The Fourteen Who Walked Out

On 9 November 1863, fourteen of the Imperial Academy of Arts' strongest students refused the gold-medal competition and walked out. The Academy had assigned the subject, a scene from Norse myth called The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla, for the contest marking its hundredth year. The fourteen, led by Ivan Kramskoy, had petitioned to paint subjects of their own choosing instead, and the Council refused. So they resigned together, gave up the funded years in Rome that the Large Gold Medal carried, and left the most powerful art institution in Russia with nothing arranged to catch them. What they built in its place, first a working commune called the Artel and then the traveling shows of the Wanderers, became the independent system that carried Russian realism into being. And the part worth keeping is the turn at the end: a decade later the Academy renewed itself from inside, when Pavel Chistyakov began training Repin, Serov, and Vrubel in the same rooms the fourteen had left.

What they were refusing

To feel the size of the refusal you have to know what the Imperial Academy of Arts was. It was not a school in the modern sense. It was a total institution. Boys entered as children, boarded in dormitories of forty or fifty on cabbage soup and kasha, and climbed a ladder of medals that could take fifteen years. Every rung was earned. Prints first, then the plaster casts in sequence, then the evening life class, then paint, begun in monochrome grisaille before any color was allowed. The summit was the Large Gold Medal, and the summit came with an ordeal. Finalists were locked in separate workshops for twenty-four hours to fix a compositional sketch, bound to that sketch by the Council, then given up to a year to paint it. Winning made you an Artist of the First Degree and sent you abroad, to Italy or France, for as many as six years at the state's expense.

So the fourteen were not walking out of a class. They were walking away from the one clear road to a career, at the final gate, having already climbed the whole ladder to reach it. That is the weight behind the date.

The quarrel was about the subject. The assigned theme was mythological, remote from anything the students saw in the Russia around them. And they had taken in the argument, running through the criticism of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, that art owed something to contemporary life. So they asked for the freedom to choose their own programme. When the Council held the subject fixed, refusing it meant refusing the prize, and refusing the prize meant leaving. All fourteen signed. Kramskoy spoke for them.

The commune that paid its own way

Leaving with nothing is easy to romanticize and hard to survive, so the first thing Kramskoy did was solve the money. In the aftermath he organized the St. Petersburg Artel of Artists, a labor commune that ran from 1863 until 1871, its charter formally approved in 1865. The charter is plain about what it was for: "by joint efforts to establish and secure one's material situation and to get a venue to sell our works to the public," and to "accept commissions for art production of all kind." This was a business built to keep painters alive outside the state, not a manifesto.

It worked like one, too. The Artel rented a large apartment on Vasilyevsky Island with three workshops where several members could paint at once. Kramskoy was elected foreman, Alexei Korzukhin treasurer. And income was pooled by rule: each member paid ten percent of anything he sold on his own, and twenty-five percent of any commission the group took together, into a common fund. The fund covered the rent and the lean months. Underneath the accounting sat one unwritten principle that mattered more than any of it. There was to be a complete break from the Academy, and no member was to accept individual honors from the institution they had left.

The Artel also taught, though not with a curriculum. Its education was the thing that happens when serious people share a room. Kramskoy ran open figure-drawing evenings on Thursdays from 1863 to 1868, at the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists. The sessions drew as many as fifty people, painters and writers and composers among them, to work from a model and argue. The training was the argument as much as the model.

What finally broke the Artel was the principle it was founded on. When one member accepted special patronage from the Academy, Kramskoy read it as a betrayal of the founding rule and asked the others to take a stand. They would not. He left in November 1870, and the commune dissolved soon after. But by then the next structure was already standing.

Taking the pictures to the country

The Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, the Peredvizhniki, was founded in 1870 and formally registered on 2 November of that year, led by Kramskoy alongside Grigoriy Myasoyedov, Nikolai Ge, and Vasily Perov. The Artel had solved how realist painters could live. The Wanderers solved where their work could be seen. And the answer they chose was the whole country.

The idea was a mobile exhibition. Instead of waiting for the public to come to St. Petersburg, the society sent its shows out to the provinces, building an art market the Academy did not control. Between 1871 and 1923 they mounted forty-eight of these traveling exhibitions. One rule did most of the commercial work. A painter could only show new pictures that had not been exhibited elsewhere, which kept every stop fresh and every show a reason to buy a ticket.

There was still no school with a set course, no medal ladder, no locked-room sketch. The Wanderers' teaching ran instead through members who took posts at established institutions, above all the more democratic Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. There Perov, Vasily Polenov, and Vladimir Makovsky each taught a new generation of realists. The system the fourteen had refused was hierarchical and closed. The one they built in its place was a market and a mentorship, decentralized and mobile.

The teacher inside the walls

Here is where the story stops being a clean fight between rebels and institution, because the most consequential change in Russian painting after 1863 happened inside the Academy, not outside it. His name was Pavel Chistyakov, and he became a professor at the Imperial Academy in 1872, nine years after the walkout.

Chistyakov taught a method, not a manner. He worked from the general to the particular, built every drawing on the underlying structure of the form, insisted on the planes analyzed from nature and the unskippable sequence, and asked first for the whole impression before any detail. It was rigorous in the old academic way and open in a new one, because it trained how to see rather than what to make. And the roll of students who passed through his studio is close to the whole summit of the era: Repin, Surikov, Polenov, Viktor Vasnetsov, Valentin Serov, and Mikhail Vrubel.

The measure of the man is that his best students kept coming back after they no longer had to. Ilya Repin had come to the Academy from poverty. He failed the entrance exam in 1863, the same year as the revolt, passed in 1864, and studied without paying a kopeck. In 1871 he won the Large Gold Medal, the exact prize the fourteen had walked away from. Even after that, he and Polenov went back to Chistyakov for drawing lessons. Chistyakov told it with dry pride: "Polenov, Repin, after completing the course at the Academy, took drawing lessons from me. That is, they learned to draw a plaster ear and the head of Apollo." Two gold-medal painters, back at the casts, on purpose.

Vrubel put the feeling of it plainly. He remembered his years with Chistyakov as "the brightest ones in his artistic life," and he explained why in a sentence that is really about seeing: "When I started classes with Chistyakov, I liked his main provisions very much, because they were nothing more than a formula for my living attitude to nature." The Academy the fourteen defied had, within a decade, grown the teacher who would train the painters who justified it.

Why the refusal still reads clearly

The neat version of 1863, brave students against a dead institution, does not survive the details, and it is better for that. Many of the leading Wanderers had been Academy-trained. Their method owed a great deal to an Academy professor. Several of them, Repin and Makovsky among them, went on to teach at the reformed Academy themselves. The revolt did not destroy the institution. It forced a conversation the institution eventually had with itself.

What the fourteen actually proved was narrower and more durable than a slogan. They showed that painters could refuse a subject handed down from above, walk out of the only official system, and still make a living and a body of work, by pooling risk in a commune and taking their pictures to the people who would look at them. That is the whole content of the date. The Academy went on making painters, better ones, through Chistyakov. The refusal went on meaning that you did not have to accept the Academy's terms to become one.

FAQ

What was the Revolt of the Fourteen? On 9 November 1863, fourteen of the Imperial Academy of Arts' top students, led by Ivan Kramskoy, refused to compete for the Large Gold Medal on the assigned mythological subject, The Entrance of Odin into Valhalla, after the Council denied their request to choose their own subjects. They resigned together, giving up the funded years abroad the prize carried, and founded the Artel of Artists. The walkout is the conventional starting point of organized Russian realism.

What was the Artel of Artists? A cooperative commune of painters that Kramskoy organized after the 1863 walkout, running from 1863 to 1871 with its charter approved in 1865. Members shared a rented workshop building on Vasilyevsky Island and pooled income, paying ten percent of independent sales and twenty-five percent of joint commissions into a common fund. It dissolved after a member accepted Academy patronage, which Kramskoy read as breaking the group's founding independence.

What were the Wanderers? The Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions, founded in 1870, which sent exhibitions of realist painting out to the Russian provinces instead of waiting for audiences to come to the capital. Between 1871 and 1923 the society mounted forty-eight traveling shows, and a rule that only unexhibited new work could appear kept each one fresh. It built an independent art market outside the Academy's control.

How did the Academy respond to the revolt? Not by collapsing, but by renewing itself from inside. In 1872 Pavel Chistyakov became a professor and built a method of drawing, from the general structure of the form outward, that trained Repin, Surikov, Serov, Vrubel, and much of the next generation. Several Wanderers, including Repin, later taught at the reformed Academy. The institution the fourteen defied grew the teacher who answered them.

The line from Chistyakov's studio out through his students is drawn in full on the Teaching Line, the atlas map of who taught whom.