Alexei Savrasov

Alexei Savrasov: Truth and Poetry

Vladimir Petrov

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#1 2006 (10)

24 May 2005 marked the175th anniversary of the birth of one of Russia’s most eminent landscape artists, Alexei Savrasov. Well-loved to this day, Savrasov is most often associated with his masterpiece "The Rooks Have Arrived” (1871). Although this is an outstanding achievement of Russian realist landscape painting, the actual scope and depth of Saurasov’s work is far greater. As early as the 1850s, Savrasov was seen as one of the leading Russian landscape painters. By his mid-twenties, he had produced many wonderful works, most of which played an important part in the development of Russian painting as a whole. Isaak Levitan, Savrasov’s favourite pupil and follower, called his teacher “the creator of the Russian landscape”, claiming that Savrasov’s art brought out the “lyrical quality of landscape painting”, being filled with “boundless love for his homeland”.

Alexei Savrasov: Truth and Poetry

DRAWING TECHNIQUE: From Orest Kiprensky to Kazimir Malevich

Irina Shumanova, Yevgenia Ilyukhina

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#1 2011 (30)

Pencil drawing is one of the oldest art forms, the source of all visual arts, recording the inception of an idea and the stages of its further development. But drawing also has a life of its own as an independent art form with a distinctive language, specific rules and history. Pencils come in many different varieties - silver, lead, graphite, black chalk, wax, coloured pencils, lithographic pencils and other types - and the word also refers to a large number of similar media which can be categorized as the techniques of “dry drawing”, like charcoal, sanguine and sauce. There is an almost limitless variety of techniques involving the use of these materials, and they serve to show off a particular artist’s individuality, sense of form, innate talent and level of skills. A drawing in pencil, charcoal, sanguine or sauce is the best reflection of its creator’s temperament and character. From the vast variety of pencil and pencil-related techniques every epoch chooses those that suit it best. The age of classicism treasured the austere beauty of linear drawing, romanticism - the contrasts and the picturesque quality of strokes; for the “Peredvizhniki” (Wanderers) artists, pencils were “modest workers”, and the modernist movement re-invented the selfsufficiency of lines and the aesthetic value of the process of drawing as such.

DRAWING TECHNIQUE: From Orest Kiprensky to Kazimir Malevich

The Tretyakov Gallery thanks Ivan Kardashidi for support of the exhibition

Anna Antonova, Lydia Tornstensen and Yevgenia Plotnikova also contributed to the publication.

Pencil drawing is one of the oldest art forms, the source of all visual arts, recording the inception of an idea and the stages of its further development. But drawing also has a life of its own as an independent art form with a distinctive language, specific rules and history.

Syndicate content