Contemporary Painting
Old-Russian style. All these efforts were, however, unsuccessful and bore no fruits of beauty. The artists have not succeeded in evoking the old, for it was inapplicable to modern life; it was simply outside the sphere of contemporary culture; and as for transforming the old into the new, they had not enough creative power and passionate love for the past. In the seventies and eighties the "Russian Style" meant something wildly grotesque, uncouth, motley, and by all means coarse. Only after Schwarz had restored in his illustrations the more or less accurate image of Old-Russian life, and a series of painstaking archeological investigations had been completed,—only after the Gagarin Museum at the Academy of Arts, and the Moscow Historical Museum had been established,—only then was the original beauty of Old-Russian life unveiled, and it became possible to create something artistically valuable on the basis of old authentic documents. This was done by V. Vasnetzov.
A worshipper of the Russian past and of all that is customary to term purely Russian culture, Vasnetzov, was well fit to undertake this work of the restoration of the past; he had the talent and the right attitude. Both this talent and this scrupulous, almost pious attention to his work are reflected in his paintings. He abandoned the superficial smartness of Hartman, Bo-
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