Avrahm Yarmolinsky

“ Repin's early artistic efforts show unmistakably the influence of this artistic movement. In fact, he is the foremost of the "Wanderers." He has never been able to understand the modern tendency to reduce painting to sheer effects of colors and design; to his mind, art must interpret life and respond to its moral clashes. But Repin was too sensitive a painter to disregard completely the purely pictorial effects of his art, and too great an artist to play on the surface of things without attempting to seize the deeper and more lasting aspects of reality. ”

“ Only very recently Repin exhibited a canvas depicting the scenes which took place on the Petrograd streets on October 17, 1905, the memorable day when the ill-fated Russian constitution was granted to the land.
In this painting Repin demonstrated again that consummate artistic skill in handling a seething, crowding, swarming mass of humanity, which makes him a great painter of gregariousness. But he is also a remarkable portraitist, initiated into the mystery of what forms the individuality of a human being and able to seize the most characteristic expression of a human face. ”

“ The Bulgarian campaign cycle must be considered as the high-water mark of Vereshchagin's genius. Pictures like "The Graves at Shipka", and "Blessing the Dead" arouse an almost eery feeling which is created by an art so close to life that the border-line between them is well-nigh obliterated. At the same time these pictures are all a-quiver with most human pathos and with a passionate, Isaiah-like protest against the evil doings of men. ”

“ Vereshchagin's canvases, like so many other spiritual citadels of mankind, have so far proved powerless against the hosts of evil. Yet it is true that the paintings of the great Russian artist are a protest, unequalled in pathos and power, against the horrors of war, a silent sermon written in colors, a most tragic "De Profundis" born of a great mind. ”

“ These uncouth creatures, cast together by fate from all corners of the vast country, and pulling at the line in the glare of day, form a gloomy human mosaic indeed, and tell a truly Russian tale of woe and suffering. ”

“ No living artist has contributed more toward the making of a Russian school of painting than Ilia Yefimovich Repin, "the Samson of the Russian painters," as someone has called him. No name is more intimately connected with the destinies of the fine arts in Russia for the last two score years. Repin's magnificent art is, both in matter and manner, preeminently national and racial ”

“ Yet he was not a cold photographer, for back of all his work there is a measureless human pathos, which is the very vis vivida of his paintings. Of late, Russian critics of the modernist school have shown a tendency to undervalue Vereshchagin's art, on the plea that his work is deficient in color and design. In fact, aesthetes have every reason to dislike Vereshchagin. He was utterly indifferent to the problems of pure æstheticism; his art is art for life's sake, art intended to serve a great humanitarian purpose. ”

“ One is the "Apotheosis of War," a pyramid of human skulls, broken and maimed, amidst the naked desert, with a flock of carrion crows perched on it,—a work dantesque and tragic; it is ironically dedicated "To all great conquerors, past, present, and to come." ”

“ In speaking of these portraits, Prince Bodijar Karageorgevich remarks: "The genius of the painter interprets the genius of the poet, and the calm and simple picture dwells in the high places of memory of those who have looked upon it, in the lofty sphere where the beautiful alone is loved and cherished."
One of the peculiarities of Russian realism in art, says Alexander Benois, is the weakness that the adepts of painting based on observation, have for historical subjects. This applies directly to Repin. ”

“ Carried away by the civic ardor and humanitarianism which was in the very air of the sixties, the "Wanderers" did not hesitate to sacrifice the artistic effects peculiar to their art, in the interests of the propaganda of progressive ideas. ”