Art Chowder January | February 2018, Issue 13 | Page 32

Russia
WITH LOVE
From
Some Highlights of Russian Realism from the Golden Age
I
n the last decades of the nineteenth
century a group of Russian composers,
known as The Mighty Five 1 (or just The
Five), banded together with the goal
of creating a strictly and distinctively
Russian musical style, based on
traditional folk songs and often with
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exotic Asiatic melodies. The music of
Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-
Korsakov, especially, is well known in
America. A similar motivation existed
among some Russian artists of the
period, yet their names are scarcely
known here. Among these was the
painter Ivan Kramskoi, who believed
that “The Russian [artist] should finally
stand on his own feet…It’s time to think
about the creation of our own Russian
school…Our art dwells in slavery to
the Academy, which is itself a slave of
Western art.”