The solo exhibition of works by Nikolai Pavlovich Ulyanov (1875-1949) at the State Tretyakov Gallery is being held for the first time[2]. By the beginning of the 21^st century the name of Nikolai Ulyanov had been thoroughly forgotten. And when the Gallery was preparing the exhibition "Nikolai Ulyanov. Art Without a Manifesto", there were fair doubts as to whether today’s public will show interest in the oeuvre and personality of the master. However, Ulyanov is one of the bright and talented representatives of the Silver Age art and Soviet art. Here are just a few facts of his biography. Nikolai Ulyanov was born in the city of Yelets in 1875. Coming from the same parts were writers Ivan Bunin and Mikhail Prishvin, artist Vasily Meshkov, the latter helped Ulyanov to enter the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1889. Valentin Serov's favourite student was seen by many as a successor to his famous teacher, a recognised master of psychological portraiture.

Ulyanov the Portraitist

Ulyanov's talent as a portraitist is evidenced by numerous commissioned portraits done mainly between 1912 and 1916. One of them, the portrait of Anna Nikolayevna Buryshkina (1910s, State Tretyakov Gallery), the wife of a prominent Moscow manufacturer and publisher of the newspaper "Utro Rossii” [Morning of Russia] P.A. Buryshkin, has incorporated characteristic features of the Art Nouveau style. The tapestry chosen as a background creates a kind of mise-en-scène in the centre of which is a society hostess in a scarlet dress by the Parisian fashion designer Paul Poiret. Her mannerish silhouette and slender fingers reveal the fluttering individuality of a fragile woman, and the emphasised angularity partly reminds one of the "Portrait of Princess O.K. Orlova" (1911, State Russian Museum) by Valentin Serov. Like his mentor, the artist built the image on the accentuation of sharp lines, which determined the perception of the model, but there is no restrained irony inherent in the image of Orlova, rather admiration for the mysterious appearance of the lovely lady.

The "Portrait of A.S. Glagoleva on a Red Sofa" (1909, State Tretyakov Gallery), full of expression and bright in its colour combination of cold red and blue shades, is sure to catch the viewer’s eye at the exhibition. The artist Anna Semyonovna Glagoleva (1873-1943) was Nikolai Ulyanov’s wife and favourite model. She studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture from 1889 to 1896, at the drawing school of Princess Maria Tenisheva under Iliya Repin (1896-1900) in St. Petersburg, and furthered her skills at the studio of Yelizaveta Zvantseva and Alexandra Khotyaintseva (1900-1902) in Moscow, where Nikolai Ulyanov taught. In 1902, Ulyanov organised a school of painting and drawing for children and adults in his studio in Lissner's house in Krestovozdvizhensky Lane, where he taught drawing and painting was taught by Anna Glagoleva. In the evenings, writers, poets, actors and theatre directors gathered in the studio - Olga Knipper-Chekhova, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Ilya Sats, and others.   

The portrait that made Ulyanov widely known was that of the leading actress of the Moscow Art Theatre Olga Knipper-Chekhova (1868-1959). It is currently kept in the Moscow Art Theatre Museum. He began working on it in the summer of 1904, six months after the premiere of "The Cherry Orchard", the play by Anton Chekhov. The artist depicted the actress reciting a monologue. Her figure is slightly bent forward, which emphasises the emotionality of performing the role. The Moscow Art Theatre Museum has her stage costume of the then fashionable shade of ash rose with white satin ribbons on the skirt, and a boutonniere of blue flowers made in the workshops of the famous fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova. Ulyanov defined the colour gamut of the portrait as "yellow and ash monochrome". When Olga Knipper-Chekhova had to accompany Chekhov to the German health resort Badenweiler, where the writer died, Ulyanov completed the portrait from a photograph. The artist exhibited it for the first time in February 1905 at the 12^th Exhibition of the Moscow Association of Artists as "The Tapestry Portrait of O.L. Knipper-Chekhova as Ranevskaya", and in March of the same year - in the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg at the Historical Art Exhibition of Russian Portraits organised by Sergei Diaghilev. In 1906, the portrait was included in the exposition of the Russian Art Exhibition at the Autumn Salon in Paris also organised by Sergei Diaghilev, in 1907, it was exhibited in Berlin and at the 7^th Biennale in Venice.

Art Without a Manifesto

The late 1900s - early 1910s is the time when Nikolai Ulyanov begins experimenting. In 1909, he took the job of a decorator at the School of Grace and Rhythm founded in Moscow by the follower of Isadora Duncan, the barefoot dancer Yelena Rabenek whose husband belonged to the family of owners of a textile dyeing factory in Shchelkovo near Moscow. From 1909 to 1911, the artist spent every summer at the Rabeneks’ dacha there. Presumably, during those months he had the idea of the composition of "A Swing". Ulyanov sought to convey the dynamics of lines and local colours, to derive his own formula of movement in painting. He repeated the composition of the painting several times, in its versions changed the "scenery" and selected different colouristic solutions for them. In all the compositions, the board with the figures of country girls in flowing bright skirts and country lads is flying up into the sky - the hills painted with vigorous brushstrokes seem to be seen from above, so that the impression is as if the artist is looking at the world from somewhere nearby, from a nearby swing board. The construction of the space and the colour scheme of the painting are very intense and reflect his search for a new pictorial language.

In 1911, the first version of "A Swing" was exhibited at the World Exhibition in Rome, where the Russian section was dominated by works of masters close to the "Mir Iskusstva" [World of Art] association. Against their background, Ulyanov's painting stood out as a bright expressive depiction of a traditional Russian merry-making and attracted the attention of the leader of the Italian Futurists Filippo Marinetti, who sent to its author an invitation to join their movement accompanied with his selected manifestos. This led to Ulyanov writing "A Reply to the Futurists of Italy", in which he expressed his position regarding Avant-Garde trends in art. It consisted in a moderate acceptance of experiments and partly in a philosophical interpretation of the new radical quests as necessary for the development of art as a whole.

If "A Swing" reflected futuristic influences, the painting "Orchestra" (1912-1916, State Tretyakov Gallery) showed tendencies of Fauvism and Expressionism. "Orchestra" is a musical work. In the evenings, military bands sounded in city gardens and parks throughout Russia, including in the public garden of Yelets, where Nikolai Ulyanov spent his childhood. Together with his father, he would sit down on the bench "where local musicians and painters gathered almost every evening"[3].

In search of the best solution, Ulyanov created many drawings of musicians and several versions of the composition at a different time - against the background of the afternoon sky and evening twilight in the park. In his notebooks, the master admitted that the orchestra was an epoch in his life. With the help of bright shades of the yellow colour, the painting conveys the bravura sound of the brass and percussion instruments. Behind the large curves of trumpets, French horns and drums, the figures of musicians dressed in military uniforms are almost invisible. The concept of the painting is in line with the statement of the French Fauvist Maurice de Vlaminck, who compared the riot of colours on his canvases to an orchestra which he himself was conducting: “To be heard, I decided to use only trumpets, cymbals, and a drum, which in this form of art were tubes of paints <...> I exploded the tubes of paints on my canvas and used only vermillion, chrome, Prussian green and blue to roar out what I wanted to say”[4].

At the same time, in the 1910s, Ulyanov got fascinated by the idea of depicting a fantastic atmosphere of multiplication of mirror reflections. This idea was, in many ways, consonant with the prose and poetry of symbolism, which was based on the cult of unsteadiness of the boundaries of the visible, instability of the world, its illusory nature. In "Self-Portrait with a Barber" (1914-1923, State Tretyakov Gallery), the artist showed how, under the effect of reflection, the images of people, the still life and the mirrors themselves fade into the distance, pale and dissolve. Presented on the canvas is a stubborn big-forehead man with a keen eye of an artist and vigorously clenched hands. He sits in a tense posture, usually not typical of visitors to a barber's shop. His face shows sharp creases on the cheeks and a dimple on the chin. The whole appearance conveys a certain severity and rigidity. The character of the protagonist is emphasised by the contrasting presentation of the second character. The barber's large face seems to be flattened out on the surface of the canvas, and his whole figure with scissors in his hand is hanging over the client like a ghost, like an allegorical image of fate. This was probably justified by the main objective - it was important for the author to convey a sense of blurred, illusory reflection of existence.

Another painting, "Café" (1917, State Tretyakov Gallery), is a kind of "mirror replica" of Édouard Manet's famous "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882, Courtauld Gallery, London). Manet's barmaid is real, but everything happening in the hall filled with a smartly dressed crowd is illusory, even the man the tired beauty is talking to appears only in the mirror. Ulyanov, on the contrary, put the impersonal figure of a woman into the reflection. She is frozen in front of the men who sit along the wall and shut themselves off from her and from the interior of the cafe by sheets of newspapers. The mirror hangs askew giving the impression that everything in the room is unstable. The furniture is sliding on the floor, and the visitor who is about to leave is hanging in the air like a marionette that the puppeteer hastens to remove from the stage. Thus, the theme prompted by the French painter acquired in Ulyanov's work the character of tragic grotesque.

The language of the piece is extremely geometric. The artist admitted that in search for a plastic solution to the painting he turned to modern trends in art, and the "Café" has "a direct relation to Suprematism. And therefore, it should more visibly express its principle. The figures should be linked by this principle to the reflection in the mirror. The tonality is the same, both in the mirror and in the objects reflected in it. The predominance of the contour, the crossing of lines, the momentum”[5]. Undoubtedly, Ulyanov's words about Suprematism are rather wishful thinking, especially since he even tried to strike out the name of this method in his manuscript. There are no utopian insights or appeals to cosmos in the painting, which are inherent in the works and treatises of Kazimir Malevich, the creator of the method. In fact, in the "Café", Ulyanov uses the method of Cubism - natural forms are refracted and transformed into planes overlapping one another.

Summarising his impressions of the trip to Paris in 1909, Ulyanov remarked: “It is enough to travel through the cities of Europe and see its shop windows to understand what contemporary humanity is concerned with. To the <...> already formed ideas about a shift in the everyday mode of life, a number of other observations will be added, sad for supporters of the past and happy for people of the new times” [6]. It was those observations that prompted to Ulyanov the theme of the painting, the pictorial objective of which was defined by him as "a horizontal construction in which the centre or visual focus is shifted to the left. The gamut of colours is grey, orange and a few additional ones”[7].

The main ‘actors’ in the painting “A Parisian Shop Window” (1909-1911, State Tretyakov Gallery) are mannequin dolls. The reflection of the street in the mirrored niches acts as a theatre proscenium – the reflection gets fragmented and multiplied as if suggesting that the real world is not what it pretends to be, and only a mirror can pull off its mask. A couple is strolling along a narrow strip of the pavement, almost lost against the aggressive background of the reflection. It seems that the artist had such impersonal city dwellers in mind when he commented on the place of a person in the urbanistic world: “...There are people fatigued, afraid of the light; merging with the grey walls of the buildings, they look sadly and timidly <...> at the cheerful people passing by” [8]. The outline of the figures is done in the Art Deco style with characteristic strict contour lines. The mannequins stand still guarding "the cheerful people" whose role they seem to have assumed. Not without irony did Ulyanov make them resemble ancient Greek sculpture, archaic Greek Korai, thus demonstrating a change of the ideal of beauty in the new century.

Ulyanov and the Theatre

It was Konstantin Stanislavsky who invited Ulyanov to work at the theatre, when in 1905 he decided to open a branch of the Art Theatre in Povarskaya Street in Moscow. Before the final title "Studio Theatre" was approved, the actors, among themselves, called it "Theatre of Pursuits", which corresponded to their ideas about the synthesis of arts. Stanislavsky invited Vsevolod Meyerhold as a new theatre director. Among other things, Ulyanov was asked to do costumes and scenery for the play by Gerhart Hauptmann "Schluk und Jau". Realising Stanislavsky's idea, Ulyanov moves the action of the play from the Middle Ages to the 18^th century. The choice of epoch was influenced by the famous exhibition of historical portraits organised by Sergei Diaghilev in the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg. Trellises, pavilions in the form of boskets, portraits of powdered ladies and gentlemen in elaborate wigs and lavish outfits created to sketches by Leo Bakst seemed to Stanislavsky the only suitable background for the play. In the second act of the play, to the music of Reinhold Glière, seven princesses sat solemnly on the stage in seven garden gazebos, through which the fleecy sky glittered. The princesses were embroidering a golden ribbon the length of the entire small stage, compositionally uniting them. The stage design of the play was met with spectators’ applause. Despite a promising start, the Studio Theatre was liquidated the same year due to financial difficulties,

From that brief but turbulent period, the Tretyakov Gallery funds have preserved the portrait of actress Yelizaveta Safonova as Princess Sidselill ("Princess", 1905, State Tretyakov Gallery). Seated in a wicker arch wearing a high wig and a white dress with scarlet roses, the haughty princess attracted the attention of the critic Vladimir Stasov, who in his review wrote that "the nasty doll, most remarkable for her ugliness, absurdity and tastelessness is a wonder of beauty in the opinion of the decadents and is terribly necessary for Russia’s salvation and bringing it to its senses” [9]. Stasov despised the puppet world of vulgar passions and was rigorously opposed to its penetration into exhibition halls forgetting about the healing power of irony.

After the revolution Ulyanov continued to work under Stanislavsky’s guidance preparing designs for Mikhail Bulgakov’s "The Days of the Turbins" and "Molière" and Bizet's opera "Carmen". The story of the artist's work on "Molière" was no less dramatic than the fate of the production itself. The Moscow Art Theatre planned to stage Mikhail Bulgakov's play "The Union of Hypocrites" in January 1930, but soon the play was banned by the censor, and only a year and a half later the ban was lifted on the condition that the author would change the title of the play to " Molière " and make changes in the text. Ulyanov signed a contract with the theatre in 1932 and began to enthusiastically study the interiors and costumes of the era of Louis XIV, but work on the play was procrastinating. Actors and mise-en-scènes kept changing. Stanislavsky, the theatre director, repeatedly rebuilt the scenes almost from scratch. Ulyanov had disagreements with the directors, in the end he was left with only the costumes, while set designs were created based on the sketches of Pyotr Williams.   

Ulyanov's costume sketches recreate the whole spectrum of society in which Molière mixed - Louis XIV, the Sun King, courtiers, clergy, actors and actresses. Some of them are real historical characters, others are figments of the playwright's imagination. The premiere took place on 16 February, 1936 and was a resounding success. But already on 9 March, the editorial of the newspaper “Pravda”, the official organ of the Communist Party, appeared under the title "External Glitter and False Content", in which Bulgakov was accused of “perversion” and “defamation” of Molière’s life, and the theatre got a beating for “covering up the shortcomings of the play by the glitter of expensive brocade, velvet and all sorts of bells and whistles” [10]. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko decided to take the play down.

In the late 1930s, Ulyanov returned to his vocation as a portraitist. In 1938, Stanislavsky agreed to sit for a large portrait. The artist had the opportunity to realise a long-standing idea of painting a large-format portrait of the director whom he deeply respected as his "stage teacher". At the beginning of the summer, several sessions took place, which can hardly be called posing in the strict sense of the word. The director was seriously ill and his doctors recommended that he stay out in the air as much as possible. So, a balcony overlooking the courtyard was attached to the house where he lived. In good weather, Stanislavsky would be there at his desk, working on manuscripts. Ulyanov, armed with sketchbooks, would sit nearby watching the director and making sketches. Soon the weather turned bad, and the director continued to work inside.

Ulyanov had learned to see in Stanislavsky "an exceptional theatre director who possessed a keen sense of painting, instilled <...> love for various constructions on the stage, which inevitably led <...> to building and searching for linear and light relationships and rhythms in the space of the picture, not to mention the semantic or ideological concept of the work”[11]. However, during the sessions, the artist most often saw a “hermit” whose face "was marked with traces of intense thought and suffering"[12]. The new "tired" Stanislavsky, fully immersed in his notes, seemed like a stranger completely shut off from the scrutinising looks. Ulyanov was ready to admit that he was late with his project: “... what is left of the former Stanislavsky! Almost nothing, except for some hints by which to imagine the former appearance of this once vivacious and cheerful man”[13]. At the beginning of August 1938, Stanislavsky died. Ulyanov had to settle for the version depicting the director working on manuscripts on the famous white sofa. He continued to work on the portrait using live sketches. The mise-en-scène, which would make it possible to show the reformer of theatrical art in his best "role", the role of a great director, took long to find. In 1947, the artist created the portrait "K.S. Stanislavsky at Work" (State Tretyakov Gallery), a pictorial monument to the man who had such an important role to play in the destiny of the Russian theatre. For this work, Nikolai Ulyanov was awarded the Stalin Prize, 3rd Class.

Ulyanov’s “Pushkiniana”

In the changed conditions of life after the October Revolution, Ulyanov submitted to the dominant view of the objectives of art, although he did not become an apologist for Socialist Realism. He turned to depicting historical events, scenes from the life of Alexander Pushkin, and thus found a kind of ecological niche that allowed him to feel relatively independent.

Preparations for the centenary of Pushkin's death began in December 1935, when the All-Union Pushkin Committee was established. Over a year and a bit, preparations for the celebrations unfolded with unprecedented breadth. To organise events to perpetuate the memory of the great poet and help to promote his work, Pushkin committees were set up in almost all republics, territories and regions, in many cities and collective farms, in large institutions, factories, schools, colleges, and institutes. The front page of “Pravda” reported that "the whole country will take part in the preparations for the historic festival of Soviet culture". The Pushkin celebrations were presented as a national festival of socialist culture. A complete collection of the poet's works in 15 volumes was published; the memory of the poet was being perpetuated in monuments, indoor sculptures, painting, graphics, decorative and applied arts and crafts, folk and amateur art, theatre plays, and music. Pushkin’s life was the subject of paintings by Pyotr Konchalovsky, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Isaak Brodsky, A.L. Gerasimov, Martiros Saryan...

Unlike other artists, Nikolai Ulyanov considered Pushkin's destiny from the position of the poet's personality transformation expressed in daily manifestations. Initially, the artist conceived a series of drawings on the theme of "Pushkin in Life". It was a most ambitious project. He built a kind of pictorial chronicle of the poet's life, embodied mainly in graphics, and only a number of particularly significant moments transferred to painting. The pinnacle of Pushkin's "suite" was a large-format portrait of the poet and his wife at an imperial court ball in the Anichkov Palace, "A.S. Pushkin and N.N. Pushkina in front of a Mirror in the Anichkov Palace" (1935-1937, All-Russian Museum of Alexander Pushkin, St. Petersburg). Pushkin is shown as a lonely restless man in the much-disliked uniform of a gentleman of the bedchamber against the background of the staircase reflected in the mirror. Ulyanov made the first pencil sketch of the composition "Pushkin with his Wife in front of the Mirror" (private collection) in one of his notebooks back in the summer of 1916, but it was only during the period from 1935 to 1937 that he was able to get fully immersed in the theme so important to him rather than doing it occasionally. According to the artist’s idea, “in a minute, they will start climbing up the staircase, into the enfilade of palace halls. This staircase leads Pushkin to the Chernaya Rechka [Black River], to the place of his last meeting with Dantes”[14].

Varying in different techniques the theme he was focused on, the master used to make numerous sketches, which revealed his ability to see something unusual in a daily routine. At the end of his life, Nikolai Pavlovich Ulyanov was honoured with official awards, a few months before his death in May 1949, he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Arts. During the Soviet years he was presented as a consistent realist and his works of the 1930s and 1940s were exhibited.

The first full-scale exhibition of the master's works at the State Tretyakov Gallery precedes his 150^th anniversary in 2025. The Tretyakov Gallery has the largest and most significant collection of Nikolai Ulyanov's paintings and graphic works, as well as his personal archive. For decades have the staff of the State Tretyakov Gallery been studying the oeuvre of Nikolai Ulyanov; they have published his unpublished articles, diary notes, correspondence and memoirs[15], and prepared a catalogue for the opening of this exhibition.

Nikolai Ulyanov’s artistic heritage is a kind of digest of the art of the late 19^th - first half of the 20th century, because the exposition space has embraced nearly the whole variety of genres and style modifications of the period. The exhibition of this unique master’s works holds a promise of vivid impressions from the encounter with true masterpieces of his art.

Author: Nadezhda Musyankova

      The article was written by order of "Alexander Garden" LLC