‘The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living’. Socrates
Created against a backdrop of revolution and war, the art of Alexey Kravchenko (1889-1940) draws you in perhaps because against the odds it reflects a tangible aura of calm acceptance and gratitude for life reflected through the artist’s ability to capture on paper and canvas the simple beauty of everything he saw. It is as if confronting reality, Kravchenko looked inside himself, rather than turn to the popular ideologies of the day, to find his own personal answers on how to live through what was a time of great social change. His was a busy, active life as artist and father, traveller and chronicler of his times focussing on the everyday within big historical events where he preferred to observe rather than pass judgement. Leafing through on screen the family’s photographic archive from the era (Kravchenko was also an amateur photographer) is a journey of discovery in itself. There are family photographs mixed in with images of war, of exotic travel, steamships, early Soviet industrial construction sites, and of Kravchenko’s studio and dacha at Nikolina Gora outside Moscow which I have been fortunate enough to visit several times in the past.
Kravchenko designed the family dacha himself in the 1930s and there he and his wife Ksenia Stepanova created a domestic idyll for family and work which reflected their multicultural background: they both spoke Ukrainian, often the language of choice at home, and the Kravchenko family were descended from Zaporizhian Cossacks and he in turn was named People’s Artist of Soviet Ukraine.
Despite the warm domesticity of life at Nikolina Gora, Kravchenko travelled continuously. There was the odyssey of the artist as young man through Greece and Italy, where he met and impressed Ilya Repin (1844-1930) and many years later his travels through the Far East, in 1913-14 by steamship from Odessa to Ceylon and India, which he describes in his letters back to his mother in Saratov. There were numerous other trips and expeditions throughout his life where he would collect material for his art or stage exhibitions of his work, from the North of Russia, the Crimea, France, Germany, New York, Kiev, the Donbas, Nizhni Novgorod, Tbilisi, the Baltics and the Caucasus.
