Slaughterhouse (Russian: Бойня) is a painting by the Russian, Soviet and American artist Nicolai Fechin. Art historians believe that the canvas was created in Kazan and that work on it began in 1904, but they differ on when Fechin stopped working (1916, the mid-1910s, 1919, or even the early 1920s). The painting belongs to the collection of the State Art Museum of Tatarstan in Kazan and is exhibited in the permanent exhibition of the Nicolai Fechin Hall of the Khazine National Art Gallery.
Slaughterhouse is a rare genre painting in Fechin's oeuvre. It is one of only four of his large-scale works. Art historians identify him and his father in the figures on the canvas, and the canvas itself is associated not only with the young Fechin's expedition to the Yenisey Range, but also with the bloody events of the First World War or the Russian Civil War, which coincided with his maturity. Researchers are analyzing in detail Fechin's composition, color solution and painting technique.
From the art historians' point of view, the process of Fechin's work on the painting Slaughterhouse was interesting: he created three-dimensional images of animals and butchers as models – sketches for the painting; the few surviving sketches for it are abstract compositions – "a whirlwind of strokes and lines that only remotely resemble real images".
Contents
Representation
A bull has been slaughtered, and a group of slaughterhouse workers of various ages are preparing to skin the carcass. According to Russian art historian Galina Tuluzakova, the action of the painting takes place indoors, as the sky is visible only in the upper left part of the painting.
In the foreground, a bull lies on the ground with its throat slit. The cold turquoise color of the eye against the bloody background gives the picture, in the words of the Soviet art historian Peter Dulsky, "a sharp eeriness". Two butchers bend over the bull. Their movements are confident and unhurried. In the background, a slaughterhouse worker drags another stubborn animal with a rope. Further to the right, a worker is skinning a hanging carcass. To the left of the carcass, behind it, is a worker dressed in a butcher's uniform with an apron. This attire does not conform to Jewish ritual (which, according to Peter Dulsky, is what Fechin chose to depict). This worker carefully wipes the blade of his knife. At the left edge of the foreground are the journeyman boys (one with his back to the viewer, the other full-face). They are playing with a bull's bladder (probably blowing it up) without paying attention to what is happening.
The upper part of the painting depicts hot air vapors through which bright patches of sky can be seen. In the same plan, a worker is holding out his hand and shouting, and another is dragging a bull to slaughter. Tuluzakova believed that Fechin gave this figure features of his own appearance. The butcher standing next to him holds a knife at the height of his chest, which the researcher took as a symbol.
History of the painting
Place in Fechin's œuvre
The Russian art historian Galina Tuluzakova tried to determine the place of the painting Slaughterhouse in Fechin's creative development. His first stage (from Homeless Man to Full Victory and Exit from the Factory) – the assimilation of Fechin's subjects and the stylistics of the Peredvizhniki; the mature period of his work (from Bearing Away the Bride to Slaughterhouse), "due to external circumstances" did not continue, demonstrates the emotional intensity of canvases, "naked, nervous, on the verge of hysterical outbreak of feelings". In her opinion, the "climax" of this stage was the painting Pouring. In this second creative stage, Fechin intensified the compositional dynamics by "external movement of the figures" and "formal methods". His most "expressionist" painting in terms of form and content is Slaughterhouse, which "eliminates the contradiction between the plot and its interpretation, where the feeling of life 'as it is' is full of tragedy and tears".
Tuluzakova considered the domestic genre to be the key genre of this stage of Fechin's development. In her opinion, his goal was not visible nature, but a way of expressing his attitude to the world, "the understanding of deep, essential processes of being". The domestic genre provided an opportunity to "sharpen the images", "use the techniques of the grotesque" at the sensitive and intuitive levels. Tuluzakova concluded that exaggeration and the grotesque "seem closer to a sober view of the reality of life than to a photographically accurate fixation of the moment". Rejecting a one-dimensional approach that combined the beautiful and the ugly, Fechin asserted the equality of the content and formal aspects of works. He drew from tradition, but freely interpreted composition and colorism, treating the painting as a "decorative whole". According to Tuluzakova, this led to the "fusion of plans" in this creative period, "the rejection of aerial perspective, the combination of silhouette and volumetric principles in the construction of form, the search for a variety of possibilities in working with texture and color, experimentation with purely technical methods", each fragment of the composition of the picture was understood by the artist as a "complete aesthetic whole". She attributed Fechin's works of this period to the "expressive-grotesque line" in the history of Russian art of the early 20th century, which also included paintings by Filip Malyavin, Boris Grigoriev, and Pavel Filonov. In her opinion, Fechin was less concerned with social problems than with "the element of national character". She characterized his genre compositions as "folk and everyday" (as opposed to "social and popular").
Dmitry Seryakov, a Russian researcher of Fechin's work, drew attention in his doctoral dissertation to the fact that Fechin, despite all his artistic activity, created only four major genre works, two of them in his student days (Bearing Away the Bride and Kapustnitsa), one not completed (Pouring), and only Slaughterhouse created in the period of maturity. In his opinion, he "clearly felt the artistic principles outlined earlier and found their logical development in Slaughterhouse", but "in a slightly different way than in his previous paintings". He also emphasized in this canvas "the expressiveness, the expansive writing, the revealing freedom and even a certain spontaneity of the creative act in the manner of painting, the ultimate generalization of details".
Fechin's work
In 1920, Fechin presented the unfinished canvas Slaughterhouse for the first time at the State Exhibition of Paintings in Kazan. It made a strong impression on the audience with its plot. The art historian and publisher Peter Dulsky, who was acquainted with Fechin at the Kazan Art School, wrote in an essay on Fechin's life and work that the canvas was conceived as long before as 1904, when he made a trip to the South Yenisey Range (Dmitry Seriakov assumed that the source of Dulsky's knowledge about the creation of the picture could be a story of Fechin himself). At that time, Fechin was part of an expedition to explore this region, led by the mining engineer Nicolai Izhitsky. Fechin later recalled that it was Izhitsky, who was "fascinated" by Siberia, who took the initiative for the trip. Izhitsky persuaded him to join the expedition. "These days, spent in the untouched beauty of Siberia, remained one of the most memorable and happiest in my life", recalled Fechin years later. Ekaterina Kliuchevskaya, a student of art history, wrote that the "binding" of genre painting to a specific geographical point was characteristic of Fechin's work. As an example she cited the painting Bearing Away the Bride, where the action takes place in the village of Morki Tsarevokokokshaisky uyezd of Kazan province, and other works of his.
In the taiga, Fechin saw several times how local people slaughtered cattle. The cattle were driven to special fenced meadows surrounded by ravines. The slaughter was done in the open. The animal was caught with a harness, then tied by the horns with a rope and dragged to a place where waiting workers stunned it, knifed it and made it bleed. The animals roared and struggled, creating a gruesome image that was enhanced by the considerable amount of blood under the feet of the slaughterhouse workers. Dulsky believed that Fechin was impressed by the "coloristic data of the peculiarities of this motif" and the "mental acuity" of the scene he had seen, "which were embedded in the artist's memory". Dulsky wrote that Fechin was most influenced by the large amount of blood and its brightness due to its exposure to " the oxygen of the air. He wanted to create a scene such that the bright effects of the spilling blood would be the focus of the viewer's attention. That is why, according to Dulsky, he chose as his subject the Jewish method of slaughtering cattle, in which the animal, lying on the ground with its hooves tied together, has its throat cut with a knife.
According to Dulsky, Fechin began to work on the subject of the massacre in 1905, but limited himself to sketches for his future painting. The artist Alexander Lyubimov, who studied at the Kazan Art School from 1914 to 1918 and was in close contact with Fechin at that time, wrote in his Memories that in 1915–1916 he exhibited in the Kazan Museum sketches of boys' heads for the painting Slaughterhouse. According to him, they were made in the technique of "wood carving". In the Kazan period, Fechin often used sculptural models as studies for pictorial compositions. For example, Galina Tuluzakova mentioned volumetric figures of bulls for Slaughterhouse (1910s).
Part of the State Art Museum of Tatarstan's collection
Having left his homeland, Fechin left Slaughterhouse in the Central Museum of the Tatar ASSR in 1923, and gave the sketches and designs for it to his wife's relatives – the Belkovichs. Later, in 1944, it was transferred to the collection of the State Museum of the Tatar ASSR, which was formed on its basis. Nowadays, the painting forms part of the collection of the State Art Museum of Tatarstan, which was founded in 1958 on the basis of the picture gallery of the State Museum of the Tatar ASSR and is exhibited in the hall of Nicolai Fechin in the National Art Gallery Khazine (a branch of this museum in the Kazan Kremlin). It came there in 1962. Its inventory number in the collection is Zh-634.
Slaughterhouse is an oil painting on canvas, 220 × 289 cm. The museum catalog dates the painting to 1919. It was presented several times at large Russian and All-Union exhibitions. So it was shown at the 1st State Exhibition of Paintings in Kazan in 1920, at the exhibition of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia in Moscow in 1926, at the exhibition Nicolai Fechin and his Time in Kazan in 1981, there at the exhibition The Art of Tatarstan in the 1920s – 1930s in 1990 and at the exhibition of works of N. I. Fechin in the State Museum of Fine Arts. Fechin in the State Art Museum of Tatarstan in November 2006 – January 2007.
Dmitry Seryakov mentioned in his doctoral thesis that the State Art Museum of Tatarstan has sketches for Slaughterhouse made in the 1910s. They are executed with gouache in combination with watercolor in a free way, close to abstract compositions. The "outlines of forms" here are almost indistinguishable. The sketches are "a whirlwind of strokes and lines that only vaguely resemble real paintings. According to Seryakov, they were only intended to determine the general composition of the work, so Fechin did not bother to detail the images, although he himself undoubtedly guessed at concrete forms behind the abstract dots of the sketches. The sketches occupy only a part of a sheet of paper and are inscribed in "rectangular frames that define the boundaries of the picture". Seryakov also suggested that the margins around the image were sometimes used by the author as an improvised palette, trying out colors on them before applying a stroke. In some of the sketches, however, Fechin enclosed the image in a wide frame, which he dashed with black paint. According to Seriakov, he did this to test how the picture would look in a dark environment. Such a frame adds tension and contrast to the sketch.
Art critics' and viewers' reviews
Contemporaries and Soviet art historians on the painting
The artist Deborah Ryazanskaya, who studied in from 1918 to 1920 in the painting studio of Nadezhda Sapozhnikova, where Fechin was giving classes, saw the painting Slaughterhouse and talked about her impressions of it. According to her, Fechin gave his students the task of writing a composition on the theme Ulysses' return to Penelope. Such an assignment was rare at that time. In the studio where the students were working, two large works by Fechin, Slaughterhouse and Blanching, were hanging on the wall. When Fechin left, the students turned the paintings away from the wall and studied them. According to Deborah Ryazanskaya, both paintings captivated the studio students. In addition to the composition, they also scrutinized Fechin's technique in these paintings.
Peter Dulsky paid great attention to Slaughterhouse, he described in detail the history of its creation and the image on it. He gave a contradictory evaluation of this painting. He wrote:
As for the composition and expression of the painting, it is quite curious, dramatized notes sound clearly in the painting, which is all soaked with the smell of blood, giving it some nightmarish, cruel character. All these dark moments repulsive side of cutting animals in the painting N. Fechin successfully transferred, the effects of gelled, spilled blood is also juicy captured by the artist, but it must be confessed that the picture of its screaming motif rather irritates the viewer, who, familiarized with it, takes away with him a feeling of bitterness and disgust, completely forgetting the technique and talented skill of the artist, inspired by such a grim bloody plot.
Soviet art historian S. G. Kaplanova considered Slaughterhouse to be the most complete and significant of Fechin's major works. She emphasized that the canvas depicts hard work and that Fechin shows the viewer "a piece of life exactly as it opened before him, without softening or concealing anything. Kaplanova noted that the painting combines tension and serenity. In her opinion, this atmosphere is created by the colors used: the black skin of the bull, the gray shirts of the slaughterhouse workers, the yellowish-red of the fresh carcass, and the earthen floor covered with blood. Such a range of colors creates a special "fusion, full of drama and inner strength".
Contemporary Russian art historians on the painting
Tuluzakova noted that "the contrast of the refinement of formal techniques and the anti-aestheticism of the subject of the picture", which always attracted Fechin, finds its "most open expression" in the painting Slaughterhouse. In her opinion, he portrayed people for whom murder has become a regular occupation. She believes that Fechin showed two poles – life and death. The symbol of the latter is a fresh corpse, that of the former is children. These two poles are symmetrical in relation to the central axis of the canvas and, in her opinion, provide the key to understanding Fechin's intention. Slaughterhouse appears on the canvas as a model of life, including tragedy and ordinariness, murder and play, indifference and protest.
According to Tuluzakova, the composition of the painting is based on contrasts and oppositions. The dark, heavy lower part of the painting contrasts with the light, brighter upper part. The left part with children contrasts with the right part (a bloody corpse). She noticed the combination of interior (closed) and exterior (open, free) space in Slaughterhouse. According to her, the rhythm of vertical and horizontal lines determines the internal structure of the work. The verticals are formed by the figures of children, a worker wiping a knife, a man in the background and the beams next to him, the legs of the bent man in the background, the hands of the crouching worker, and another figure skinning a carcass. For the horizontals, she referred to the floor, the lying carcass, the bent worker, the hands of the butcher and the worker in the far background, the hanging pole on which the carcass being processed is suspended, and the windowpane. She compared the relationship of these horizontal and vertical lines to the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Tuluzakova found the same Mondrian scheme with a rigid intersection of vertical and horizontal lines in Portrait of N. M. Sapozhnikova at the Piano, which she considered a genre painting rather than a portrait.
The face of the most distant figure in the center of the painting, which Tuluzakova perceived as a self-portrait, is, in her opinion, the top of an imaginary pyramid. The "slight break" between the outstretched hand and the counter-impulsive movement of this figure is, in her view, "a way out of the closed, stuffy space. The main action unfolds closer to the viewer. Its main elements are the figure of a leaning man close to the viewer, modeled after the artist's father, as well as the carcass of a slaughtered bull lying on the floor and the hanging carcass from which the worker is skinning. She noted the "delicacy of the elaboration of red, pink, yellow and white, with variations of warm and cold" of his image and that the carcass is "crucified" on a crossbar (an analogy to a well-known Christian subject). In the image of the bull lying on the ground, she noted the "free, almost careless brushstroke" applied to the painting eye of the lying bull, conveying the agony of death, and the use of shades of warm brown and cold white-gray colors to depict the softness, amorphousness of the carcass from which life is draining away.