I came across this painting at the Met last year, and it froze me in my tracks. For over a year I've been trying to understand its hold on me. It is a portrait of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1884) by Illia Repin (1844-1930), a Ukrainian painter, of his friend and writer, during the repressive reign of Tsar Alexander III of Russia. It is as if you have come upon Garshin, looking up at you, but not exactly at you, but past you somehow, his thoughts elsewhere, waiting for you to leave.

Realist Technique

Repin was a prodigous, realist painter, and all of the realist painter's techniques are present here, in expert and effortless fashion. There is the dashed indication of the folios on the desk, the silhouette of his cossack, the complexity of color in his face, indicating both youth and premature age. There is the imprint of his eyeglasses on the bridge of his nose. It is worthy of the best painters of the time, say John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, or our own Adelaide Cole Chase, where the subjugation of all detail allows us to focus on the character of the subject.

Still, there was something more in this painting that illuded me, something powerful and tragic. Researching this painting, I later learned that four years after this picture was painted, Garshin, scarred by the suicides of his father and brother and his own mental illness, threw himself down a stairwell and died. And as I look at this painting now, it is not the subject of the painting itself, the writer at his desk, which is indeed extraordinary, but the background; the steel blue winter sky in Ukraine, the rasputitsa brown of his cassock, deep as the mud in where Napoleon might have lost his troops. His amber eyes reflect te mood of the dull, relentless sky, and the palest trace of the sky remains on his sleeve.

Reverse Light

This painting is a beautiful tribute to his friend, and a kind of foretelling. Whether the background was painted before or after his friend's death is unkown, but it is safe to say that it is an usual background. Convention would have the background dark, to bring out the subject, to in effect, illumimate the subject. Here it is the reverse. The almost relentless bright background now casts our subject into dark lugubriosity.

There are so many ways we look at a painting, and not all of them happen on the same cognitive plane. Some are conscious and some are not. That's why it's taken more than a year for me to unravel this painting, its terrible, tragiic mpact. Sometimes, when we look at a painting, particularly with a portrait, the first thing we see is recognition. We are wired to recognize a face, perhaps sorting it out against all the other faces we have known, and attributing some characteristic based on memory.

Beyond Recognition

But there is another aspect which has to do with the paint itself, the emotional response, particularly of those indeterminant colors, where our response may be limbic, coming from the fight or flight part of our brains. We reactas a primitive animal might to the presence of the light dark in the surrounding environment. This, of course, was the realm of the color field painters later in the 20th Century, but it has always been present in the work of earlier painters, where its impact is almost most subversive. The light and color are speaking to you in way that you are almost unaware of.

That was the case for me with this painting (in Gallery 827 at the Met).

There are only a handful of paintings by Ilya Repin (1844-1930) in the United States, and three of them are at the Met, though there are over five hundred held in art collections around the world, mostly in Russia, and primarily in Moscow.