page_title: Mikhail Vrubel
section_title: The Academy of Arts
hierarchical_section_title: Mikhail Vrubel / The 1880s / The Academy of Arts
caption_attribution_description: English: The portrait is a study artwork, it was performed during Valentin Serov’s first year at Academy of Arts, where the young artist attended the course of Pavel Chistyakov.Sometime in March 1881 Chistyakov settled on the place of a sitter and told pupils to draw his portrait in pencil. Several portraits were drawn the drawing by Valentin Serov was among them. It was positively appreciated contemporaries said that Serov managed to achieve the true, practically utmost likeness&#91;1&#93;. Русский: Портрет является учебной работой, созданной Валентином Серовым на первом курсе Академии художеств. В один из дней марта 1881 года, Павел Чистяков, класс которого посещал Серов, разместился на месте натурщика и предложил ученикам нарисовать его портрет карандашом. Так появились несколько портретов, в том числе и рисунок Серова. Работа молодого художника была оценена как весьма успешная, современники говорили, что сходство Серову удалось предельно&#91;1&#93;.
context_page_description: Mikhail Vrubel – a 19th–20th century Russian painter who worked in all genres of art, including painting, graphics, decorative sculpture, and theatrical art. In 1896, Vrubel married the famous singer Nadezhda Zabela-Vrubel whom he regularly painted.
  Soviet historian Nina Dmitrieva compared Vrubel's artistic biography to a three-act drama with prologue and epilogue, while the transition between acts was rapid and unexpected. The "Prologue" refers to his earlier years of studying and choosing a career path. The "first act" peaked in the 1880s when Vrubel was studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and then moved to Kiev to study Byzantine and Christian art. The "second act" corresponded to the so-called "Moscow period" that started in 1890 with the painting "The Demon Seated" and ended in 1902 with "The Demon Downcast" and the subsequent hospitalization of the artist. The "third act" lasted from 1903 to 1906 when Vrubel was suffering from his mental illness that gradually undermined his physical and intellectual capabilities. For the last four years of his life, already being blind, Vrubel lived only physically.
context_section_description: According to Domiteeva, Vrubel's decision to study at the Academy of Arts came from his engagement with the Kant's theory of aesthetic ideas. His younger colleague and an admirer Stepan Yaremich suggested that Vrubel adopted Kant's philosophy that "clarity of the division between physical and moral life" led over time to a separation of these areas in the real life. Mikhail Vrubel demonstrated "softness, pliability, shyness in little things in everyday life; while iron perseverance accompanied his general higher direction of life". However, this was only one side of the story – undoubtedly, at the age of 24, Vrubel considered himself as a genius. According to the Kant's theory of aesthetics, the  "genius" category implied working in a sphere "between freedom and nature" that could only be achieved in the field of arts. For a young and gifted Vrubel that inspired his long-term life plan.
  Starting from the autumn of 1880, Vrubel audited classes in the Academy and, presumably, started having private lessons at the Chistyakov's studio. However, these lessons were documented only starting from 1882; the painter himself claimed that he studied with Chistyakov for four years. In his autobiography dated 1901, the painter characterized years spent in the Academy as "the brightest in his artistic career" thanks to Chistyakov. This does not contradict what he wrote to his sister in 1883 (when they renewed mutual correspondence that was broken off for six years):
  When I started my lessons with Chistyakov, I passionately followed his main statements because they were nothing less than a formula of my living attitude towards nature, that is embedded in me.
  Among Chistyakov's students there were Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Vasily Polenov, Viktor Vasnetsov, and Valentin Serov all of whom painted in different styles. All of them, including Vrubel, recognized Chistyakov as their only teacher, honouring him to the last days. Due to scepticism prevailed among the second generation of scholars, this type of relationship between the mentor and his students was not quite appreciated. Chistyakov's method was purely academic, but very "individualistic" since Pavel inspired "sacred concepts" in working on a plastic form, but also taught conscious drawing as well as structural analysis of the form. According to Chistyakov, to construct the painting one needs to break it down to several small planes transmitted by flatnesses, and these planes would form the faces of the volume with its hollows and bulges. Vrubel's  "crystal-like" technique was thus fully mastered by his teacher.
  One of the most crucial acquaintances that Vrubel met during his time in the Academy was Valentin Serov. Despite a 10-year age difference, they were connected on different levels, including the deepest one. Throughout the years spent at the Chistyakov's studio, Vrubel's motives drastically changed: his dandyism was replaced with asceticism, about which he proudly wrote to his sister. Starting from 1881, after transferring to a life model class, Mikhail visited both Chistyakov's classes and morning watercolour lessons at the Repin's studio. However, their relationship with Repin got complicated quickly due to the argument on the painting "Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate". In one of the letters to his sister, Vrubel mentioned that by "taking advantage of the [public] ignorance, Repin stole that special pleasure that distinguishes the state of mind before a work of art from the state of mind before the expanded printed sheet". This quote clearly illustrates Chistyakov's influence on Vrubel's philosophy since Pavel was the one who suggested that obedience of techniques to art is the fundamental spiritual property of the Russian creativity.
   
  One of the brightest examples of Vrubel's academic work is his sketch "Feasting Romans". Even though it formally compiled with rules of academic art, the painting violates all the main canons of academism –  the composition does not have the main focus, the plot is unclear.
  Judging by the correspondence between Vrubel and his sist
caption: The portrait of Chistyakov by Valentin Serov, 1881
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