Abramtsevo Colony

Abramtsevo (Russian: Абра́мцево) is an estate located north of Moscow, in the proximity of Khotkovo, that became a center for the Slavophile movement and artistic activity in the 19th century. The clubhouse became a center for the Slavophilic movement. Inside the artists, in a cooperative spirit, designed architectural projects and established workshops for the design and production of furniture, ceramics and silk canvas.

The artists Vasili Dmitrievich Polenov and Viktor Michajlovič Vasnecov erected a church, which represents one of the first buildings inspired by art nouveau in Russia.

History
Originally owned by author Sergei Aksakov, other writers and artists — such as Nikolai Gogol — at first came there as his guests. Under Aksakov, visitors to the estate discussed ways of ridding Russian art of Western influences to revive a purely national style. In 1870, eleven years after Aksakov’s death, it was purchased by Savva Mamontov, a wealthy industrialist and patron of the arts.

Under Mamontov, Russian themes and folk art flourished there. During the 1870s and 1880s, Abramtsevo hosted a colony of artists who sought to recapture the quality and spirit of medieval Russian art in the manner parallel to the Arts and Crafts movement in Great Britain. Several workshops were set up there to produce handmade furniture, ceramic tiles, and silks imbued with traditional Russian imagery and themes.

Working together in a cooperative spirit, the artists Vasily Polenov and Viktor Vasnetsov designed a plain but picturesque church, with murals painted by Polenov, Vasnetsov and his brother, a gilded iconostasis by Ilya Repin and Mikhail Nesterov, and folklore-inspired sculptures by Viktor Hartmann and Mark Antokolsky. Towards the turn of the 20th century, drama and opera on Russian folklore themes (e.g., Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden) were produced in Abramtsevo by the likes of Konstantin Stanislavsky, with sets contributed by Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel, and other distinguished artists.

After 1917, the estate was nationalized and turned into a museum. The first keeper was the daughter of S. I. Mamontov, Alexander Savvichna. On an area of 50 hectares currently occupied by the museum-reserve, there are architectural monuments of the 18th-19th centuries and a park. The museum collection includes more than 25 thousand exhibits. The exposition is dedicated to the life and work of the owners and famous guests of Abramtsev.

On August 12, 1977, by a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR, the Abramtsevo Museum-Estate was transformed into the State Historical, Art and Literary Museum-Reserve “Abramtsevo” of the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR. In 1995, attributed to the objects of historical and cultural heritage of federal (all-Russian) significance.

Abramtsevo Art Circle
Abramtsevo is an artistic community that developed in the mid-1870s around S. I. Mamontov, an industrialist, a well-known philanthropist, and an artistically gifted person. Therefore, often the circle is called mammoth. For a quarter of a century, the Mamontov’s estate “Abramtsevo” near Moscow turned out to be a major center of Russian culture, a place where sometimes for a whole summer, sometimes for a shorter period, artists came from well-known to very young. Frequent guests were I. Repin, V. Vasnetsov, Ap. Vasnetsov, V. Serov, M. Vrubel, V. Polenov, E. Polenova.

Here they drew a lot, worked diligently in painting, discovering the beauty of Central Russian nature and the charm of mentally close people, staged home performances, carried out interesting architectural designs, worked in specially arranged handicraft workshops.

Abramtsev’s artistic life is, from a certain point of view, the history of the formation of the “ neo-Russian style, “ which turned out to be an essential facet of modernity in Russia. The Ambramtsevo circle never had its own charter or any pre-defined program. The beauty of the benefit and the benefit of beauty – with such two interconnected concepts, one could conditionally define the “home” aesthetics that took shape in the spiritual atmosphere of the estate.

With his desire to uphold the vital connection between beauty and good, the Mammoth Circle shared the widespread beliefs of the era. They talked about and wrote about it most often just in that artistic environment where the principles of modernity took shape. The peculiarity of the creative orientation of the Mammoth Circle was that the combination of benefit and beauty seemed to the members of the community not only as a serious public duty of the artistic intelligentsia, but also as a living poetic tradition, an organic property of peasant art, embodying important features of the folk ideal.

Following their social ideas and creative interests, the members of the Abramtsevo circle organized two workshops: joiner’s and rechitsa (1885) and ceramic (1890). And in fact, and in another case, the matter concerned attempts to revive artisan crafts, having before his eyes collected in the villages of folk art. The participants in the mammoth colony did not look at these products of peasant labor as “samples” to be copied. The intentions were to return to the decorative and applied art its poetic essence and, together with it, its main life function – to adorn the everyday life of a person. Artists whose style searches went in this direction differently interpreted the poetics and stylistics of folk art, and, say, ceramics, created by Vrubel in the Abramtsevo workshop, responded to completely different sides of the folklore art tradition than the carved doors, shelves and cupboards performed by E. Polenova and her colleagues in the carpentry workshop. Moreover, here you can talk about various modifications of the “neo-Russian style” – from the creative recreation of traditional visual vocabulary and ornamental forms of objects of peasant life to their serious transformation into a new plastic system. Nevertheless, one can speak about the Abramtsevo “style” as an independent phenomenon of Russian art only conditionally – it was constantly developing, gaining new properties and qualities.

In the late XIX – early XX centuries, such large centers of folk art were created not only in Abramtsevo near Moscow, but also, for example, in the Smolensk estate of the princes Tenishev Talashkino.

Museum
Abramtsevo is now open to the public and tourists can wander along the many paths through the surrounding forest and cross the wooden bridges that served as an inspiration for the artists at the Abramtsevo Colony. They can also visit many of the buildings to see works produced by the artists at the colony, e.g., a wooden bathhouse in the shape of a traditional dwelling of Ancient Rus, designed by Ivan Ropet, and the House on Chicken Legs, a fairy-tale abode of an evil witch, Baba Yaga, designed by Vasnetsov. One building, the main “manor,” is said to have been the model for the estate in which Anton Chekhov set The Cherry Orchard.

Abramtsevo in the cinema
Several feature films have been shot at the Abramtsevo estate:

“ On the Eve”, 1959, USSR (director: Vladimir Petrov)
“Solaris”, 1972, USSR (director: Andrei Tarkovsky)
First Love, 1995, Russia (director: Roman Balayan)
“Savva”, 2008, Russia (director Evgeny Gerasimov)
“Two Days”, 2011, Russia (director Avdotya Smirnova)