Portrait

The Medici... PORTRAITS! POLITICS?

Natella Voiskounski

Article: 
WORLD MUSEUMS
Magazine issue: 
#4 2021 (73)

The exhibition “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570” opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum on June 26, 2021. A truly impressive range of artefacts drawn from the collections of the Met and from other European, North American and Australian museums, as well as private collections, has been brought together in one exhibition for the first time in the museum’s 150-year history. More than 90 genuine masterpieces created by the great artists of the Italian Renaissance - from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Agnolo Bronzino and Francesco Salviati - give the impression of time turned back and allow us an incredible opportunity to indirectly make the acquaintance of various members of the Medici dynasty and the ruling elite of the era of Cosimo I de’ Medici. The exhibition is indeed “a sort of mirror of contemporary concerns,” as it is characterised by Carlo Falciani, the exhibition’s guest curator and professor of art history at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. The age of Cosimo I de’ Medici is, without doubt, as Falciani emphasises, one of the most glorious periods in the history not only of Italian, but also of European art, so that an encounter with the masterpieces of the epoch is relevant as never before, as the subjects are, in essence, our contemporaries.

The Medici... PORTRAITS! POLITICS?

“It's time you knew: I'm also a contemporary...”
Osip Mandelstam

The Charisma of Zurab Tsereteli

Aleksander Rozhin

Article: 
ART AND PERSONALITY
Magazine issue: 
#4 2021 (73)

The present century and the one preceding it have subsumed the greatest achievements and discoveries of world history. From the time of the Enlightenment to the present day, modern civilisation has made an incomparable spiritual contribution to global artistic culture. For all the wealth of national talents, each people has its own talismanic figures who embody the traditions of their ethnic group. However, on the level of wider humanity, it is rare to find figures who are outside their time, creed and ethnicity. Irrespective of aesthetic preferences, breadth of view or level of education, personalities on such a scale are defined by a combination of both their creative and social activity.

The Charisma of Zurab Tsereteli

“The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.”
Stendhal

The story of Zoya Kalatozova, model to Robert Falk

Lilia Kalatozova, Yulia Kalatozova

Article: 
ROBERT FALK (1886 - 1958)
Magazine issue: 
#4 2020 (69)

The portraits painted by Robert Falk in the early 1950s, the last decade of his life, reveal the artist’s interest in the faces of young ladies’ faces and the feminine grace of his young models. During that period, he created a number of paintings depicting girls and young women, among them “Portrait of Lenina Rabinovich” (1950, Orlov Art Gallery), “Portrait of Olga Severtseva” (1950-1951, Olga Severtseva collection, Moscow), and “Portrait of Irina Glinka” (1951-1952, National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan) and so on. Falk’s fourth (and last) wife, Angelina Shchekin-Krotova, jokingly gave this period of his art the Proustian title “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom”.

The story of Zoya Kalatozova, model to Robert Falk

Robert Falk. A CHAPTER FROM "AROUND THE GABRICHEVSKYS", A MEMOIR

Olga Severtseva

Article: 
ROBERT FALK (1886 - 1958)
Magazine issue: 
#4 2020 (69)

The recollections of the art historian Olga Severtseva touch on a memorable event from her youth, when in 1950-1951 she sat for an oil portrait by Robert Falk. Falk was a friend of Olga’s relatives - her aunt Natalya Severtsova, an actor and artist, and Natalya’s husband, the eminent philosopher, art scholar and artist Aleksander Gabrichevsky. An academic and intellectual of encyclopaedic knowledge, who studied art history, philosophy of art and architectural theory, alongside literary translation, German studies, music, and aesthetics, Aleksander Gabrichevsky was unable to fulfil many of his scholarly goals during the tragic decades of the Stalin regime. He was arrested three times, in 1930, 1935 and 1941; twice, 1935-1936 and 1942-1944, he was exiled for his “cosmopolitan and anti-patriotic writings”, and in 1949 he was ousted from the Academy of Architecture, where he worked as a department head.

Robert Falk. A CHAPTER FROM "AROUND THE GABRICHEVSKYS", A MEMOIR

Robert Falk. "Meet My Kind of People"

Angelina Shchekin-Krotova

Article: 
ROBERT FALK (1886 - 1958)
Magazine issue: 
#4 2020 (69)

Falk did not like to refer to the genre in which he worked with greatest enthusiasm as portrait painting. For him, the words rang with a note of something overly formal and representative. “I like to paint people,” he said and, showing his friends his paintings at the studio, he added, “Meet my kind of people.” Falk’s people were from all walks of life, but there was not a single person among them whose portrait he had painted solely to commission, rather it was in response to the call of the heart. Others attracted him with their outward appearance and characteristic image. He loved to paint the elderly, who had been worked with the merciless chisel of a long and difficult life. He was also very fond of painting young women’s faces that were delicate as flowers. In Falk’s portraits of women, there is always the sense of an alluring secret. <...> In his male models, he was most often attracted by intelligence and strength of personality. It should be said that Falk was far less interested in a person’s external appearance than he was their inner world. Usually, the desire to draw and paint arose from the sharing of common interests, an exchange of thought and intimate conversation

Robert Falk. "Meet My Kind of People"

 

FRAGMENTS FROM THE MEMOIRS “LYRICAL COMMENTARIES ON THE EXHIBITION OF ROBERT FALK”

Falk did not like to refer to the genre in which he worked with greatest enthusiasm as portrait painting. For him, the words rang with a note of something overly formal and representative. “I like to paint people,” he said and, showing his friends his paintings at the studio, he added, “Meet my kind of people.”

The Quintessential Moscow Artist. A Jubilee Exhibition of Vasily Tropinin at the Tretyakov Gallery

Svetlana Stepanova

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#3 2005 (08)

An exhibition marking the 225th anniversary of Vasily Tropinin (17801857) is running at the Tretyakov Gallery from May 25 to September 4 2005. The artist's creative work belongs to the epoch that is considered the “golden age” of Russian culture.

The Quintessential Moscow Artist. A Jubilee Exhibition of Vasily Tropinin at the Tretyakov Gallery

An exhibition marking the 225th anniversary of Vasily Tropinin (17801857) is running at the Tretyakov Gallery from May 25 to September 4 2005. The artist's creative work belongs to the epoch that is considered the “golden age” of Russian culture.

Pushkin in Portrait. “Like the memory of first love, you will forever stay dear to Russia’s heart…”

Veronika Kirsanova

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#4 2019 (65)

To mark the 220th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Pushkin in 2019, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum (the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin) staged an unprecedented exhibition of portraits of the great Russian poet. It brought together more than 300 works from Russian museums and galleries, both images created in the poet’s lifetime and works made after his death.

Pushkin in Portrait. “Like the memory of first love, you will forever stay dear to Russia’s heart…”
 

“Like the memory of first love, you will forever stay dear to Russia’s heart...”[1]

To mark the 220th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Pushkin in 2019, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum (the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin) staged an unprecedented exhibition of portraits of the great Russian poet. It brought together more than 300 works from Russian museums and galleries, both images created in the poet’s lifetime and works made after his death.

From the Golden Age to the Silver Age. THE CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT OF VASILY POLENOV IN THE PRISM OF RUSSIAN CULTURE

Eleonora Paston

Article: 
POINT OF VIEW
Magazine issue: 
#3 2019 (64)

The Tretyakov Gallery’s new exhibition "Vasily Polenov”, running on Krymsky Val until February 16 2020, marks the 175th anniversary of the artist’s birth. Polenov (1844-1927) worked mainly in the final decades of the 19th century but the variety of his artistic activity establishes him as a key figure linking broader strands of Russian culture, not least through his influence as a teacher, contributing as he did to the development of the "Moscow school of painting” at the turn of the 20th century. Featuring more than 150 works drawn from 16 Russian museums as well as private collections, the exhibition brings Polenov’s monumental "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery” from the Russian Museum to Moscow for the first time.

From the Golden Age to the Silver Age. THE CREATIVE ACHIEVEMENT OF VASILY POLENOV IN THE PRISM OF RUSSIAN CULTURE

“Polenov, everything he said and thought about art, and even his very manner, is tied to his works, and from the very beginning of his career seeing him transported me to his paintings. And everywhere, I see it in his art... how much he admired the beauty of the world, how happy beautiful shapes, and especially beautiful colours always made him.”[1]

Yakov Minchenkov

Remembering Yevgenia Lang

Svetlana Volodina

Article: 
HERITAGE
Magazine issue: 
#2 2019 (63)

FOUR DECADES IN FRANCE, RETURN TO MOSCOW, RECOLLECTIONS OF MAYAKOVSKY

The artist Yevgenia Lang (1890-1973) was an acquaintance of my aunt, Lyudmila Mayakovskaya, the sister of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. My aunt was closely involved in my education, hoping to prepare me to take over the mission of preserving the great poet’s legacy and studying his work. Lyudmila, an artist herself introduced me to many interesting personalities from the world of art and literature of her time, and I developed a particular friendship with Lang.

Remembering Yevgenia Lang

 

FACES. THE MODERN RUSSIAN PORTRAIT

Article: 
CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Magazine issue: 
#4 2005 (09)

Modern culture - and modern art, In particular - has encompassed the term "re-actualization”, which refers to cases when a phenomenon or genre is taken out of the archive and presented to the cultural community in a new light, with new meanings and a new functional orientation.

FACES. THE MODERN RUSSIAN PORTRAIT

 

-Oleg KULIK. Lisa and Quilty. 2004
Oleg KULIK. Lisa and Quilty. 2004
From the series “The Fears of White Man”. Black and white photo

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