by Yermak (1895), painted in a positive frenzy of emotion, shows the desperate crossing of a river by Russian troops faced with a heartbreaking display of savage resistance by tribesmen armed with arrows. Like all his work, it is wonderfully confident and well-organised, direct and vivid, suffused again with his tragic sense of doomed conflict between past and present. Progress moves forward like an unfeeling juggernaut over the crushed bodies of individuals who can do no other than to fulfil their historical destiny, of which in most cases they are unaware. In a sense, this is the same moral Tolstoy was illustrating in his stories: the helplessness of men and women in the grip of irresistible collective forces. It is not true, however, that there are no heroes or heroines in Surikov's work. He produced a wonderfully dashing picture (it actually took ten months) of a famous episode in Russian military history, Suvorov's Army Crossing the Alps (1899), in which the popular marshal is presented as a laughing, almost homely figure, in realistic contrast to David's absurd presentation of Bonaparte doing the same thing.

Surikov moved in close, for once, in his painting Count Menshikov in Exile (1883), which shows the former adviser to Peter the Great, in disgrace after Peter's death, crammed with his family into a small cabin in the Siberian outpost of Beryosovo. Unlike Surikov's open-air heroics, this painting, though also big, generates powerful claustrophobia alongside its inevitable pain. Surikov was a wonderful man with a brush, employing huge, majestic strokes like Rubens. He was also exact, as his numerous fine and sensitive portraits demonstrated (the Tretyakov has a ravishing example, Siberian Beauty), and he operated brilliantly in watercolour, as some late landscapes of Italy prove. But what drove him, and made him a great painter, was overwhelming emotion: his canvases are passionate, outraged, fearful and angry, bold to desperation.

TASKS