Luminous landscapes

These influences are due to the remarkable public collections in Moscow, notably the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov Museum, and their rich representation of Russian and mainland European art, the latter which incidentally includes the French Barbizon landscape painters and Corot, artists admired by some of the painters associated with ‘The Wanderers’. Vassiliev has also recalled the lasting impression made upon him by his childhood encounter with Alexander Ivanov’s famous painting ‘Christ Appearing to the People’; its monumental presence within the gallery room and accompanying studies and sketches have influenced Vassiliev’s own art practice. The painting ‘The Sunset’, in the current exhibition, also reminds us that several paintings by the early 19th-century German landscape symbolist painter, Caspar David Friedrich, are part of The Hermitage in St Petersburg, due to the collecting interests of Tsar Nicholas I.

Vassiliev also incorporates Russian text into some of his art works. ‘The White Flowers’, for example, has a poem by Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), a writer of poetry and prose, who was also an émigré leaving for France after the Russian revolution. There are two key aspects of Bunin’s work which inform Vassiliev’s paintings and drawings in general. Bunin painted in words the essence of the Russian countryside and its seasons (a sensibility best understood as the expression of the Russian soul): ‘in winter, a boundless snowy sea; in summer a sea of cornfields, grass, and flowers’. He also, due to his own distressed-nobility background, created characters who existed in a metaphorical twilight tinged with longing for what was and what might have been.