'I killed your fiancé' — the painter who saw himself in a forbidden demon [Lee Won-yul's Huam-dong Art Museum — Mikhail Vrubel]

Huam-dong Art Museum is the original home of extra-long cultural and arts storytelling fit for the boundless digital age. Subscribe to the reporter's feed and a new art story will arrive every weekend. Articles are written as narrative storytelling grounded in historical fact, with a measure of imagination added.

This installment runs a little longer than usual, in part because it draws on literary material. Deep thanks to every reader who stays with it to the end. Wishing you a happy Chuseok holiday.

It was late at night. An unidentifiable whisper reached the ears of Princess Tamara. "Love me instead. I will give you everything." The metallic voice came again. "Who are you? Where are you?" Was this not a dream? Tamara raised her head. Her heart began to pound. "Be calm," the voice said. Then a heavy hand settled on the blanket. "I am a demon. But please — do not be afraid. Believe only in my sincerity." Tamara wanted to scream, yet her body locked up in a way she could not explain. When she came back to her senses, morning had already arrived. There was no one in the bedroom but her. Just as the strength drained from her limbs, an urgent voice rang out from beyond the door.

"Princess! Something terrible has happened." "What is it?" "Your fiancé — he was attacked by bandits. He is dead." Tamara could neither lie back down nor stand. "Bandits?" "Yes. Bandits, but their eyes looked strange. As if they were possessed by something ... "

At that moment, the demon was on the Caucasus Mountains.

He looked down at Tamara, who had been thrown into shock — taking in her wandering gaze and the pallor of her face. The demon had come to Tamara on Thursday night. He was a fallen angel, cast out of heaven long ago for a sin he had committed, condemned to immortality under a curse: "Live out your days in solitude."

For years — perhaps centuries — the only thing left to him was to peer into the world of human beings.

Then one day, by chance, he saw Tamara. He was captivated by the sight of her dancing at a ballroom. Forgetting the curse entirely, he was seized by desire — for her body and her soul. And so he went to her, without preamble, and confessed his love. Her fiancé? Bewitching a bandit into killing him was nothing at all.

Even after that fateful night, the demon did not stop his pursuit.

He appeared to her in every realm — her dreams, her waking hours, every world she inhabited. Tamara feared him. Then, gradually, she feared him less. At some point she found herself waiting, without quite knowing why, for him to appear. One day she even hoped he would speak to her first. It was the process by which the spark of love migrated from reason to unreason. Tamara finally resolved to accept the demon's wish. She embraced him and kissed him. But in that instant, Tamara's heart stopped, as if by magic. The curse handed down from heaven — which had been lying in wait all along — had been triggered.

The demon cried out, holding Tamara's body, but the heavens were silent. He had lost love and hope once more. All he could do was weep through another endless night. This is drawn from the poem "The Demon" by Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov.

The demon climbs the Caucasus Mountains once more.

He curls in on himself at the spot where he always sits. Alone. Alone again. In a world where the sun rises and sets, flowers bloom and fall, and butterflies take flight and drop — only he remains unchanged, without blooming or fading, perpetually alone. Only he must endure the world in solitude, with no end in sight. That was the essence of his curse and his punishment.

Mikhail Vrubel captured that image in The Demon Seated.

The demon filling the canvas evokes a vast emptiness. His rigid face, powerful body and clenched hands leak the anger and frustration this being carries within. The red in the distance, the blue of his garments, the gray and green and violet scattered like shards of glass — all seem to stand in for a mind torn between struggle and resignation. The thick layers of paint built up across the surface, and the three-dimensionality carved out with a palette knife, heighten the tension further.

Yet for all that the title says "demon" and the subject is plainly a demon — Vrubel did not paint this figure as grotesque or terrifying.

He left out the horns, fangs and tail that conventionally accompany such a creature. There was a reason for that. This was, in effect, a spiritual self-portrait — one that borrowed the narrative of "The Demon" to paint the artist himself.

Artists often cast themselves as heroes — as sages, saints, or visionary geniuses ahead of their time. Vrubel did none of that. He overlaid himself onto an unredeemed being. And that being happened to be a demon. Why, of all things? His fixation on this soul had its own backstory, one rooted in the arc of his life and his vision of art.

Spring, 1885. Vrubel, then 29, was visibly wasting away. It was around that time that a story about him — one that was hard to believe — began to circulate.

The rumor was that Vrubel had grabbed hold of a woman and proposed to her out of nowhere. The woman in question was pianist Emiliya Prakhova. The problem was that she was already taken. Her husband, art historian Adrian Prakhov, had in effect been Vrubel's patron, supporting his artistic career. Yet just as the demon had done with Tamara, Vrubel had reportedly declared his love without any regard for the circumstances.

Haste always undoes things. This time was no different. Emiliya did not welcome the rumor. The more it spread, the more displeased she became. She gradually put distance between herself and Vrubel. That was the end of it. Emiliya had occasionally posed as a model for Vrubel, but it was now clear that this had been an act of goodwill — never a sign of personal affection.

Painter Konstantin Korovin once recorded in writing a conversation he had with Vrubel by a lakeside. "I made it myself." "( … ) Did you have surgery? It must have hurt." "( … ) I loved a woman. She did not love me. Or perhaps she did, but there was a great obstacle to her understanding me. ( … ) When the pain became unbearable, I inflicted pain on my own body." The exchange gives some measure of how deep the wound of his rejection by Emiliya had cut.

A being who had loved and lost everything — the demon on the Caucasus. It is not hard to see why Vrubel was drawn to him.

One question still lingers, however. Why did Vrubel project his heartbroken self not onto a human man, but specifically onto a demon? Was it simply because he loved Lermontov's poem "The Demon"? To find an answer, one must look more closely at his life and his philosophy of art.

Vrubel was born in 1856 in Omsk, in south-central Russia.

His father was a military lawyer — a relatively stable profession, though one that required the family to move whenever his unit was reassigned. His mother faithfully uprooted herself and resettled each time, following her husband. It was never easy, least of all under the biting cold of Siberia. She grew weaker with each passing year and died in 1859 of pneumonia. Years later, when Vrubel spoke of her, he would say: "Small figures cut from paper — people, horses, all manner of fantastical shapes … " She had cut paper into various forms and played with him, even while burning with fever and bedridden. His mother died when he was just three years old.

Loss did not end there for Vrubel. He also had to bury his siblings, each of whom left the world before reaching adulthood.

His father soon found a new companion. The woman who became his stepmother was also a loving person. But the boy, who had grown up with a certain boldness born of solitude, did not easily open his heart to anyone from that point on.

What captured Vrubel's attention in those years was painting, music and theater.

Drawing was where he excelled above all. It was said that after seeing a reproduction of Michelangelo Buonarroti's "The Last Judgment," he could reproduce it from memory alone, perfectly.

Vrubel enrolled at St. Petersburg University as a law student.

It was his father's wish. Predictably, he found no interest in it. He chose his own place. That place was the Imperial Academy of Arts. The year was 1880. He was 24.

At the time, Vrubel's path was somewhat unusual for a Russian painter of his generation.

He paid no attention to the movement then gaining prominence in Russia — the group known as the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers. It was an organization and a movement whose purpose was to enlighten the common people through art, traveling to every corner of the continent to hold exhibitions directly. The core of their work was painting narratives that ordinary people could readily understand: the tyranny of landlords, the sorrows of common life, and universal themes of love, parting and death. The group had attracted a considerable number of serious artists building both reputation and skill — Ivan Kramskoi at the forefront, along with Ilya Repin and Vasily Surikov, among others.

But Vrubel had little interest in that kind of direct narrative. What he described as his own obsession was not narrative but technique — the placement of lines, the mixing of colors, the entirely different density that the smallest variation could produce. When he looked up from that pursuit, he found himself standing alone in the wilderness once more. First within his family, and now outside it too.

It was partly by chance that Vrubel came to receive a commission from Prakhov.

In 1883, Prakhov asked Vrubel to help restore St. Cyril's Monastery in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. Prakhov had not had Vrubel specifically in mind. What he wanted was a painter skilled enough not to disrupt the work, but not so expensive as to warrant a large fee. Vrubel simply happened to fit that description.

Vrubel studied more during this period than even he might have expected.

As he continued his experiments with technique, the ancient Byzantine style offered him new inspiration. Cutting lines at sharp angles, setting them into rows, filling them with varied colors — mosaic. This method, which had traveled across vast stretches of time, struck him as fresh, and somehow more sacred. "This is essentially the work I must return to." Vrubel said something to that effect while studying the traces left in a Kyiv cathedral. He also made a brief visit to Italian cities including Venice, immersing himself again in the touch of old masters at sites such as St. Mark's Basilica. Yet here too, it seemed that no one but Vrubel was thinking about how the techniques of the past might be grafted onto modern art. In this way, he was, at his core, always alone.

Once something seized his attention, he threw himself into it with total, relentless absorption.

From this, one can begin to sense that Vrubel's personal life was not particularly stable either.

While making his way through monasteries and cathedrals doing what he called "the most sacred work," Vrubel appears to have led a rather unstable personal life on the other side of that existence. He is believed to have contracted syphilis around 1885.

His father, who came to visit him, said as much upon seeing his condition. Setting aside the syphilis, it is clear that Vrubel had not been taking care of himself — body or mind — from the start.

On one occasion, Vrubel told his fellow painters an obvious lie: "My father has died in Kharkiv."

He paired the story with a request that they pool money for his travel expenses. That money was most likely spent on entertainment — or so Prakhov suspected. Given that he was also described as a "drunkard" by those around him, he was almost certainly drinking heavily as well.

It was amid all of this that the rumor about the married Emiliya also spread.

A contradiction deepening between his work and his private life — Vrubel may have found in that gap a strange sense of moral transgression, one that gradually turned his thoughts away from God and angels and toward a demon. And it would not have taken long for the demon in his mind to find its way to Lermontov's poem "The Demon." As noted earlier, Vrubel had a keen interest in music and theater, and had already been deeply moved in his early twenties by an opera based on "The Demon."

From that point on, the demon meant something specific to him: rough and unpolished, yet at the same time lonely and bitter. Aware of drifting away from the mainstream world, yet unable to turn back. On reflection, was that not exactly where he himself had ended up?

Vrubel described the figure in his The Demon Seated in these terms. It was a characterization that could be read as somewhat fractured. Some have interpreted this as evidence of how deep Vrubel's inner torment ran — and of his determination to define it somehow, in spite of everything.

The painting stirred controversy as soon as it was shown. Most critics attacked the artist for projecting himself onto a demon. They condemned the emotional sensitivity with which he had rendered not an angel but a demon, and heaped scorn on the obscure technique filling the canvas.

Those around Vrubel also noted that the painting was unlikely to be well received. Vrubel himself was at one point so discouraged by the atmosphere that he destroyed several preliminary studies with his own hands.

There was, however, one person who looked on his audacious attempt with interest: Savva Mamontov, a railroad magnate and prominent patron of the arts.

Mamontov had long recognized the potential in Vrubel's sensibility. He believed that with The Demon Seated, Vrubel had finally let that potential explode. He commissioned several paintings at generous prices and at one point even offered Vrubel the annex of his own mansion as a place to live.

From around that time, Vrubel's life began to turn. A decisive moment came in 1896, when Mamontov commissioned two large paintings — each to fill 100 square meters — to hang at an exhibition marking the coronation of Russian Emperor Nicholas II.

For one of the two works, Vrubel conceived Princess of Dreams. It was based on the play "La Princesse lointaine" by French playwright Edmond Rostand — the story of a troubadour who sings for a princess he has never seen but only heard described as beautiful, and who dies in her arms at last.

Vrubel painted the dying troubadour and the princess gliding toward him. The setting is a ship. Below, paper-thin waves churn. The figures are pale, their forms smooth. Around them, color scatters like powdered jewels. Nothing is sharply defined, and it is precisely that quality which makes the image feel like a dream. It was said to express the desire of an artist willing to stake his life to reach beauty. Even so, the work did not escape harsh reviews — "grotesque," "incomprehensible." The exhibition jury's final verdict was equally blunt: "This painting cannot remain in the exhibition hall."

The first to rage on Vrubel's behalf was not Vrubel himself but Mamontov.

Mamontov rented a plot of land next to the exhibition grounds, fitted it out as a separate venue and put up a sign. It read: "Exhibition of decorative paintings by Mikhail Vrubel, rejected by the jury." People were drawn less by the painter's name than by the spectacle of the situation itself. The newspaper Moskovsky Listok reported that "only Vrubel's paintings are being mentioned in the art coverage." Another paper wrote that his work was "so intense it borders on frightening." Some outlets ran criticism — "people laughed," "nothing but a pretense at fame" — but nothing could stop Vrubel's name from rising.

Around this time, Vrubel began a relationship with celebrated opera singer Nadezhda Zabela.

This time, the feeling was mutual. It was not the one-sided dynamic of the Emiliya episode. The two soon married and settled in Moscow. Vrubel designed stage sets and costumes for Nadezhda's opera roles — the Swan Princess, the Snow Maiden, Princess Volkhova among them. Like the demon on the Caucasus who had once seemed to stand alone in the wilderness, Vrubel was at last being filled — in life, in love and in art. In 1899, at 43, he painted a demon once more. This demon stretches his legs and soars. He is neither weak nor lonely. The title: The Demon Flying. Was it an expression of strength and confidence?

But his joy did not last.

Around 1900, Vrubel began to suffer from severe migraines. Then, the following year, news arrived that he did not want to believe. The first child he had waited for with both hands clasped in hope came into the world with a cleft lip. The infant's cry was faint, and there was little strength in its limbs. It was the moment when the trauma of childhood loneliness — the loss, one after another, of his mother and siblings — raised its head again.

That was when Vrubel began to change in ways that were impossible to ignore.

He painted a demon again. This demon's eyes blazed wide open. But that was all — it was a being groaning on a cold mountain ridge, its body broken. Everything around it was in disarray. The colors did not merely shatter; they warped. The demon never managed to take flight. He had fallen to a state worse even than the days of brooding solitude. The painting was The Demon Downcast. It was difficult to see this as unrelated to Vrubel's inner world.

Vrubel clung to this painting with a kind of frenzy.

When it was hung at an exhibition organized by the World of Art group in St. Petersburg in early 1902, Vrubel was still standing in front of his own canvas — every morning until noon, every day, brushes and paints loaded in both hands. He was still painting even after the work had been put on display, correcting and repainting and wiping it down, hundreds of times over. He paid no attention to whether anyone was watching.

Vrubel was not fixated on The Demon Downcast alone.

According to his biographer V. M. Domiteyeva, Vrubel painted for more than 14 hours a day. He barely spoke to his family and had no desire to receive visitors. He simply talked to himself without pause. Once a day he would put on his overcoat and open a window — a ritual he called a "walk," and the only rest he allowed himself beyond painting and muttering. To call it merely "living with dedication" would be to understate the level of obsession. Even his wife Nadezhda was frightened. "He has become ( … ) excessively self-assured. The shyness he used to show around people is gone. He just talks and talks without stopping." Nadezhda wrote as much to her sister.

It was inevitable. Vrubel suffered a breakdown in 1902, crying out as if someone were pulling at his soul. A doctor who examined him diagnosed him with a syphilitic infection. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Vrubel's life had, in effect, stopped there.

He continued to paint occasionally through cycles of hospitalization and recovery, but he never escaped the compulsion to revise endlessly. The poet Bryusov, who sat for Vrubel as a model in 1906, recalled that this "eccentric" painter repeatedly erased parts of the canvas, saying he wanted to repaint the background. "It seemed as though Vrubel was trying to erase the demon within himself," Bryusov wrote of the experience.

By that point Vrubel was half blind. He was tormented by hallucinations and auditory delusions. He referred to himself as Christ, then on other days as the poet Alexander Pushkin, and on still others as the governor-general of Moscow. He made the earnest claim that he had lived through the Renaissance, painting Vatican frescoes alongside Michelangelo and Raphael Sanzio. He could no longer produce work that satisfied him. The demon series ended there.

Vrubel died in April 1910 at the age of 54. Pneumonia is cited as the immediate cause of death.

For Vrubel, the demon had been his own symbol — one forged equally from ideals and suffering. That is why he could not let it go, even as his mind descended into confusion. His experimental technique, evoking jewels and stained glass, ultimately expanded the world of Russian painting. He became the standard-bearer who flew the flag of modernism highest — in a territory that academic painting and the realism of the Peredvizhniki could not claim. "He was a messenger from another world," the poet Alexander Blok said in tribute at his funeral. Unlike the demon who lost Tamara, Vrubel was at last able to leave his bewildered world behind. If there is any consolation in that, perhaps it is at least this.

Dmitriyeva, N. A., Mikhail Vrubel: Life and Art. Moscow: Detskaya Literatura.

Kirichenko, E. I., The Russian Style: The Search for the Expression of National Identity, Nationality and Nationhood, Traditions of Ancient Russian and Folk Art in Russian Art from the 18th to the Early 20th Century. Moscow: Galart.

Suzdalev, P. K., Vrubel: The Man, His Worldview, His Method. Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo.