The weak spot about all this combativeness and intellectual ardor, which proved fatal and unavoidable amid these divergent points of view, was the lack of creative ability on the part of the group. This group had deposed and duly trampled under foot the art of the “wanderers” with its social tendencies and its worship of the moujik. It had done this to the greater glory of an art that is unselfish and creative. But almost immediately its members turned toward literature. Among all those former members of the Club (I except only Serov and the Moscovites), there was not a single painter in the real sense of the word. Benois, who never when working at a canvas could completely overcome his amateurish clumsiness, Lanceray, later Doboujinsky—they all were first and foremost illustrators, rather than painters, who were steeped in precious recollections, who gleaned from every style and who discovered forgotten beauties.
With this select group, then, the motif prevailed more and more over its execution; the brush became a means of interpreting a history perceived with a sort of sentimental homesickness mixed with irony. Is it surprising, then, that the retrospective attitude got the upper hand more and more, and that the offshoots of this movement were sacrificed to a propaganda for the past?
As a matter of fact, discovery followed upon discovery. Preceding generations, going into Russian extremes, became infatuated with the idea of progress. Accordingly they either ignored or misunderstood their national past. Then, under Nicholas I the czar-gendarme, the old architecture was disfigured by German builders. As for the unique and grandiose beauty of the structures in the style of the Empire and of Louis XVI,—buildings without parallel in the occidental world—these were confounded by the public with that implacable hatred that it bore toward the regime that had erected and that was maintaining them. An educated Russian could not possibly find anything beautiful about the Winter Palace, this fine masterpiece of Rastrelli; he would decline to admire the Admiralty Building because the defeat of Tsushima was prepared within its formidable walls. The writer of this sketch was himself brought up in this atmosphere of hateful contempt for the “official ugliness” and the “style of the barrack.”
Benois and his friends discovered this slandered beauty and became enamoured of it. Later on we shall see how Bakst discharged his debt of gratitude to old Petrograd, this wonderful city which rose miraculously from the surface of the waves.
But the surprises were not yet over. In his history of modern Russian painting, Benois with boldness and with charming eloquence recalled the founders of this style of painting, the portrait-painters of the eighteenth century, especially Levitzky and Borovikovsky. He cast
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STAGE DECORATIONS FOR HINDU BALLET (GOUACHE)