Style realism

With the elegant courtesy of his native New England, Nelson White welcomes me to his studio space at the Florence Academy. Seascapes hang from the partitions. On the main easel, a portrait is a work in progress. But there’s little room to sit down and talk, so we withdraw to a table in the library. Around us, FA students browse through its rich collection of art books.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Bern has devoted an important exhibition to Swiss artist Rolf Iseli, presenting paintings, objects, sculptures and prints that survey the artist's 50 years of work. Arranged in thematic groups the works show the explosive energy of an outstanding artistic life -Iseli's main subject is man and his natural environment.

An insulting term to dismiss a new type of art, a term that, in turn, becomes the positive identifier of that group, is by now a cliche. In 1874 a journalist in “Le Charivari” newspaper in Paris mocked a young artist named Claude Monet, who was exhibiting a painting called “Impression, Sunrise”: “Impression,” wrote the critic, “I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” Likewise, when a Donatello sculpture was placed in the same room as some contemporary painters at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, a critic mourned, “Donatello au milieu des fauves” - “Donatello surrounded by wild beasts” - and the term “Fauves” stuck.

THE ART OF PAVEL FEDOTOV (1815-1852) HAS A UNIVERSAL APPEAL. THE TRETYAKOV GALLERY EXHIBITION MARKING THE BICENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH INTRODUCES THIS CREATOR OF WELL-KNOWN AND POPULAR IMAGES AS A SUPERB GRAPHIC ARTIST, WHO GAVE HIS SMALL-SCALE "INTIMATE PIECES" A DEPTH COMMENSURATE WITH HIS PLACE AND CENTRAL ROLE IN RUSSIAN CULTURE.

The exhibition "Russian Artists Abroad. Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938)"'opening at the Tretyakov Gallery, is a part of the Ticino Year in Russia - the year dedicated to the Swiss canton of Ticino in Russia - and is timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth. Regrettably, the general public in Russia knows little about Marianne Werefkin, although she is a fascinating personality in many respects. Some viewers will be more interested in her evolution as an artist - from her "Peredvizhniki"-style realism, through symbolism and other schools that nearly all artists of her age engaged with, towards a very distinctive, idiosyncratic expressionism. Others will probably take an interest in her life story, so unusual for a 19th-century woman, including many dramatic turns of fate, and resolute decisions taken in the course of it.