Physicality in the works of Stepan Erzia (1876–1959)

Abstract

The attempts to understand the art of S. Erzia, based on the complex circumstances of his life, are unconvincing. Erzia’s skills were formed on the basis of the Italian Renaissance tradition, European Neoclassicism, and, partly, impressionism. He did not accept the principles of social realism. Erzia was an excellent master of marble, and later became the only master in the world who could work with the hard wood of the Argentine forests. The relevance of the research lies in the novel approach to the sculptor’s creativity. The idea is that the sculptor’s creativity depends on the discovery of new expressive possibilities of a human body, embodied in the physicality of indoor and monumental sculptures. Erzia significantly updated the iconography of images that were well-established in the history of art. These conclusions are based on the methods of proper art history analysis and phenomenological approach. Among the works that deserve special attention are those that he himself sought to preserve and which he brought to Russia on his return from Argentina. These are the monumental portraits of Alexander Nevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Beethoven, Michelangelo, and Moses. For Erzia they were the spiritual leaders of humanity, its heroes. The symbols of eternal femininity for Erzia are the Mother Eve and the girl-nymph, whose physicality embodied the ideas of Argentines about beauty. The unique portraits of Mordovian and Russian peasants, in their ethnic expressiveness, enshrine the memory of Russia. The sculptor has repeatedly embodied telluric powers and the mysticism of the Selva in his works. Perhaps this is why he so much valued the natural features of wood as a material. Not only its density and color, but even the knurrs on the bark and roots were his no less valuable artistic means. Over the time, Erzia’s sculpture shows more and more clearly the emotional excess inherent in the culture of Latin Americans and the features of transcultural inversion.