Landscape

The anniversary exhibition of Valentin Mikhailovich Sidorov — People’s Artist of the USSR, full member of the Russian Academy of Arts, and Chairman of the Artists’ Union of Russia — ran in the Engineering Wing of the Tretyakov Gallery from November 13 through December 14. The retrospective continues the series of personal exhibitions of the masters of the generation of the 1960s, the “shestidesyatniki”.

The Tretyakov Gallery has a major collection of paintings by Sylvestr Shchedrin (1791-1830), one of the most endearing Russian landscape artists of the first third of the 19th century. In 1800 he was accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied in Mikhail Ivanov’s workshop. Awarded in 1811 a Big Gold Medal for his “graduation paintings”, he was a recipient of an academic fellowship for study abroad, and in 1818 he went to Rome, the city widely recognized as the capital of European art. It was in Italy that his talent would blossom.

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.

The late 18th century saw the appearance in Russia of the “artist-traveler” - artists who accompanied official delegations to new lands, or visited Europe on Academy fellowships, or traveled independently, always recording their impressions of their journeys. Drawing was the most direct form in which to do so: their sketches from nature - the first step towards final, finished compositions - were created using different media (pencil, quill, watercolour or pastel), and preserved intact the freshness of the artistic perception of nature, architectural landmarks, and people. An exhibition of graphic artwork from the Tretyakov Gallery collection, held from June 2009 through January 2010, featured more than 350 pieces from the late 18 th to the early 20th century (up until the 1930s), created by artists during their travels across the Russian empire and the world.

Levitan started using pastel sticks very early on. His youthful pieces such as the images of the little girls Nadya Yakovleva (1880, Russian Museum) and Lena Nenarokova (1880, Tretyakov Gallery) already have delicate pastel inclusions. However, it was not before the 1890s that Levitan's pastel explorations truly reached their creative peak. Among the pastels currently known and dated by the artist himself, "Storm" (1890, private collection, Moscow) is the earliest. From 1890 on Levitan created a number of remarkable pieces which established him as one of the premier masters of pastel art of the late 19th century.