Georgy Grigorievich Nissky

Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to a keyed wooden stretcher. This is ensuring a stable structural support. There is a horizontal seam in the canvas which runs approximately 20 cm below the upper horizontal framing edge. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even and matt varnish layer. There are several areas of slightly raised craquelure, most notably within the sky in the upper right quadrant of the composition. These appear stable. There a several very small scattered paint losses throughout the composition. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows scattered retouchings, the most significant of which are: 1) a large area of retouching within the sky and the top of the mountains in the centre right of the composition, 2) a further large area of retouching covering the grass in the lower right of the composition, 3) scattered retouchings within the sky and running along the extreme edges of the composition, and 4) several retouchings within the figures and the trees in the left of the composition. There are also other scattered retouchings. It should be noted many of these retouchings appear crude and excessive, are visible in natural light, and could be considerably reduced with more careful inpainting. Summary The painting therefore appears to be in reasonably good and stable condition having undergone significant restoration work in the past. The painting should also respond well to cleaning, restoration and revarnishing, including the removal and replacement of any previous retouching.
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In the 1950s Nissky briefly abandoned working in oil for gouache. This temporary change in medium was to have a lasting effect on his style and from 1956 his oils demonstrate a deliberate exaggerated flatness redolent of fresco murals which lends a sense of the monumental to even his small-scale compositions. ‘In my gouaches, the organisation of space is of colossal significance.’ The new expressive role of colour, applied in saturated blocks; the use of contrasts rather than perspective to delineate space and the sacrifice of detail for even more generalised forms are all developments inspired by his discoveries in gouache.

In terms of subject matter, Hikers remains true to the stated aims of the Society of Easel Painters with whom Nissky had associated at the beginning of his career. Here, he successfully combines the epic with the lyrical, the monumentality does not detract from the freshness and the sense optimism embodied by this representation of healthy Soviet youth. Nissky was himself an accomplished sportsman and in his landscape paintings, the landscape itself becomes another object of man’s activity. The striking use of perspective in this painting seems to place the artist, and by extension the viewer, within the composition as though we too are part of the hiking party, only a few steps downhill from the young couple on the rock.