This thesis seeks to re-interpret the landscape paintings of Russian-trained, Ukrainian artist, Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910), through the lens of science and the artist's friendship with the famous Russian chemist and founder of the periodic table, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1837-1907). Unusual for their intense luminosity, crude forms, and startlingly bold color, Kuindzhi's paintings have been favorably labeled as awe-inspiring works anticipating the promising future of decorative art and new romanticism. Derogatorily, the works have gained a reputation as the immature and crude renditions of an untrained primitive. This thesis proposes that, more accurately, Kuindzhi's style was overridingly the result of a tenacious pursuit to paint the often-invisible chemical and physical structure of nature. Kuindzhi was less concerned with academic methods of painting and the imitation of Western European styles and, more originally, interested in experimenting with paint to visually reconcile the forces of art and science.
Kuindzhi emerges from this new analysis as an artist of important transitional stature, not only serving to unite art and science, but providing an important link between traditional Russian landscape painting of the nineteenth century and the experiments of avant-garde Russian and Western European painters of the twentieth century. At the crossroads of centuries and on the cusp of great scientific advances from the invention of the x-ray to the dawning of the atomic age, and the explosion of artistic movements from cubism to suprematism, Kuindzhi's work is easily misread or forgotten. It is science that brings the significance of his paintings into focus, giving them constancy and consistency through which they can be re-interpreted within the Western art historical paradigm.