Nikolai Ge: An Anthropology of Horror

Abstract

This article explores the legacy of the outstanding Russian artist Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge. The author explores a key theme in his work, which revolves around the image of Christ. Nikolai Ge is a prophetic artist who, while achieving success in genre, landscape, and portrait painting, consciously transcends the boundaries of social and aesthetic statements in art to what he calls “universal“. For Ge, painting becomes a preaching of an anthropological ideal. The author compares Ge's relatively early painting ”The Last Supper”with his later series of paintings on the theme of the Crucifixion, demonstrating that while in the former, the artist sought to convey to the viewer the idea of ​​an existential confrontation between two approaches to truth, in the latter, Ge offers a revelation about man. By shifting the emphasis in the Crucifixion to the thief crucified next to Christ and repenting, Ge uses pictorial means to express the truth that man is constitutively connected to God. For N. Ge, God is not an abstract ideal, but a concrete, living God who made a sacrifice for humanity. Man attains his true identity at the moment when he experiences communion with God. For the artist, this experience of conversion is associated with horror. Horror is the transition point from self-forgetfulness to the discovery of one's inner self. The article examines the connection between N. Ge's painting and iconography and 20th-century painting.