Special issue. GREAT BRITAIN–RUSSIA: ON THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURES

While the British school of painting has always been appreciated in Russia, it is, unfortunately, far from fully represented in the collections of the country’s museums. Such an omission has been significantly remedied in recent years with a series of shows from various British museums held in Russia, many in the framework of the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014, which included the exhibitions “Francis Bacon and the Legacy of the Past”, at the Hermitage; “Unrivalled Wedgwood”, held at Moscow’s Museum of the Applied and Folk Arts; “Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Manifesto of the New Style” presented at the Moscow Kremlin Museums; “Oscar Wilde. Aubrey Beardsley. The View from Russia” at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; and the “‘English Breakfast’ in Russia. Late 18th-19th Century” exhibitionat the Historical Museum.

We owe this characterization, “Poets of the Human Visage”, of these two portrait-painters to the art historian Alexei Lebedev: it dates from 1945, when the Soviet researcher’s enthusiasm was encouraged by the rapid progress in building ties with the UK.[1] His comparison of the Russian and English painters caught on, although Rokotov was never called “the Russian Gainsborough” in his lifetime. Nor had the fame that each artist enjoyed in his own land spread to the other country. At the 1862 International Exhibition in London Russian portraiture was represented by Levitsky and Borovikovsky: Rokotov was then simply forgotten in his homeland. Nor did Russians have any knowledge of the British artist: the remarkable “Portrait of a Lady in Blue” now at the Hermitage - Gainsborough’s only masterpiece in a Russian collection - was acquired as late as 1912. So what do the great Russian and British artists, so apparently different from one another, have in common?

“They have an eye for beautiful and expensive things in Russia”: proof of that was provided by the interest expressed by Russian business and high society individuals in the recent British Antiques Mission in the Moscow Expo that took place in the British Ambassador’s private residence in Moscow in March 2011.

The reign of Catherine the Great saw English faience in all its diversity take the Russian market by storm. Its attractive price, compared to porcelain, and superior artistic design made English faience extremely popular with the Russian nobility: indeed, as the natural scientist and diarist Andrei Bolotov wrote, by 1796 many had started “buying, and filling their homes with English faience crockery”. It was accepted as perfect for everyday purposes, combining quality, practicality and elegance, and by the 1830s faience was commonly found in many households. Unlike porcelain, which was reserved for special occasions, “Faience dinnerware is not a luxury: it is used every day,” the writer Yevdokim Ziablovsky wrote in his work “Russian Statistics”.

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a key figure of the English modernist movement in both art and literature, acquainted with - as friend or enemy - almost all the key figures of British culture in the first half of the 20th century. Best known from 1914 as the founder and leading proponent of the pioneering British modernist movement Vorticism, his considerable legacy in another field, portraiture, was the subject of a retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG).

Ritualistic, spontaneous, improvisatory, disciplined, anarchic, unfashionable, indifferent, insatiable, obsessed, risk-taking yet curiously wedded to routines: Lucian Freud’s life (1922-2011) was a mass of self-imposed contradictions, while his art was almost alarmingly focused, intense and unremitting, and the product of unvarying determination. He never, from his hallucinatory early drawings, prints and paintings on a relatively small scale to the paintings of his last decades, with rich thick impasto, and occasionally crowded with figures, deviated from his obsession not only with the observed world, but his observed world. The exhibition “Lucian Freud Portraits” at London’s National Portrait Gallery collected more than 100 works from museums and private collections - the first major show since the artist died on 20 July 2011, but in which he was involved until his death. It will perhaps be the culmination of his lifetime’s preoccupation with private faces in public places, and public faces in private places - for many of those he painted were never identified by name.