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Issue Date: 2 / 2006 |
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Wurdeman: An American Impressionist Trained in Russia
Judith Bell Turner-Yamamoto
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A still-life by John Wurdeman.
Click image to enlarge.
If you can imagine an art world spared the fracturing "isms" of twentieth-century Western art, where the tenets established in French Impressionism continued to flourish uninterrupted, then you have some idea what's been going on in Russian realism for the last one hundred thirty years.
"Russian art doesn't fit neatly into the classification system of Western art history," says painter John H. Wurdeman V. "These painters took the definition of plein air painting literally; they built on what the French Impressionists started. French Impressionism produced fifteen masters, and the Barizon school produced five significant artists. A long school produces a lot of good artists. With the Russians we're talking about perhaps eight hundred master painters."
It was this uninterrupted tradition within which the young American realist painter made the unprecedented decision to immerse himself. Wurdeman, who attended the pre-college painting program at the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1991, began his art studies the following year at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. Despite the school's longstanding tradition as the oldest accredited art school in America, he soon discovered a decided bias against representational art. "Aesthetics, beauty, the importance of a beautiful composition--we couldn't talk about those things at the Maryland Art Institute," he recalls. "I felt the most controversial thing I could do was paint a still life of a rose. You could smear icing on the wall and talk about what you felt about it, but beauty was too bourgeois."
In 1995, after repeated attempts to obtain admission--there were considerable doubts about the efficacy and rigor of his American art training--he transferred to the Surikov Institute of Art in Moscow. "My previous art history classes touched on the Surikov and three or four important nineteenth-century artists. The message was that while the rest of Europe was progressing, Russia was keeping the nineteenth-century school intact and preserving their own form of expression. That was the end of coverage of Russian art in a two-volume art history text."
Wurdeman soon discovered an unbroken connection with European tradition coupled with an Asian perspective on the importance of craft and a commitment to bring art to the people. "With the final critique at the end of the semester they graded you--on painting, on drawing, on composition. Whoever headed the delegation would carry a piece of white chalk. If they X'd lower left hand corner, your piece was taken to the state fund. Any work deemed significant belonged to the state. The idea was we give you the materials, the studio, the education; we reserve the right to take a few paintings. The fund of the Surikov then distributed the paintings to the local regions. The people give the education to the artists and the artists give their work back to the people. You can go to a small fishing village in Russia and there will be a state museum with 500 beautiful paintings."
Wurdeman studied under Vyacheslav Nikolaivic Zabelin whose studio was most traditional of the sixteen at the Surikov. Although Zabelin's own work was playful and decorative, he brought strict traditionalists like renowned draftsman Nikolai Dubavik into the studio to teach. "Zabelin would tell me 'feel the subtlety of color, feel the beauty,' in a loud voice, and walk away. He taught me to paint things I had a relationship with so that I poured all my love and affection into the work. Paint your favorite street at the angle that represents something to you. There was no concern with being politically correct. Only one thing mattered, and that was to produce incredible art. It was incredibly hard, but so refreshing with my natural inclination toward realism."
Zabelin had discovered his own muse during a summer painting expedition to the north in the small lakeside village of Rostov. Wurdeman's teacher's lifelong love affair with the expressionist power of color and this small village fueled his own search for a similarly inspiring subject.
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A landscape by John Wurdeman.
Click image to enlarge.
Working toward his sixth year, when students produce a large-scale painting on a particular theme, Wurdeman turned his attention to the small east Georgian village of Sighnaghi and the subject of the grape harvest. "You work for years doing all kinds of sketches and etudes. I was having a romance with the Republic of Georgia. I fell in love with the language, the cuisine, the nature, the people, and Sighnaghi, this small village of three thousand people, was love at first sight. I would come out on my balcony to this incredible view looking over this little town of terra cotta roofs and below that, fifty miles of vineyards running right up against the Caucasus Mountains."
A year later Wurdeman met his future wife, folk singer Ketevan Mindorashvili, as she was walking by his house, singing. The couple lives in Sighnaghi with their two children where Wurdeman continues to paint his beloved subject. "There's an urgent sense of life and celebration there unlike anything I've ever experienced, and years later I'm still hooked. Georgia is considered one of the seven cradles of civilization. When God was dividing the world, the story goes, the Georgians arrived late, smelling of wine. God was furious, but the Georgians appeased him with their story of how they'd praised him with their drinking. As a result, He gave them Georgia, a country the size of West Virginia that contains every natural wonder, from alpine mountains to deserts, deciduous rain forests, and beaches. There's nothing like it in the world."
Wurdeman's instinctive sense of color--Zabelin cited it as the reason for accepting him into his studio--pervades canvas after canvas where the artist deftly captures the light, sense of place, and humanity of his adopted home. "When form and content merge, when there's a wonderful idea and a means of conveying the idea, when the formal aspect of the painting and the plastic language used echoes the content, then a painting is moving. Zabelin believed nineteenth-century American artists like Frederic Church and John Henry Twatchman possessed this knowledge but it was lost in the sudden break with tradition that came with the twentieth-century. He told me one day you have to go back to America and bring them the understanding of color you learned here."
Wurdeman is actively creating visibility opportunities for Surikov-trained artists with corporations and galleries throughout Russia and the west. In 1996 he founded the Moscow- based art group "Vision" to create exhibition and acquisition opportunities for Zabelin-trained artists. Wurdeman's parents, longtime art dealers John and Kathy Wurdeman, have in recent years shifted the focus of their business to fine art by Soviet-era masters and contemporary Surikov painters.
This spring, to showcase these works, they launched Lazare Gallery, named for their grandson Lazare, in Charles City County, Virginia. The Wurdemans work with galleries throughout the country organizing shows and lecturing. The gallery also makes its resources available to the community. Student groups are welcomed; art students come to paint with John H. Wurdeman when he is in town, and the Wurdemans lecture in the schools. The Lazare Gallery inventory consists on average of over a thousand paintings. In what is the largest collection of work associated with the Surikov outside Russia, the collection includes over 185 master works by Russia's greatest painters. Only the Museum of Modern Art in Turin, Italy, for example, has a larger collection of paintings by Vyacheslav Nikolaivic Zabelin. The artist, who died in 2000, is considered a national treasure and his works are no longer allowed outside of Russia.
"Things are changing at the Surikov," says Wurdeman. "The old masters are dying, and without their presence, younger teachers are yielding to pressure from the administration to place less emphasis on tradition. I was really there at the last moment to acquire this kind of knowledge. I tell my friends we have a responsibility to the legacy, to the tradition."
Judith Bell Turner-Yamamoto is an art historian, features
writer, and
novelist
based in Arlington, Virginia.
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