Contemporary Painting
a mime or a clown. A more sincere, enthusiastic artist can hardly be found. But, unfortunately, his sincerity and enthusiasm are misplaced. When one admires Malyutin's amusing fancy, his sense of colour, his true artistic character, one regrets that all these high qualities are absolutely distorted and maimed by a wholly wrong theory, which is deeply rooted in the artist's mind; namely, that the fundamental principle of the Old-Russian æsthetics is coarseness, absurdity, puerility, and superficiality. For many years Malyutin has been obstinately sticking to his "truly Russian" attitude, to this traditional manner of botching up, doing things at random. This feature in a talented, and naturally very delicate painter can be accounted for only by the general morbid state of our culture.
The same discouraging feature mars the art of another admirable Moscow painter—Golovin. He is one of the richest colourists of modern Russian art, less original, but perhaps more delicate than Vrubel. Golovin's favourite colour gamut, light, silvery, with fascinating streaks of fresh, vernal green, hazy azure, and patrician red, fascinates like soft music. But this music flows on not in the finished form of lucid accords or clear strains, but as an elemental, confused roar. Golovin's art is like a hint at a fascinating but veiled beauty.
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