The Neue Tretyakov Gallery is currently showing a retrospective of the Art Nouveau painter Michail Wrubel (1856 to 1910), whom Russian art historians often compare with Van Gogh because he was misunderstood during his lifetime, ended up in psychiatry in later years and, with his visual language, well into the twentieth century foresaw. The more than three hundred, sometimes extremely large-format paintings and drawings from the Tretyakov holdings, from the Petersburg Russian Museum, from private collections, but also from Wrubel's native Omsk, are deliberately presented in a non-chronological way so that the artist's motif-related way of thinking and working can be experienced in crystal structures close. The architect Sergej Choban, who lives between Petersburg and Berlin, has built a concentric suite of rooms without right angles,in which polyhedral windows open up references. The fact that the Christian modernist paintings from Vrubel's Kiev phase of 1884 and 1889 are missing, some of which are shown in the extensive catalog, is also overlooked.

Kerstin Holm

Editor in the features section.

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With the blessing of the comparatively open-minded Kiev church authorities, depictions of the risen Christ and the Virgin Mary were created there, whose spherical manga eyes make the pantheistic-mythological world perception of the highly educated artist palpable. A separate hall pays tribute to his Moscow discoverer and patron, Savva Mamontov, who provided a ceramic workshop in his Abramzewo Vrubel artists' colony and commissioned him to set the stage for his private opera. But a key work of Russian Art Nouveau, the seven and a half meter wide "dream princess", which evokes the transforming effect of beauty based on the French neo-romantic Edmond Rostand, was seen for the first time in 1896 at the industrial and art show in Nizhny Novgorod, reviled as decadent.Maxim Gorki found the flatness inspired by Byzantine mosaics and the angular lines very pathetic.

At the center of the show are Wrubel's monumental enigmatic demon pictures, which, initially created as an illustration of Michail Lermontov's poem of the same name, also personify the rebellious spirit of the time. The renegade angel appears for the first time in 1890 as a brooding seated figure in fractal color hatching and with a sky-blue cloth around his knees. After a pause of almost a decade, Wrubel painted the “Flying Demon” in 1899, an extreme landscape format on which the figure spreads mighty dark wings in an anatomically impossible twist and at the same time appeared squeezed in from the room as if in a cave. The picture, long dismissed as unfinished, ended up in the Russian Museum during the Soviet era. The "fallen demon", lying in almost the same contortion in a peacock feather wreath in a depression, concluded the subject in 1902.The picture was immediately perceived by contemporaries as a tragic prophecy, and Wrubel, who worked feverishly on it, changed and varied it, then became a psychiatric patient.

Thanks to the neurologists

Wrubel's increasingly self-worthy areas of color often reach the limit of non-representationalism.

The paintings “Morning” and “Lilac” consist largely of lilac-green growths from which only two small heads peeked out like nature spirits.

But the polyglot artist, who read Homer in the original, felt in his happiest phase as a commissioned painter for Moscow industrialists above all as a new Renaissance painter and created, for example, “The Choice of Paris” as a triptych for the Dunker Villa designed in a Palladian style assigned the elements air, water and earth to the three goddesses Juno, Venus and Minerva.

Wrubel puts his Greek god of nature Pan in the twilight of a Russian birch clearing and gives him fairytale traits of the Slavic forest spirit Leschi.

The fact that Wrubel's great graphic work from recent years has largely been preserved is mainly thanks to his treating neurologists.

Under the supervision of W. Pomorzow, haunting colored pencil portraits are created on the border between madness and expressiveness; in Fyodor Usolzew's clinic he draws doctors, nurses, but also his bedstead or a snowdrift, in which he works out angular-crystalline structures in an almost constructivist manner.

After his release, a mother-of-pearl shell once given to him as an ashtray became a pictorial cosmos at home, whose curves, breaks and color nuances he captured with pastel and pencil in the finest and fantastic nuances and was even able to see small nymph figures in them.