150 Russian Years

Great writers and musicians have abounded in Russia but there never was a first-rate Russian painter or sculptor. Out of the second-rate last week Manhattan's Hammer Galleries assembled a collection of 86 canvases entitled "One Hundred and Fifty Years of Russian Painting."

The Hammer Galleries boasts as its emblem the double-eagle of Imperial Russia and deals exclusively with the leftovers of the Tsarist aristocracy. It was founded by a young U. S. doctor named Armand Hammer who was so sympathetic with the Soviet experiment that he spent nine years in the U. S. S. R. Foundation of the Hammer fortune was laid by Armand Hammer's father who made a great deal of money after the War selling medical supplies to the Soviets. Armand Hammer manufactured lead pencils in Moscow, traded U. S. wheat for furs and caviar, carried on a thriving business in Russia until 1930. Three years later, in Manhattan, he began buying air-dried white oak Russian staves for U. S. beer barrels. Because it is almost impossible to get actual money out of Russia, Concessionaire Hammer made an arrangement with the Soviet authorities to take his profits out of the country in antiques, jewels, paintings, furniture, embroideries. In his Manhattan galleries he makes his final conversion of profits into cash.

Chronologically, the 86 pictures exhibited last week ranged from a portrait of a Russian nobleman by Borovikovsky (1757-1825) to Pinsk-born Nicolai Cikovsky's Landscape.

Many of the pictures came from Imperial Palaces; all were once the property of Russian aristocrats. Beyond their subject matter, however, there was nothing Russian about any of them. It was swart, hulking Peter the Great who unwittingly stifled the development of Russian painting. Disgusted with the barbarism of his own court, he made French the court language, sent Russian artists, most of whom were serfs, abroad to study, imported droves of Italian, German, French craftsmen. At least four Britons brought in were among the founders of Russian secular art: James Walker, John Augustus Atkinson, Edward Miles and Landscapist Richard Brompton.

Not until comparatively recent times did such painters as the late Leon Bakst and goat-bearded, mystic Nicolas Constantinovich Roerich attempt to start a really Russian school of painting, based on Russia's Byzantine iconographers. There were few examples of this at the Hammer Galleries. The sort of pictures that the Tsars and their friends liked were skillful paraphrases of British and French 19th Century portraits, sentimental landscapes, super-magazine illustrations. On view were five seascapes by Ivan Aivazovsky, a marine painter so beloved by Grand Dukes that they used to buy his pictures by the square inch, covering the canvas with 1,000 rouble notes.

If originality dismayed the Dukes, they did appreciate technical excellence. Typical is Professor A. Makovsky's amusing Posing for a Portrait (see cut). Longtime instructor in the St. Petersburg Academic Art School, able Illustrator Makovsky showed a pompous bourgeois merchant posing stiffly in a chair while his enthralled chambermaid and houseboy gape over a young artist's shoulder. Nicholas II found it delightful. The picture hung long in the Petrograd Winter Palace.

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