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Few artists in the history of art have been able to create their own universe. The art of Mikhail Schwartzman is a distinctive and outstanding phenomenon; its place in the history of 20th century art is still to be determined. The name of Schwartzman was well known in artistic circles. He graduated from the Moscow State University of Applied Arts (formerly the Stroganov Institute) in 1956, and he began his creative activity in the time of the Khrushchev “Thaw”. A society of artists and writers, who took up a position of unofficial art, appeared at that time in Moscow. As a rule, Schwartzman’s name is mentioned among such artists because of his deep influence on the artists, poets and philosophers of the underground.

The richness and variety of the graphic art collection of the Louvre Museum always makes it of particular interest. The subject chosen for the exhibition in Moscow was the journeys of European artists - from the late 16th to the 19th centuries.

The exhibition “From the Western Seas to the Very Gates of the East. Russia at the Time of Pushkin” - a look at the Russian Empire as it was seen by Alexander Pushkin and his contemporaries - has been one of the most memorable events of 2010 at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

When a soul, sinful but talented and longing for epiphany, encounters genuine holiness, a “divine spark” produced by this encounter kindles an unquenchable flame of creativity. For Mikhail Nesterov, “holiness” was a hallmark of the ideas and objects regarded as sacred by every nation: the lands of the forbears, religion, the history and heroes of the country. But, together with his deep “affection for one’s hearth and home, affection for one’s ancestral tombstones,” he equally revered the title of artist, questioning, until his last days, his right to be called one.

Early in the 1990s a professor from Simon Fraser University in Canada, Evelyn Harden, was working in the Tretyakov Gallery archives. Preparing for the publication of the journals of James McNeill Whistler's mother, she requested help in searching for information about the artist's Russian mentor, Alexander Koritsky. It was Evelyn Harden who drew my attention to a little known but important fact in Whistler's biography - the years he spent in Russia, the country that this unconventional individual, with a penchant for "deliberate pranksterism" and hoaxes, called the cradle of his talent. As a researcher of the international contacts associated with Russian art, I became interested in the subject of Whistler and Russia because of its apparent impossibility. Fifteen years later this project has materialized in the exhibition "Whistler and Russia" which is to be held at the Tretyakov Gallery from 7 December 2006 to 15 February 2007. It will be one of the most remarkable events in the international programme celebrating the Tretyakov Gallery's 150th anniversary.