ART REVIEW : Leonid Pasternak, Family Man and Artist

The Pasternak family must have looked forward to cozy evenings in their Moscow home, reading and sewing and playing the piano while daddy crept around with a sketchbook, trying to catch everyone unawares.

Daddy was Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, a teacher at the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Drawing. His sketches from the early decades of this century--on view, with a selection of his other work, at the Modern Museum of Art in Santa Ana through Sept. 25--show him to be at heart a family man.

Pasternak’s crayon lovingly traces the bare rounded shoulders and a slack, full cheek of dreamy 11-year-old Boris, capturing the vulnerable awkwardness of a child’s posture. (Years later, this dreamy son would write “Doctor Zhivago.”)

In a chalk drawing, the two daughters sit side by side in different worlds, lost in books in a corner of lamplight. In another image, daughter Josephine’s dark braid slaps forward as she pushes a needle through a soft white cloth. And here is Pasternak’s wife Rosalia playing the piano for her rapt young audience. One small sketch lingers on a toy bear resting against a pillow.

Married to a former concert pianist and the father of four children, Pasternak found some of his most endearing subjects close to home. But he was also deeply involved with the cultural scene of his day. His friendship with the leading Russian artists--a group known as the “Itinerants”--brought him into contact with other key members of the intelligentsia, and Rosalia provided introductions to important figures on the music scene.

Organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, “A Russian Impressionist: Paintings and Drawings by Leonid Pasternak, 1890-1945” introduces an artist whose major claim on our attention is the vanished milieu conjured up in his work.

It is a world seen from the inside out, with even famous folk like the renowned opera singer Feodor Chaliapin and the composer Sergei Rachmaninov glimpsed either in private moments or from the perspective of someone obviously well-acquainted with their public selves.

Chief among these figures is Leo Tolstoy. In 1893 the 65-year-old novelist met the 31-year-old artist at an Itinerants exhibit. Pasternak had already been commissioned by a magazine to do illustrations for an edition of “War and Peace” but was too awed to try to communicate with the celebrated author. Happily, Tolstoy was pleased--so much so that he later asked Pasternak to illustrate “Resurrection,” the crankily Christian novel of his old age.

None of these illustrations are included in the present exhibit, but Tolstoy the man makes several appearances. Unlike the famous life-size portrait by leading realist Ilya Efimvich Repin, which shows the bearded writer barefoot in the woods of his country estate--a contemplative giant in peasant garb--Pasternak’s Tolstoy is a grandfatherly, retiring fellow.

In an undated painting that suffers from an uncertain mixture of different kinds of brush strokes, as if Pasternak were nervously toying with his style in an effort to measure up to the master, lamplight illuminates a view of the author’s family sitting around a table. Tolstoy is tucked into a far corner.

Pasternak was particularly interested in rendering what he called the “almost musical quality” that lamplight lends a scene. His many lamplit scenes of people in deep concentration over a task or a book also suggest that Pasternak was a devotee of Rembrandt, who himself enlarged on earlier traditions with his images of studious scholars and saints shrouded in darkness. In fact, Rembrandt was Pasternak’s favorite artist. He first saw the 17th-century master’s etchings when he was a young man studying art in Munich.

A strong draftsman whose style became freer over the years, he was an essentially conservative painter. Not for him were the private language of the Symbolists and the geometric adventures of the avant-garde Russian artists, although he tried to acquaint himself with these styles.

Instead, his work largely reflects the commitment to portraying everyday life of the Russian realists who dominated the national art scene during the latter 19th Century.

A visit to Berlin in 1906 lent Pasternak’s painting a lighter touch reminiscent of German Impressionists Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann. The Germans showed him a way of loosening up his brush stroke while retaining an anecdotal character quite different from the optically analytical approach of the key French Impressionists.

Color was his major tool in urban and rural views; a surprising burst of bright red revs up the outlines of a gas storage tank on a street in Berlin and blue shadows of carmine horses pulling a sleigh below the golden-domed Kremlin churches enliven a wintry Moscow scene.

Once he got too far away from the human world he cared about, however, Pasternak’s work fell off markedly. Still lifes, sights seen on an uncomfortably rushed tour of Palestine in 1924 and a posthumous portrait of Lenin lack the warmth and passion of the scenes the artist knew best.

The Russian Revolution shook up his orderly world, and--although he “maintained a positive attitude toward the new Soviet government,” as the catalogue essay puts it--unhappiness with the radical activities of the students led him to try unsuccessfully to resign his teaching post.

Rosalia’s heart condition brought the family to Berlin again in 1921. When the rise of Nazism made life in Germany impossible for the Pasternaks, who were Jewish, they moved to England. The works in this show come from the Pasternak Trust, in Oxford, England, where the artist lived until his death in 1945 at 83.

It is good to see the Modern Museum finally looking to a solid source for exhibitions that can provide professional wall labels and a seriously researched catalogue. (This one has an essay by Alison Hilton, professor of art history at Georgetown University and a specialist in turn-of-the-century Russian art.)

But considering the museum’s much-ballyhooed intent to educate its public, there should also have been an attempt to bring Pasternak’s world into closer focus with concerts, lectures or other programs focusing on Russian cultural life in the decades before and after the Revolution. It is a juicy subject that begs to be explored.

“A Russian Impressionist: Paintings and Drawings by Leonid Pasternak, 1890-1945” remains at the Modern Museum of Art through Sept. 25. The museum, on the first floor of Griffin Towers, 5 Hutton Centre Drive, Santa Ana, is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free. Information: (714) 754-4111.