To Those Which They Never Turned Another Cheek: 

Volga Barge Haulers, Repin, 1870-1873

Fyodor Dostoyevsky admired Ilya Repin’s work from the exhibition’s walls, and immediately remarked on “barge haulers, real barge haulers, and nothing more… You can’t help but think you are indebted, truly indebted, to the people.”

The exhaustion of the eleven men pulling the barge onto the shores of the Volga River stuns viewers before they even stop to notice the coarse, unrefined brush strokes.

The deflated expressions and sagging physiques defined Repin as his time’s “master documentarian of social inequality.” The nauseating and dry burn of the midday heat offers an unsentimental depiction of lower-class laborers, something that both spited and commended the upper classes for their undeniable “lack of a heart” towards the plight of man.

As a reward for his painting, Repin joined the Peredvizhniki movement, an anti-academic movement that rebelled against polished works, striving for the portrayal of reality’s hardships just as they are. In hopes of enlightening the masses and making art accessible to all populations, the group succeeded only in infuriating all authority figures of their society.

The artistic academy abandoned all affiliations with the failed movement, deciding to just wait until the masses of Russia reject the movement for its lack of pomp.

Repin regarded the work as his first professional art in honor of the Russian realist movement. Repin revels in the feeling of aristocracy’s “unpaid debt,” hallmarking his painting as a form of beratement of the ignorant who insist on enslaving others.

Though ignorance may be bliss, Repin refused to spare the ignorant.