Barge Haulers on the Volga

Judged figure by figure. The leader at the head of the line cannot go: the gang’s weight lands first on his chest, and his face, lifted and calm, is the picture’s intelligence. The boy in the middle cannot go: he is the one figure not yet bent, and the frieze turns on him. The last man, head hanging, nearly dropping out of the line, cannot go: he is where the gang ends and the load begins. The barge cannot go, nor the steamer’s smoke, which makes the men an anachronism already being superseded. What yields is in the middle of the file, two or three men whose types repeat rather than add, and the empty bank at the right. The width is compelled: the line must be long to be a line.

Score: 8.4 / 10

What is disclosed can be stated. Human beings are here a means of traction, harnessed as draught animals, and the harness is the shape of their lives; yet each is a person, and a different one, so that the picture refuses the abstraction on which the work it shows depends. A second disclosure: the men are not posed to plead. They endure, they talk, one looks out at the viewer. The condition holds outside the Russia of the 1870s, wherever bodies are spent as power and the spending is invisible to those it serves. Held just below the gate because part of the meaning had already been said in Russian, in Nekrasov’s lines on the groan of the Volga, and because the picture names no cause: it shows the condition and leaves offstage the order that makes it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The elevation is real and of one kind: the gravity of endurance under a bleaching sky, the line of men advancing like a slow wave, the boy’s head rising out of the bowed file into the light. The width and the heat give it weight, and the group has the mass of a monument made of the people a monument would never show. But it rises in one place and holds one register. There is no transport, no terror, and little beauty in the sky or the river, which are flat and pale by design; the grandeur is moral more than aesthetic. Height is solid and frequency low, and the figure sits above a cabinet delight and well below a sky that burns in five places.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Built in one structure, evoked elsewhere. The built structure is the procession of the yoked: a file of men bound to one strap and one load, coming toward the viewer and never arriving, which carries the archetype of the condemned at their labour, the Sisyphean load, the chain gang. Within it the ages of man are laid out in order along the line: the boy in the middle, the grown men around him, the old and the broken at the rear. The particulars stay particular, faces, rags, a red shirt. The river as Russia, the steamer as the coming age, and the haulers in the guise of apostles are summoned, not built; the readings that make the leader a philosopher or a saint are brought to him from outside.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is the Imperial Academy’s history painting, the wide format and the large figure group reserved for scripture, myth and the state, which Repin had just mastered. The departure: that format given to the lowest labour on the river, a peasant gang painted with the gravity of a history, in plein-air light rather than studio brown. The departure was real but not unprecedented: Courbet’s The Stone Breakers of 1849 and the Russian genre painting of Perov had already turned to labour and the poor, and the Wanderers began exhibiting in 1871. The stake was moderate. Academic hostility is reported, but its words cannot be checked, and the picture was shown at once in Saint Petersburg. This is the lowest of the five gated axes: a sharpening of a path already opening.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Substitute a different form and much goes. The frieze, more than twice as wide as tall, is the knowledge: a line, a strap, a load, read left to right and back again, so that the eye’s passage along the men repeats their labour. The diagonal from the barge at the rear right to the leader at the front left gives the advance and its slowness. Painting holds the faces at once and side by side, every person in one instant, which a poem could not give together and a photograph of the period, with its long exposures, could not have caught in the pull. The pale light is the heat, and the heat is the cost. Held below the top because the content could be carried, with loss, in a smaller canvas of the same arrangement, and because the landscape is a setting more than an instrument.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: 153 years, and a reception that has turned several times. Praised in 1873 as protest or as epic, with Stasov’s championing and Dostoevsky’s reading against tendency pulling in opposite directions; made in Soviet schooling the emblem of tsarist exploitation; reread since as a gallery of individuals, as an image of Russian endurance, and as a picture whose reproduction outran its looking. The open questions are real: protest or epic; whether the boy is hope or the next victim; whether the steamer means rescue or obsolescence. The faces reward return. Held well below the top because the central meaning is agreed, the debate turns on the picture’s ideological frame more than on depths in the image, and the literature outside Russian is thin.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is Russian painting of the 1870s, and force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas made the people at their labour a subject fit for the scale and seriousness of history painting, and did so with a portraitist’s individuation that the genre painting before it lacked; it is the founding large statement of Russian critical realism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach is very large, in Repin’s own career, in the Wanderers’ painting of the people and the whole school’s turn to the large realist canvas, and later, discounted for distortion, in its adoption as an ancestor by Soviet socialist realism. Outside Russia its reach in painting is small; it redirected no European school, and that holds the figure below the gate.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 153 years. Form: whole. The image is the image the painter made, and no part of what carries its meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: shown on completion in Saint Petersburg in 1873, and now in the State Russian Museum, it has passed through the revolutions and every change of regime in Russia, each of which reread it and none of which put it away. In Russia it has the widest presence a painting can have: a school image, a phrase. Outside Russia its presence is narrower, which keeps the figure a tenth below the widest of its age. Fabric: nothing is charged, since no damage is known; the conservation record is not stated.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning is in the individuation, and the individuation is drawing and painting. Each head is a portrait with its own bone, age and temper; each body leans into the strap at its own angle and with its own share of the weight, so that the load is distributed visibly along the file. The light is a plein-air light, white and dry, laid over the ochres and dun of the sand and the rags, with one accent of red at the boy’s shirt that brings the eye to the centre. The costs are charged: the arrangement is a studio construction from studies and shows a little in the evenness of the frieze; the sky and water are thin and serviceable; the group’s middle is crowded, its legs and bodies harder to read than its heads.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the old man at the rear right, head down, nearly falling out of the line, and the leader at the front left, upright and composed. One law holds them: every figure is ranked by how it bears the strap, and the strap runs through all. The same light falls on all of them and the same sand is under all their feet; the barge is the load the law names, and the steamer on the horizon is its other term, the machine whose work the men are doing. Nothing in the picture contradicts the law: no picturesque incident, no softening of the light. The range, from boy to old man, from body to machine, is wider than one figure’s state, but it holds one place, one instant and one register.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The orders held: labour, as the picture’s subject and its form; class, in the gang against the unseen owners of the barge and the viewer’s own place; the ages of a life, from the boy to the broken; the natural order, in the river and the heat; the coming of the machine, in the steamer; and the people as a nation, in the river every Russian viewer names. They are integrated by the strap and the line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, no woman, no state except as the order offstage, no history but the present instant, no consciousness beyond what the faces show. One bank and one instant hold more than most single canvases, and the figure describes a single frieze.

Score: 7.4 / 10