Nikolay Krymov

Biography

As a point of reference Nikolay Krymov proposed a burning match against a sunlit wall. He saw the essence of painting in the tone that fills colour with light, and paint in itself mattered less to him. On this he built his own system of the “general tone”, and he set out his views in the article “On Levitan” (1938). It seems to me that this match explains his landscapes better than any theory.

He regarded Levitan as his chief teacher, although he never found him alive.

Krymov was born in Moscow on 20 April (2 May) 1884, the son of the painter Pyotr Alekseyevich Krymov, who worked in the manner of the Peredvizhniki; his father had once been a favourite pupil of Sergei Zaryanko and himself taught drawing at a Moscow gymnasium. Nikolay was the twelfth child in the family; he received his first professional training from his father, and his brother Alexei became a well-known surgeon. At first, though, he was sent to a non-classical secondary school. In 1904 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, in the architecture department, and in 1907–1911 he studied in the landscape studio of Apollinary Vasnetsov; he also studied under Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin. At the student exhibition of 1906 his landscape “Roofs under Snow” pleased Serov and Vasnetsov so much that, so the story goes, they persuaded the council of the Tretyakov Gallery to buy it. In 1907 he took part in the Blue Rose exhibition, and in 1906–1909 he worked as a graphic artist on the magazine Zolotoe Runo (The Golden Fleece). Early works such as “Under the Sun” (1906, Russian Museum) resemble a shimmering fabric of colour in which nature almost dissolves.

That 1907 exhibition was organised by the patron Ryabushinsky, who hung the rooms with silvery and blue fabric; Krymov also exhibited with the Wreath and at the Golden Fleece exhibitions. He soon parted company with the Symbolists, however, because he considered himself above all a painter of the Russian landscape. From 1910 to 1923 Krymov belonged to the Union of Russian Artists, and stayed in it when the Petersburg artists left the Union in 1910; from 1923 to 1931 he was a member of the Society of Moscow Artists. The objects in his landscapes gradually grow heavier and gain weight, while there are still almost no people in them: “The Yellow Barn” (1909, Tretyakov Gallery), “Morning” (1916, Yaroslavl Art Museum). At that time he painted from memory: he went out to the countryside near Moscow and did the work at home, and from 1913 he rented a summer house at Kraskovo. He moved to painting in the open air only in the 1920s.

In the first years after the revolution he and his wife Elena, the daughter of the painter Nikolai Dosekin, spent long periods on the estate of his friend Vsevolod Mamontov near Ryazan.

In the same years Krymov worked on the commission for the protection of monuments of art and antiquity, was a professor at the Polygraphic Institute, and in 1919–1930 taught a great deal: at the Prechistenka Practical Institute, at VKhUTEMAS and at the Moscow Regional Art School in Memory of 1905. Although he himself was a landscape painter, his pupils included genre painters, history painters and portraitists: Viktorov, Kugach, Kondrashin, Ivanov-Radkevich, Reshetnikov, Solomin. In each of them he could see and develop a manner of their own. For the Moscow Art Theatre Krymov designed Ostrovsky’s “A Warm Heart” (1926) and “Talents and Admirers” (1933) and Leonid Leonov’s “Untilovsk” (1928).

From 1928 he spent a large part of each year in Tarusa. His mature works, “The Stream” (1926) and “At the Mill” (1927), both in the Tretyakov Gallery, and the late “Street in Tarusa” (1952), are built on the plainest motifs of central Russia, gathered into a clear composition and subordinated to the general tone. In 1949 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, in 1954, for his seventieth birthday, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, and in 1956 he received the title of People’s Artist of the RSFSR.

Nikolay Krymov died in Moscow on 6 May 1958 and is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery.