The Russians Meet Munch: The Swan Princess in Oslo

There's been a recent flurry of exhibitions in London and elsewhere about the Russian revolution and Soviet art and design, but Russian art before 1900 isn't very well known in the West. So we seized the opportunity on a trip to Oslo this month to take in The Swan Princess at the Munch Museum, a show devoted to Russian art from 1880 to 1910 and mostly drawn from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

It was a period when Nordic artists were looking to the past, to rural culture and to traditional myths and legends for inspiration. The Russians were doing something similar, many of them working from the artists' colony at Abramtsevo near Moscow.

This show takes its title from one of the most famous artworks of the period. The Swan Princess by Mikhail Vrubel is drawn from a story by Pushkin, which was turned into an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, and here is the swan transforming magically into a beautiful princess. It's a swirl of whites and greys with highlights in pink, topped off by the swan princess looking back at us with a yearning expression. We're probably lacking in Slavic soulfulness, but it struck us as just a bit over the top.

Now there's quite a lot of fairy-tale illustration in the early part of this show, and we weren't mad about it. A lot of history painting, too, of the sort you got in every country, it seems, in the 19th century, and some religious works. All a bit underwhelming. And then there was this:

Towards the end of the century, improvements in communications let Russian artists discover the north of their country to find new subject matter. Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin travelled to the Arctic in 1894, and Korovin's Fishing in the Murmansk Sea was one of the results. It's a huge and arresting canvas with bold colours, sharp lines and a viewpoint that makes you feel you're inches above the icy waters. It was accompanied by several equally dramatic paintings that stopped us and many visitors in their tracks to study the walruses and polar bears frozen on giant canvases.

It was landscapes that provided some of the more memorable images in this exhibition for us. Among romantically inclined works by Isaac Levitan, there's Silent Monastery, its onion domes reflected in a river crossed by a rickety wooden bridge under a sky streaked with wispy clouds. And then there's Twilight, a painting that gives the impression of having been made quite quickly but which exudes a stillness and quietness.

Set alongside these Russian works are a number of paintings by Nordic artists, including several by Munch, and Dark Spruce Forest contrasts strikingly with Levitan's landscapes. Munch's trees are looming, threatening, oppressive.

A large body of work in this show is by Yelena Polenova, much of it illustrations for fairy tales, but also including some delightfully delicate watercolours, such as this one, aptly entitled Flowers. 

Another woman artist provides two of the more remarkable and perhaps novel depictions to have travelled to Norway. Maria Yakunchikova-Weber's Fir Tree outside the Window is one of the two pictures given additional depth with the outlines of the fir branches and the windows scored into the very thick layers of paint. That view out through the window is very, very tangible. It caught the attention of other visitors too.

Russia's greatest artist in this period was Ilya Repin, but he is represented by only a couple of pictures in Oslo, presumably because the Tretyakov has a big exhibition of its own about him running at the moment. One painting that has made the trip is At the Boundary, showing his wife and children in a setting that has the merest hint of French Impressionism.

This was a show from which we learnt a bit about late 19th-century Russian art, but found the subject matter and style of quite a lot of the paintings, tapestry and pottery an acquired taste. A film at the end about Abramtsevo was enlightening and put the works into context. But all in all, a rather uneven exhibition with some pieces that were a challenge to modern Western eyes.

Practicalities

 The Swan Princess is on at the Munch Museum in Oslo until April 21. It's open daily from 1000 to 1600 and tickets cost 120 kroner, which is just over £10.50. They can be bought online here. The museum is on Tøyengata to the north-east of the city centre, and Tøyen is the nearest metro station, just a few minutes' walk away, or the route 20 bus stops outside.

Images

Mikhail Vrubel, The Swan Princess, 1900, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Konstantin Korovin, Fishing in the Murmansk Sea, 1896, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Isaac Levitan, Twilight, 1899, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Edvard Munch, Dark Spruce Forest, 1899-1902, Munch Museum, Oslo
Yelena Polenova, Flowers, 1881, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Maria Yakunchikova-Weber, Fir Tree outside the Window, 1896, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Ilya Repin, At the Boundary; Vera Alexeyevna Repina Is Walking along the Boundary with Her Children, 1879, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow