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Exotic Aesthetics: Representations of Blackness in Nineteenth-Century Russian Painting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

Maria Taroutina
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Abstract

This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin depicted Black subjects. Through a combination of close formal readings and broader analyses of the specific contexts in which these images were produced, the article probes a number of complex and interconnected topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan pictorial sensibilities. The article likewise pays close attention to the conceptual and material continuities and discontinuities between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century and considers how these paintings might have contributed to the evolving Russian discourses on race, nationality, and empire in the “long” nineteenth century.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 80 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 267 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1. See for example, Bindman, David and Gates, Henry Louis Jr. eds., Image of the Black in Western Art, vols. 1–5 (Cambridge, Mass., 2010–2014)Google Scholar; Childs, Adrienne L. and Libby, Susan Houghton, eds., Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (New York, 2016)Google Scholar; Murrell, Denise, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (New Haven, 2018)Google Scholar.

2. On representations of African Americans and racial minorities in Soviet art see Kiaer, Christina, “African Americans in Soviet Socialist Realism: The Case of Aleksandr Deineka,” The Russian Review 75, no. 3 (July, 2016): 402–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lee, Steven S., The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On nineteenth-century Russian representations of Black subjects and native Russians of African descent, see Leigh, Allison, “Blood, Skin, and Paint: Karl Briullov in 1832,” in Taroutina, Maria and Mardilovich, Galina, eds., New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (New York, 2020), 15–31Google Scholar; Kaplan, Paul H.D., “Karl Briullov and the Russian Representation of Black Africans in the Age of Pushkin,” in Bindman, David and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the American Revolution to World War 1, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 261–76Google Scholar; and Borden, Richard, “Making a True Image: Blackness and Pushkin Portraits,” in Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer, Svobodny, Nicole, and Trigos, Ludmilla A., eds., Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston, IL, 2006), 172–95Google Scholar.

3. Some of the earliest records of Black subjects at the Russian court date back to Michael I’s reign (1613–1645). They were purchased and brought over to Russia as slaves by way of Tripoli and Constantinople. According to the records of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Peter I was personally responsible for bringing over a number of Black servants from Holland in 1697. By the late eighteenth century, chattel slavery was virtually abolished in Russia and upon their arrival, Black subjects would be given their personal freedom in exchange for a lifetime of service obligation. By the early nineteenth century, many of these Black servants would be paid an annual wage and at the fin de siècle, in some instances, they earned as much as 600–800 rubles per year. For more information, see Blakely, Allison, Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought (Washington, 1986), 13–16Google Scholar.

4. During Peter I’s reign, the Russian Imperial Court instituted a special service position called the “Blacks of the Imperial Court” (Arapy Vysochaishchego Dvora). Many of these servants went on to marry Russian women, father mixed-race children, and live independently of the court. For more information on this, see: Nina Tarasova, “Arapy Vysochaishchego Dvora na sluzhbe u rossiiskhikh imperatorov kontsa 19-nachala 20 veka,” in Nina Tarasova, ed., Trudy Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha: Kul΄tura i isskustvo rossii, vol. 40 (St. Petersburg, 2008), 227–43; and Tarasova, “Vysochaishego dvora sluzhiteli,” Nauka i zhizn΄ no. 10 (2014): 136–41.

5. I use the term “negro” as a translation from the Russian word negr, which was employed as a neutral descriptive term in the nineteenth century.

6. Kaplan, “Karl Briullov,” 271.

7. Kaplan, “Karl Briullov,” 274.

8. For an overview of this topic, see David Brakke, “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, nos. 3–4 (July-October, 2001): 501–35.

9. See Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and Ludmilla A. Trigos, “Introduction: Was Pushkin Black and Does It Matter?” in Nepomnyashchy and Trigos, eds., Under the Sky of My Africa, 15–18.

10. Ibid., 16.

11. Blakely, Russia and the Negro, 38.

12. Khomiakov, Aleksei Stepanovich, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Aleksia Stepanovicha Khomiakova. Tom tretii: Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii (Moscow, 1882), 107Google Scholar.

13. For a broader discussion of Russian nineteenth-century conceptualizations of race, see Nathaniel Knight, “Chto my imeem v vidu govoria o rase? Metodologicheskie razmyshleniia o teorii i praktike rasy v Rossiiiskoi Imperii,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 2 (2019): 114–32; and Vera Tolz, “Constructing Race, Ethnicity, and Nationhood in Imperial Russia: Issues and Misconceptions,” in David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019), 29–58.

14. Stepan Eshevskii, “O znachenii ras v istorii,” in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1870), 40–41.

15. Ibid.

16. Mikhail Veniukov, Rossiia i Vostok: Sobranie geograficheskikh i politicheskikh statei (St. Petersburg, 1877), 114–15.

17. For a discussion of Russia’s imperial violence, coercion, and ethnic cleansing, see Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander Martin, eds., Orientalism and Empire in Russia (Bloomington, 2006); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, 2005); William C. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, 1985); Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign Against Enemy Aliens During World War I (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

18. Adrienne L. Childs, “Exceeding Blackness: African women in the art of Jean-Léon Gérôme,” in Childs and Libby, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, 125–144.

19. Ibid., 141.

20. Igor E. Grabar΄, Repin, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1963), 1:159; Aleksandr Savinov, “Zametki o kartinakh Repina,” in I[gor]. E. Grabar΄ and I. S. Zil΄bershtein, eds., Repin: Khudozhestvennoe nasledstvo, 2 vols. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1949), 2:231.

21. I would like to extend my thanks to the anonymous peer reviewer of the present article for suggesting this intriguing connection.

22. I would like to thank Ludmila Piters-Hofmann for her correct identification of the bird as a marabou stork.

23. Childs, “Exceeding Blackness,” 141

24. E.B. Shuldham, “The Royal Academy,” Dark Blue (1873): 472, quoted in Childs, “Exceeding Blackness,” 136.

25. Apollon Matushinskii, “Khuhozhestvennaia khronika: Vystavka v Akademii Khuhozhestv, Chast’ II,” Golos, no. 358 (December 29, 1876): 2.

26. I would like to thank the participants of the 19V Art History Seminar for their insightful suggestions and feedback on this piece, as well as Kathy Poh for providing invaluable research assistance during the writing of this article.