Slaughterhouse (Russian: Бойня) is a painting by the Russian, Soviet and American artist Nicolai Fechin. Art historians believe that the canvas was created in Kazan and that work on it began in 1904, but they differ on when Fechin stopped working (1916, the mid-1910s, 1919, or even the early 1920s). The painting belongs to the collection of the State Art Museum of Tatarstan in Kazan and is exhibited in the permanent exhibition of the Nicolai Fechin Hall of the Khazine National Art Gallery.Монографический зал Николая Фешина. Государственный музей изобразительных искусств Республики Татарстан. Accessed 7 December 2018.
Slaughterhouse is a rare genre painting in Fechin's oeuvre. It is one of only four of his large-scale works. Art historians identify him and his father in the figures on the canvas, and the canvas itself is associated not only with the young Fechin's expedition to the Yenisey Range, but also with the bloody events of the First World War or the Russian Civil War, which coincided with his maturity. Researchers are analyzing in detail Fechin's composition, color solution and painting technique.
From the art historians' point of view, the process of Fechin's work on the painting Slaughterhouse was interesting: he created three-dimensional images of animals and butchers as models – sketches for the painting; the few surviving sketches for it are abstract compositions – "a whirlwind of strokes and lines that only remotely resemble real images".
Representation A bull has been slaughtered, and a group of slaughterhouse workers of various ages are preparing to skin the carcass. According to Russian art historian Galina Tuluzakova, the action of the painting takes place indoors, as the sky is visible only in the upper left part of the painting.
In the foreground, a bull lies on the ground with its throat slit. The cold turquoise color of the eye against the bloody background gives the picture, in the words of the Soviet art historian Peter Dulsky, "a sharp eeriness". Two butchers bend over the bull. Their movements are confident and unhurried. In the background, a slaughterhouse worker drags another stubborn animal with a rope. Further to the right, a worker is skinning a hanging carcass. To the left of the carcass, behind it, is a worker dressed in a butcher's uniform with an apron. This attire does not conform to Jewish ritual (which, according to Peter Dulsky, is what Fechin chose to depict). This worker carefully wipes the blade of his knife. At the left edge of the foreground are the journeyman boys (one with his back to the viewer, the other full-face). They are playing with a bull's bladder (probably blowing it up) without paying attention to what is happening.
The upper part of the painting depicts hot air vapors through which bright patches of sky can be seen. In the same plan, a worker is holding out his hand and shouting, and another is dragging a bull to slaughter. Tuluzakova believed that Fechin gave this figure features of his own appearance. The butcher standing next to him holds a knife at the height of his chest, which the researcher took as a symbol.
History of the painting
Place in Fechin's œuvre The Russian art historian Galina Tuluzakova tried to determine the place of the painting Slaughterhouse in Fechin's creative development. His first stage (from Homeless Man to Full Victory and Exit from the Factory) – the assimilation of Fechin's subjects and the stylistics of the Peredvizhniki; the mature period of his work (from Bearing Away the Bride to Slaughterhouse), "due to external circumstances" did not continue, demonstrates the emotional intensity of canvases, "naked, nervous, on the verge of hysterical outbreak of feelings". In her opinion, the "climax" of this stage was the painting . In this second creative stage, Fechin intensified the compositional dynamics by "external movement of the figures" and "formal methods". His most "expressionist" painting in terms of form and content is Slaughterhouse, which "eliminates the contradiction between the plot and its interpretation, where the feeling of life 'as it is' is full of tragedy and tears".
Tuluzakova considered the domestic genre to be the key genre of this stage of Fechin's development. In her opinion, his goal was not visible nature, but a way of expressing his attitude to the world, "the understanding of deep, essential processes of being". The domestic genre provided an opportunity to "sharpen the images", "use the techniques of the grotesque" at the sensitive and intuitive levels. Tuluzakova concluded that exaggeration and the grotesque "seem closer to a sober view of the reality of life than to a photographically accurate fixation of the moment".By “photographically accurate capture of the moment” Tuluzakova in this case understood the portrait genre. Rejecting a one-dimensional approach that combined the beautiful and the ugly, Fechin asserted the equality of the content and formal aspects of works. He drew from tradition, but freely interpreted composition and colorism, treating the painting as a "decorative whole". According to Tuluzakova, this led to the "fusion of plans" in this creative period, "the rejection of aerial perspective, the combination of silhouette and volumetric principles in the construction of form, the search for a variety of possibilities in working with texture and color, experimentation with purely technical methods", each fragment of the composition of the picture was understood by the artist as a "complete aesthetic whole". She attributed Fechin's works of this period to the "expressive-grotesque line" in the history of Russian art of the early 20th century, which also included paintings by Filip Malyavin, Boris Grigoriev, and Pavel Filonov. In her opinion, Fechin was less concerned with social problems than with "the element of national character". She characterized his genre compositions as "folk and everyday" (as opposed to "social and popular").
Dmitry Seryakov, a Russian researcher of Fechin's work, drew attention in his doctoral dissertation to the fact that Fechin, despite all his artistic activity, created only four major genre works, two of them in his student days (Bearing Away the Bride and Kapustnitsa), one not completed (Pouring), and only Slaughterhouse created in the period of maturity. In his opinion, he "clearly felt the artistic principles outlined earlier and found their logical development in Slaughterhouse", but "in a slightly different way than in his previous paintings". He also emphasized in this canvas "the expressiveness, the expansive writing, the revealing freedom and even a certain spontaneity of the creative act in the manner of painting, the ultimate generalization of details".
Fechin's work In 1920, Fechin presented the unfinished canvas Slaughterhouse for the first time at the State Exhibition of Paintings in Kazan. It made a strong impression on the audience with its plot. The art historian and publisher Peter Dulsky, who was acquainted with Fechin at the Kazan Art School, wrote in an essay on Fechin's life and work that the canvas was conceived as long before as 1904, when he made a trip to the South Yenisey Range (Dmitry Seriakov assumed that the source of Dulsky's knowledge about the creation of the picture could be a story of Fechin himself). At that time, Fechin was part of an expedition to explore this region, led by the mining engineer Nicolai Izhitsky. Fechin later recalled that it was Izhitsky, who was "fascinated" by Siberia, who took the initiative for the trip. Izhitsky persuaded him to join the expedition. "These days, spent in the untouched beauty of Siberia, remained one of the most memorable and happiest in my life", recalled Fechin years later. Ekaterina Kliuchevskaya, a student of art history, wrote that the "binding" of genre painting to a specific geographical point was characteristic of Fechin's work. As an example she cited the painting Bearing Away the Bride, where the action takes place in the village of Morki Tsarevokokokshaisky uyezd of Kazan province, and other works of his.
In the taiga, Fechin saw several times how local people slaughtered cattle. The cattle were driven to special fenced meadows surrounded by ravines. The slaughter was done in the open. The animal was caught with a harness, then tied by the horns with a rope and dragged to a place where waiting workers stunned it, knifed it and made it bleed. The animals roared and struggled, creating a gruesome image that was enhanced by the considerable amount of blood under the feet of the slaughterhouse workers. Dulsky believed that Fechin was impressed by the "coloristic data of the peculiarities of this motif" and the "mental acuity" of the scene he had seen, "which were embedded in the artist's memory". Dulsky wrote that Fechin was most influenced by the large amount of blood and its brightness due to its exposure to " the oxygen of the air. He wanted to create a scene such that the bright effects of the spilling blood would be the focus of the viewer's attention. That is why, according to Dulsky, he chose as his subject the Jewish method of slaughtering cattle, in which the animal, lying on the ground with its hooves tied together, has its throat cut with a knife.
According to Dulsky, Fechin began to work on the subject of the massacre in 1905, but limited himself to sketches for his future painting. The artist Alexander Lyubimov, who studied at the Kazan Art School from 1914 to 1918 and was in close contact with Fechin at that time, wrote in his Memories that in 1915–1916 he exhibited in the Kazan Museum sketches of boys' heads for the painting Slaughterhouse. According to him, they were made in the technique of "wood carving". In the Kazan period, Fechin often used sculptural models as studies for pictorial compositions. For example, Galina Tuluzakova mentioned volumetric figures of bulls for Slaughterhouse (1910s).The place is unknown, only a photographic reproduction of it has survived – NA GMII RT, f. 4, OP. 1, ed. xr. 2 / 671).
The Russian Soviet "new peasant poet" and artist, the last chairman of the Peredvizhniki Society and the first chairman of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, Pavel Radimov, recalled that in the early years of his acquaintance with Fechin, the latter showed him a set of sketches of twelve of his works. Among them was Slaughterhouse. Radimov wrote that Fechin later created his canvases on the basis of these sketches. Tuluzakova in her dissertation mentioned the drawing Boy (sketch for Slaughterhouse), created by Fechin in 1912, presumably with charcoal on paper, but noted that its location was unknown until 1998. This drawing was published in a biographical sketch by Peter Dulsky.Tuluzakova mistakenly wrote that this reproduction is in Dulsky's book between pages 20 and 21, in fact, in this place there is a reproduction of the painting Slaughterhouse itself.
According to Dulsky, Fechin began to work on the painting itself only in 1912 and continued until 1916. In a letter to Valery Loboykov dated February 16, 1916, which contains his autobiography for his upcoming candidacy for Academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts, Fechin wrote that he was working on two large canvases. Art historians believe that these canvases were Pouring and Slaughterhouse.