{"title":"Eastern Encounters: Ilia Repin's Orientalist Aesthetics Abroad and at Home","authors":"Maria Taroutina","doi":"10.1111/1467-8365.12717","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, <i>Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom</i> (1876), <i>Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan</i> (1885), and <i>Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan</i> (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.</p>","PeriodicalId":8456,"journal":{"name":"Art History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1467-8365.12717","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Art History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8365.12717","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.
期刊介绍:
Art History is a refereed journal that publishes essays and reviews on all aspects, areas and periods of the history of art, from a diversity of perspectives. Founded in 1978, it has established an international reputation for publishing innovative essays at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship, whether on earlier or more recent periods. At the forefront of scholarly enquiry, Art History is opening up the discipline to new developments and to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches.