Landscape

"Levitan's landscape" is a term firmly ingrained both in art scholarship and in the minds of many art lovers. A "Levitan landscape" is different from an "Ivan Shishkin landscape" or even landscapes by Alexei Savrasov or Vasily Polenov, although it is very close to the last ones. Usually, a "Levitan landscape" is a simple image of an almost always deserted natural environment - a creek, a narrow pathway, groves rolling on into the depth of the picture in a somewhat diagonal direction, or copses. It is set in different seasons, except (largely) winter -Levitan's pieces almost never feature images of snowy winter -and usually depicts a transitional season or summer; there are blue horizons and a high limitless sky with a distinct life of its own, beyond the mental grasp of human beings.

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.

In September 2008 the Tretyakov Gallery opened the first solo show of the Russian landscape artist Fyodor Mikhailovich Matveyev (1758-1826), commemorating the 250th anniversary of his birth. Matveyev spent most of his life in Italy, where he gained European acclaim. The great artist’s legacy had the same fate as academic art in general - appreciated by his contemporaries, it was later relegated to oblivion and for a long time considered outmoded and lacking in originality. The present exhibition re-introduces Matveyev to modern audiences. The project brought together many Russian and international museums, including the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, the National Art Museum of Belarus, and private collections. The work led to many interesting discoveries: the discovery of previously unknown facts about the artist’s life, a more accurate attribution of the content of his landscapes, and a better knowledge of the specifics and dates of their creation. The catalogue published as a part of the exhibition project is the first dedicated to Matveyev’s works. The panoramic views of Italy and diverse graphic pieces, including journey sketches on display in the Gallery’s Engineering Building, take the viewer on a “painterly journey” in the spirit of the 18th century together with an artist more than fond of the beauty of nature.

The painter and graphic artist Maria Favorskaya (1887-1959) wrote her “Memoirs” in the 1950s. Her father Vladimir (von) Derviz (1859-1937), a watercolour artist, studied at the Academy of Arts together with Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel, who became his lifelong friends. Vladimir Derviz also graduated from the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, and in 1885 he married Nadezhda Simonovich (1866-1908), Serov’s cousin. With his inheritance from his father, a St. Petersburg senator, Vladimir bought an estate close to Tver, Domotkanovo. Nadezhda had always wanted to live in the country, and her husband, while enjoying painting watercolours of the surrounding countryside, actively participated in the work of the “Zemstvo” (local council) and, until his wife’s death, in the improvement of his household and those of local peasants.

A retrospective exhibition of the artist-brothers Alexei and Sergei Tkachev, running in the Engineering Wing of the Tretyakov Gallery from April 15 through July 17, presents the oeuvre of two figures who in many respects define the trajectories of the Russian school of painting in the second half of the 20th and at the start of the 21st centuries. The exhibition features around 180 pieces representative of the main stages of their work and the main directions of their artistic explorations. The pictures on view include large-scale “exemplary” compositions, the results of the brothers’ collective effort from the gallery’s collection, as well as earlier paintings, from their Moscow studio, created by one or the other brother independently, and a large assortment of sketches. All this is but a fraction of the vast body of work created by the artists who continue working to this day.