Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Maillol – antiquity in the works
Antoine Bourdelle and Aristide Mayol. What binds them? That they were born in the same year – 1861st? That both are French? Or that they are outstanding sculptors and are at the forefront of the art of the 20th century? Yes it is. But, among other things, another, very important. They admired antiquity and became its living carriers in an era that did little to flourish sculpture.
Sculptors lived at the turn of the century. Humanity was on the verge of the First World War, the October Revolution, which shook the foundations of the old system. Closed the last page of classical art history. The first letters fit into a book called Modern Art. Continue reading
Anton Refrigier – born in Moscow
Refrege was born in Moscow in the year of the first Russian revolution. This fact would seem irrelevant to the biography of an American artist: after all, his father took him to his homeland, to France, when he was still a teenager. In Paris, the boy’s artistic inclinations, inherited from his Russian ancestors, appeared: his maternal grandfather was a famous violinist, his grandmother was a ballerina of the Mariinsky Theater, and Anton himself became interested in the sculptor’s craft. Continue reading
Artists of besieged Leningrad
In the city on the Neva, in the House of Artists, in front of the entrance to the exhibition halls hangs a large marble plaque. On it are carved the names of those killed in the Great Patriotic War. More than 150 artists …
1941 Winter blockade bombing. Shelling, hunger, cold. Uncountable thousands of deaths … Continue reading
Wooden sculpture of Prikamye
The discovery of this “completely unprecedented and absolutely amazing phenomenon” – the original folk art of the Kama region – belongs to N. N. Serebrennikov, an Ural art historian, collector and researcher of wooden sculpture. For 40 years he worked as a director and chief curator of the Perm Art Gallery.
“… I clearly remember that incident,” Nikolai Nikolayevich wrote. – It happened in the village of Ilinsky, Perm province in 1922. Tired, then I went to my house. A gusting wind blew. Continue reading
Two portraits of the actress Strepetova
There are destinies that strike the imagination with unusualness and inner completeness — such is the life of Pelageya Antipevna Strepetova (1850–1903), difficult and bright, full of dramatic turns. At the age of seven she first appeared on the stage. She was not yet fifteen, when she became a professional artist. And after a while rumors about her brilliant game began to spread throughout Russia. The very first performances of the provincial actress on the stages of Moscow and St. Petersburg literally stunned the theater audience, gave rise to the sincere admiration of some and the same sincere hostility of others. Continue reading
