Ivan Shishkin

“One should search for nature at its simplest…”

Galina Churak

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#4 2007 (17)

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin is remembered in the history of Russian art as an artist who glorified the grandeur and beauty of the nature of his homeland, and masterfully and lovingly translated into the language of painting the limitless vastness of fields with golden grain, the greatness of oak forests with their ceaseless murmur, the dense pathless thickets of woodland, every single grass-blade, the unassuming flowers of the field, and the wrinkled tree-bark on an old tree. His life in art is one of the most essential and important components of Russian landscape painting, of the history of its formation and bloom.

One should search for nature at its simplest

Mastery of the Pen

Yevgenia Iliukhina

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#1 2009 (22)

The exhibition “Mastery of the Pen”, featuring graphics from the holdings of the Tretyakov Gallery, is part of a show series focused on drawing techniques and media. The 300 pieces tracing the history of pen drawing in Russian art of the 18th-20th centuries include work by Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, Fyodor Tolstoy, Ivan Shishkin, Isaac Levitan, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Somov, Alexandre Benois, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, and many other famous artists.

Mastery of the Pen

The exhibition “Mastery of the Pen”, featuring graphics from the holdings of the Tretyakov Gallery, is part of a show series focused on drawing techniques and media. The 300 pieces tracing the history of pen drawing in Russian art of the 18th-20th centuries include work by Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, Fyodor Tolstoy, Ivan Shishkin, Isaac Levitan, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Somov, Alexandre Benois, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, and many other famous artists.

IVAN SHISHKIN’S OTHER GENRE. The story of a search - and its findings

Galina Churak

Article: 
EXCLUSIVE PUBLICATIONS
Magazine issue: 
#1 2010 (26)

The artistic legacy of outstanding Russian painters such as Vasily Surikov, Viktor Vasnetsov and Ilya Repin - and another master from the same tradition, Ivan Shishkin - seems to have been studied, explored and expounded so thoroughly that, to use Shishkin’s words, “everything has been learned, and there is no more learning to be done”. However, museum researchers sometimes enjoy unexpected encounters with works by these masters that have been long forgotten and/or believed lost, or have a style unusual for them and here is the story of our search and findings.

IVAN SHISHKIN’S OTHER GENRE. The story of a search - and its findings

The artistic legacy of outstanding Russian painters such as Vasily Surikov, Viktor Vasnetsov and Ilya Repin - and another master from the same tradition, Ivan Shishkin - seems to have been studied, explored and expounded so thoroughly that, to use Shishkin’s words, “everything has been learned, and there is no more learning to be done”.

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.

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