Etching

On the 150th Anniversary of Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s Birth St. Petersburg had neither a Piranesi, like Rome, nor a Canaletto, like Venice - the city on the Neva lacked an artist who would devote themselves entirely to glorifying it. In the mid 18th century, Mikhail Makhaev could have been such an artist, but the times would not allow it: having completed a number of glorious etchings of Baroque Petersburg, he was forced to turn to other, more practical projects. At the end of the same century, this was again the case with Fyodor Alekseyev, the creator of wonderful landscape panoramas of the Northern Capital, who was obliged to devote the majority of his canvases to Moscow.

The great Italian artist of the 20th century Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) received major renown in New York in Autumn 2008, with a landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accompanied by a range of other shows at other galleries in the city. The largest retrospective in North America for the artist to date, it will move back, in a slightly adjusted format, to the artist’s hometown, Bologna, to be displayed at that city’s Museo d’Arte Moderna from January 22. It was in Bologna that the artist spent the greater part of his life, and where a museum dedicated to his memory occupies an honoured place in one of the city’s central town square buildings.

The age when Russia fought against Napoleon presented through artefacts from the Pushkin Museum and the collection of Alexander Vasiliev

The Pushkin Museum is one of the first museums to begin the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the war against Napoleon, this landmark event in Russian history — the Patriotic War of 1812 — with the museum's new project "TIME OF GLORY AND ELATION!". The developments in and around the year 1812 had a special importance for Pushkin both as an individual and as a writer. This age of huge upheaval became for the poet one of the main sources of inspiration and focused his reflection on the destinies of humankind, his motherland and the world. A whole series of his masterpieces in poetry and prose (from the youthful "Recollections about Tsarskoe Selo" to the philosophical "The Commander") directly or indirectly address the era that remains embedded in the memory of almost all citizens of Russia. The circle of his family and friends included many people who had participated in the heroic battles of the Great European War of 1812-1815.