Mikhail Vrubel

• 1. Introduction

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  Mikhail Vrubel arrived at a Kiev train station in 1884 dressed like a young Venetian from a Tintoretto painting: black velvet costume, short trousers, stockings, and anklets. The student sent to collect him was struck speechless. That single image captures something essential about this Russian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who was born on the 17th of March 1856, and who spent his life refusing to look like anything that had come before him.

  His art was rejected by the Imperial Academy of Arts, ridiculed in newspapers, and torn from exhibition walls. Maxim Gorky attacked him in five separate articles. Yet a Russian emperor would later stop in front of one of his paintings and say simply: "How beautiful it is. I like it."

  Vrubel worked across painting, decorative sculpture, ceramics, theatrical art, and architectural design. He painted Byzantine murals in a twelfth-century church, designed costumes for opera, headed a ceramic tile factory, and spent more than a decade in pursuit of a single image: the Demon. A Soviet art historian later described his life as a three-act drama with prologue and epilogue, where the transitions between acts were rapid and unexpected. What unites all three acts is a restless intelligence that neither patrons nor critics could fully contain, and a mental fragility that eventually consumed him.

• 2. Paper Horses and a Siberian Childhood

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  Vrubel's great-grandfather Anton Antonovich Vrubel came from Bialystok, and the family name derived from the Polish word for sparrow. His grandfather served at the rank of Major General and spent his final decade as ataman of the Astrakhan Cossacks. The painter's father Alexander had graduated from the Cadet Corps, served in the Tengin Infantry Regiment, and fought in both the Caucasian and Crimean Wars before marrying the daughter of a cartographer and admiral who governed Astrakhan.

  Mikhail was born in Omsk in 1856, where Alexander was posted as a desk officer of the 2nd Steppe Siberian Corps. His mother's health was destroyed by frequent childbirth and the Siberian climate; she died of consumption in 1859, when Mikhail was only three years old. One of his few memories of her was watching her cut paper figures of people, horses, and fantastic shapes for her children from a sickbed.

  Alexander remarried in 1863, taking Elizaveta Vessel from Saint Petersburg as his wife. She was a dedicated stepmother who put Mikhail on what he later called, with some irony, "a diet of raw meat and fish oil" to strengthen his constitution. Her sister Alexandra had graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and introduced Mikhail to music. By the age of ten, he was drawing, performing in amateur theater, and practicing music, with painting occupying no more prominent a place than any of the other arts. His sister later recalled that a copy of Michelangelo's "The Last Judgement" was exhibited in Saratov during this period, and that Mikhail reproduced it from memory in full detail.

• 3. Law, Latin, and a Belated Vocation

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  After graduating with distinction from the gymnasium in Odessa, neither Vrubel nor his family imagined him becoming an artist. The decision to study law at Saint Petersburg State University reflected, according to the painter Alexandre Benois who attended the same faculty, the family tradition and the values of their social circles.

  Vrubel struggled. He had to repeat his second year in 1876 due to poor grades and eventually graduated with the lowest possible scientific degree, unable to defend his thesis. Part of the reason was temperament: his uncle Nicolai Vessel, with whom he lived in Saint Petersburg, allowed him to maintain a bohemian lifestyle that consumed his energies. He knew Modest Mussorgsky personally, who visited the Vessel house often. To fund his social life, Vrubel regularly took work as a tutor and governess. In 1875 he traveled to France, Switzerland, and Germany with one pupil, and later guided a former university classmate through his studies at the Papmel family estate.

  It was the Papmels who, according to memoirs from the period, first awoke Vrubel's desire to paint seriously. They were prone to aestheticism and a bohemian lifestyle; Vrubel discovered his passion for wine in their household. Meanwhile, he was writing letters from Odessa that reveal how his priorities were shifting: in one letter, he complained to his sister that instead of reading Goethe's Faust in German and completing English exercises, he had spent the time copying Ivan Aivazovsky's "Sunset at Sea" in oil.

  By the late 1870s, Vrubel had begun attending evening classes at the Imperial Academy of Arts as an auditor and making contact with students working under the painter Pavel Chistyakov. After completing his military service, he was admitted to the Academy at the age of twenty-four. His biography from that point forward is inseparable from Chistyakov's teaching.

• 4. Chistyakov and the Crystal Method

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  Pavel Chistyakov taught a method he described as breaking a painting into small planes transmitted by flatnesses, which together form the faces of a volume with its hollows and bulges. Among his students were Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Vasily Polenov, Viktor Vasnetsov, and Valentin Serov, all of whom painted in entirely different styles and all of whom recognized Chistyakov as their only teacher.

  Vrubel began auditing classes from autumn 1880 and documented private lessons at Chistyakov's studio from 1882 onward, though he later claimed to have studied with Chistyakov for four years. In his autobiography dated 1901, he called these years "the brightest in his artistic career". In a letter to his sister in 1883, he described Chistyakov's main statements as "a formula of my living attitude towards nature, that is embedded in me."

  The technique that emerged from this training was what critics later called Vrubel's "crystal-like" method: a way of fracturing surfaces into facets that gave his paintings an unusual, mineral shimmer. The same letter exchange with his sister reveals a developing aesthetic argument with Repin, whose painting "Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate" Vrubel accused of taking advantage of public ignorance to produce something closer to a printed sheet than a work of art.

  From 1881, Vrubel also attended morning watercolour lessons at Repin's studio, but relations deteriorated quickly. His most significant friendship from the Academy years was with Valentin Serov, ten years his junior, with whom he was connected on what a later biographer called the deepest level. In 1883, his painting "Betrothal of Mary and Joseph" received the silver medal from the Academy. That same year, Professor Adrian Prakhov invited him to Kiev to restore the twelfth-century St. Cyril's Monastery. The offer promised good earnings, and Vrubel agreed.

• 5. Kiev and the Byzantine Turn

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  Prakhov had been looking for a qualified painter with some academic training who was not yet famous enough to command a high salary. The contract Vrubel signed called for four icons to be completed in seventy-six days, with a salary of three hundred rubles paid every twenty-four working days. Vrubel arrived dressed in the black velvet costume that startled Lev Kovalsky at the train station, and threw himself into an encounter with Byzantine art that would shape everything that followed.

  In five years in Kiev, Vrubel single-handedly painted murals and icons for the St. Cyril's Church and made one hundred and fifty drawings for the restoration of an angel figure in the dome of St. Sophia Cathedral. The fresco "Descent of Holy Spirit on the Apostles," painted on the choir of St. Cyril's, depicts twelve Apostles in a semicircle at the box vault, with the standing figure of Mary at the center against a blue background. The model for Mary was a paramedic named M. Ershova, a frequent guest at the Prakhov house. The model for the fourth apostle, with his hands folded in prayer, was Prakhov himself.

  Vrubel also traveled to Venice on commission, painting three icons for St. Cyril's: "Saint Kirill," "Saint Afanasii," and "Christ the Savior." In Venice he accidentally met the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, and the two debated the merits of painting in oil on zinc boards versus canvas. Vrubel's Venetian formation ran from medieval mosaics and stained glass at St. Mark's Basilica through early Renaissance painters Vittore Carpaccio, Cima da Conegliano, and Giovanni Bellini. His interest in the grandeur of Titian and Veronese was minimal.

  The Kiev years also brought a romantic disaster. After returning from Venice in 1885, Vrubel apparently proposed to Emily Prakhova, who was already married to his employer. His friend Konstantin Korovin recalled noticing large white scars on Vrubel's chest that summer, and when pressed, Vrubel explained that he had cut himself to diminish the suffering of unrequited love. Prakhov ultimately rejected six versions of Vrubel's independent painting "Tombstone Crying" from the decoration of St. Volodymyr's Cathedral, on the grounds that they were too unlike his colleagues' work to fit alongside them. Prakhov reportedly said a new cathedral "in a very special style" would need to be built to accommodate Vrubel's paintings.

• 6. The Demon Seated

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  The first serious version of the Demon idea surfaced in Odessa in summer 1885, when Vrubel told Serov about his plan for the painting during Serov's visit. The theme had been circling Vrubel for years before it materialized on canvas.

  The immediate occasion was a publishing commission from the Kushnerev brothers, who were preparing a two-volume jubilee edition of works by the poet Mikhail Lermontov with illustrations by eighteen painters, including Repin, Ivan Shishkin, Aivazovsky, and Leonid Pasternak. Vrubel was the only participant entirely unknown to the public. His fee for five large and thirteen small illustrations was eight hundred rubles. The illustrations were made in black watercolor; monochromaticity let him emphasize dramatic contrasts and explore a range of textured effects. The publication was approved by censorship authorities on the 10th of April 1891, and immediately attacked in the press for "rudeness, ugliness, caricature, and absurdity."

  While working on the illustrations, Vrubel painted "The Demon Seated," the first large canvas on the subject. In a letter to his sister dated the 22nd of May 1890, he described what he was painting: a half-naked, winged, young sadly thoughtful figure sitting embracing her knees against a sunset, looking at a flowering clearing with branches stretching toward her. He noted this was not the "fundamental" Demon he planned to create later.

  The painting uses blues and purples that recall Byzantine mosaics. The flowers surrounding the Demon are cold crystals that reproduce fractures of rocks. The clouds read as stone. The Demon is muscular but passive, his fingers interlocked, his body slumping, his face sad. Despite his own description, the figure has no visible wings; their shape is suggested by the contour of large inflorescences behind his shoulder. According to the art historian Klimov, this painting was both the most famous of Vrubel's Demon images and the most free from literary associations. Vrubel would not return to the image for another eight years.

• 7. Ceramics, Scandal, and Mamontov

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  On the 20th of July 1890, the twenty-two-year-old A. Mamontov died at the Abramtsevo Colony. Vrubel attended the funeral as Mamontov's friend and was so struck by the local landscapes that he stayed. Abramtsevo introduced him to ceramics, and he soon wrote proudly to his sister Anna that he headed "the factory of ceramic tiles and terracotta decorations."

  Savva Mamontov did not fully share Vrubel's aesthetic vision but recognized his talent and tried to create conditions in which he could work. For the first time in Vrubel's life, according to Dmitrieva, he ceased to depend on noble families for his support. He decorated a majolica chapel on A. Mamontov's grave, worked on the extension of the Mamontov mansion, and collaborated with the architect Fyodor Schechtel on the decoration of Zinaida Morozova's mansion on Spiridonovka street. The ceramist Peter Vaulin helped bring Vrubel's ceramic plans to life at the Abramtsevo factory.

  The crisis came with the All-Russia Exhibition of 1896, held to mark the coronation of Nicholas II. Mamontov commissioned two enormous panels from Vrubel to fill empty walls in the exhibition's pavilion: "Mikula Selyaninovich" and "The Princess of the Dream." The total area of paintings was one hundred square meters, to be completed in three months. On April 25, academician Albert Nikolayevitch Benois arrived in Nizhny Novgorod and sent a telegram: "Vrubel's panels are terrifying; we need to take them off, waiting for the jury." On May 22, Vrubel had to leave the exhibition hall with his work removed.

  Mamontov bought both paintings for five thousand rubles each and built a separate pavilion outside the main exhibition called "Exhibition of decorative panels made by Vrubel and rejected by the Academy of Arts." Maxim Gorky published five articles attacking Vrubel's "poverty of spirit and poverty of imagination." Nikolai Garin-Mikhailovsky published a careful analysis without invective. The debate in newspapers was wide enough that when Vrubel's painting "The Lilacs" was later shown at a Diaghilev retrospective in the Academy of Arts attended by the emperor, the emperor asked whether this was "the one who was executed in Nizhny."

• 8. Zabela, the Demon Downcast, and the End

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  Vrubel first saw Nadezhda Zabela at a rehearsal for the Russian premiere of the opera "Hansel and Gretel" in early 1896, when she was playing the role of Gretel's little sister. He had been brought in as designer after Korovin fell ill. He ran to her on a break, kissed her hand, and said: "What an amazing voice!" He proposed shortly after, telling his sister Anna in a letter that he would kill himself immediately if Nadezhda rejected him.

  Nadezhda's parents were troubled by the age gap: Vrubel was forty and she was twenty-eight. Nadezhda herself knew that he drank, was careless with money, and had an unstable income. They engaged on July 28 in the Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Geneva. At that moment, Vrubel was utterly broke, and had walked from the station to Nadezhda's house because he had no money for transport.

  Nadezhda's admiration for the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov shaped the next years of Vrubel's work. They met Rimsky-Korsakov personally in 1898 when Nadezhda joined the Moscow private opera. Vrubel listened to the opera "Sadko," in which Nadezhda sang the role of the Princess of Volkhov, no fewer than ninety times. When she asked if he was tired of it, he replied: "I can endlessly listen to the orchestra, especially the sea part. Every time I find in it a new wonder."

  By 1898, during a summer stay in Ukraine, Vrubel began experiencing symptoms that preceded his collapse: intense migraines treated with phenacetin in quantities his sister-in-law described as twenty-five grains or more at a time, and severe anxiety whenever anyone disagreed with his artistic views. The Demon returned to his work as a ten-year obsession neared its completion. The painting "The Demon Downcast" was completed in 1902 and was followed almost immediately by the artist's hospitalization. Vrubel's mental illness progressively undermined his physical and intellectual capabilities throughout 1903 to 1906. On the 28th of November 1905, he was awarded the title of Academician of Painting for his "fame in the artistic field" at the very moment his career was nearly finished. The last four years of his life he spent blind, and he died in 1910.