Christ in the Wilderness, Ivan Kramskoi. 1872. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
I’m not Christian, nor have I ever been, but I have a life-long obsession with this painting. On a screen like this it’s nothing like seeing it in person; after I first saw it, it must have been the late 80′s – I kept asking my grandfather to take me to Tretyakovka so I could see it again. I couldn’t say it’s why I wanted to go again – my grandparents would have found that weird – but they weren’t going to argue with “kid wants to go to the museum”. The main building of the gallery was closed for reconstruction at the time, so the painting was not where I ended up seeing it on return trips to Moscow in the 00′s. I don’t actually remember what it was exhibited near on any of the visits; it was all by itself on a back wall in ‘05 and I just sat there on the bench across from it probably for a good 40 minutes, even though I’d already been to Tretyakovka and had already seen it on the very same trip to Moscow, because it seemed like a good place to meet a relative I’d previously never met.
I keep looking at him now, thinking he’d know just just what to tell me – not any abstract Christ, but this man, this tired, worn man, with too much behind him and not enough ahead of him, alone in the desert, dust on his calloused feet, the hem of his robes, decidedly not divine in this moment, but painfully, horribly human, on the precipice of an impossible decision.
Then I tell myself to stop being a pretentious fuck, but I don’t think he minds.
Dude, this is great
that’s the face of a man fighting a losing battle
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