What Is Truth? Christ and Pilate

Що є істина? Христос і Пілат

Year1890

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions233 × 171 cm

LocationTretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Painted over his earlier canvas Mercy, this is Ge's most notorious late work: a shadowed, exhausted Christ confronted by a Pilate standing in full light. Its refusal of any idealised Saviour outraged church and academy alike and the picture was withdrawn from exhibition.

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About the Artist

Mykola Ge

1831–1894

Mykola Ge (1831-1894) was a painter of Franco-Ukrainian descent, a leading figure of the Peredvizhniki generation and a radical reinterpreter of biblical subjects. From 1876 until his death he lived on the khutir Ivanivskyi in Chernihiv gubernia, where he painted Ukrainian landscapes and peasants alongside his late Passion cycle.

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Movements

Realism

Realism is an artistic movement that sought to depict reality as accurately and objectively as possible, holding that the purpose of art is to reflect all aspects of existence, rather than merely its idealized representation. The term was introduced by the French literary critic Jules Champfleury in the 1850s to denote art that opposed Romanticism and Academicism. In the visual arts, the significance of Realism as a style is quite controversial, and its boundaries are undefined. In a narrower sense, realism is understood as positivism, a movement in the visual arts of the second half of the 19th century. One of the first realists was the French artist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who opened his solo exhibition “The Pavilion of Realism” in Paris in 1855. Before him, artists of the Barbizon School—Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Jules Breton—worked in a realistic style. In the 1870s, realism split into two main movements: naturalism and impressionism. In contemporary painting, realism borders on the grotesque and anti-glamour.

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Also part of

Existentialism

Related Works

1870

Portrait of the Historian Mykola Kostomarov

Ge's portrait of Mykola Kostomarov, the Ukrainian historian and Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood member who had taught him at the First Kyiv Gymnasium. Critics have long counted it, with the Saltykov-Shchedrin portrait, among his most intellectually charged likenesses.

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1890

Dawn. Khutir Ivanivskyi

High-resolution, unwatermarked alternative from the same Khutir Ivanivskyi landscape series, in case the watermarked 500 px 'Moonlit Night' is unusable.

public-domain

1893

Portrait of Nataliia Petrunkevych

One of Ge's last works, painted at Ivanivskyi: the daughter of his Chernihiv neighbours stands reading by an open window with the twilight garden behind her. The full-length format and the dissolving green half-light make it the most lyrical portrait of his Ukrainian years.

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Moonlit Night

A nocturne painted at Ge's own khutir Ivanivskyi in Chernihiv gubernia, sometimes catalogued as Moonlit Night. Farmstead. It belongs to the small group of Ukrainian landscapes in which the moralist of the Passion cycle let himself work as a pure romantic of light.

public-domain