Picturing Russia's Men: Masculinity and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Painting

Description

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women's and Gender Studies 2021 There was a discontent among Russian men in the nineteenth century that sometimes did not stem from poverty, loss, or the threat of war, but instead arose from trying to negotiate the paradoxical prescriptions for masculinity which characterized the era. Picturing Russia's Men takes a vital new approach to this topic within masculinity and art historical studies by investigating the dissatisfaction that developed from the breakdown in prevailing conceptions of manhood outside of the usual Western European and American contexts. By exploring how Russian painters depicted gender norms as they were evolving over the course of the century, each chapter shows how artworks provide unique insight into not only those qualities that were supposed to predominate, but actually did in lived practice. Drawing on a wide variety of source material, including previously untranslated letters, journals, and contemporary criticism, the book explores the deep structures of masculinity to reveal the conflicting desires and aspirations of men in the period. In so doing, readers are introduced to Russian artists such as Karl Briullov, Pavel Fedotov, Alexander Ivanov, Ivan Kramskoi, and Ilia Repin, all of whom produced masterpieces of realist art in dialogue with paintings made in Western European artistic centers. The result is a more culturally discursive account of art-making in the nineteenth century, one that challenges some of the enduring myths of masculinity and provides a fresh interpretive history of what constitutes modernism in the history of art.

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art and Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. She is a specialist in European and Russian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and her writing focuses primarily on the development of new art historical methodologies, masculinity studies, and the history modernism.

Leigh's study is a breath of fresh air showing that there was never one notion of masculinity (or femininity) even in Russia, but competing and dominant versions, intersecting with gendering projections, dependencies, and other categories used to define male identity. * The Russian Review * Engaging with a remarkable spectrum of behaviors, expectations, violations, and stereotypes, this book generates new understanding of masculinity and modernity by considering paintings as revelatory, questioning, and even constitutive of what it meant to be a man during a turbulent half-century of imperial rule. * Rosalind P. Blakesley, Professor of Russian and European Art, University of Cambridge, UK * By exploring the myths and pressures of masculinity that shaped male experience in Imperial Russia after Napoleon, Allison Leigh offers compelling new perspectives on five of Russia's best-known nineteenth century painters. Beautifully illustrated, full of incisive new readings of familiar paintings, Picturing Russia's Men excavates the innumerable ways in which the institutions of academy, army, and family shaped the male artist's identity and output. With its blend of close reading, theoretical sophistication, and wide-ranging research, this fine study brilliantly dispels the common misperception that there is little more to be said about Russian painting of the nineteenth century. * Wendy Salmond, Professor of Art History, Chapman University, USA * An important and eye-opening contribution to the Slavic field and our studies of modernism in Russia. Through an examination of male portraiture, it traces the breakdown, between 1825 and 1881, of various myths surrounding masculinity-from the solid heroic code of virtuous, courageous manhood to the ambiguities of doubt-ridden individualism. * Elizabeth K. Valkenier, Resident Scholar, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, USA *