The vocation of Aleksey Mikhailovich Korin was determined in his early childhood. He belonged to an old family of Palekh icon painters and devoted his whole life to art. A brilliant representative of the Moscow school of painting and a member of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, Aleksey Mikhailovich expressed himself in various artistic forms with equal depth: genre, portrait and landscape painting. The artist enthusiastically engaged in fresco painting, book design, and restoration of churches and cathedrals.
Korin actively participated in exhibitions and won art competitions. His paintings received high praise from such venerable art connoisseurs as Ilya Repin and Vladimir Stasov. Korin’s remarkable painting “The Sick Artist”, shown in 1892, was acquired by Pavel Tretyakov for his collection.
Korin’s genre painting is characteristic of the “late” Wanderers (artists of the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions), who often created small-scale paintings on subjects inspired by everyday Russian life. Korin’s works, as a rule, are uniquely intimate, because the artist almost never depicted people outside the circle of his family and close friends.
The canvas “Failed Again” from the collection of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts was painted by Korin shortly after his successful graduation from the school. The work of the young artist was first exhibited in 1891 at the 19th Traveling Exhibition, where he made a successful debut.
The painting shows a scene from the life of a poor urban family, whose hope, the future breadwinner, has failed yet another exam at the gymnasium. The artist sympathetically depicted a lanky gymnasium student standing with a guilty look, his desperate mother’s face and a younger sister carelessly drawing. Much attention in the picture is paid to the details of a modest setting, where each object has its own place and carries a certain message. The poses, gestures, and facial expressions — everything is employed to reveal the complex mental state of the characters. Especially impressive is the image of the mother, totally immersed in her sad thoughts. The expressive image of the woman is based on the artist’s mother-in-law, Alexandra Flegontovna Ammosova.
Korin managed to create a special mood, an atmosphere of intense silence that precedes further events, through a realistic, soft depiction and a subtle color palette. The composition, “staged” by the painter and constructed on the principle of mise-en-scène, turns the picture into a kind of pictorial novella.
