explosion
“The Racea”: What does the excursion poem about, which the artist Fedotov wrote in his painting “Major Matchmaking”
The painting by Pavel Andreyevich Fedotov “The Matchmaking of the Major” is now in the Tretyakov Gallery. She has no shortage of attention and viewers. All the more interesting is the tour conducted by the artist himself in the poem of his own work “The Racea”. It was written specifically for the story of the painting and read in 1849 at the exhibition of the Academy of Arts.
“Here you are kind to look!”
The racey, that is, edification, moralizing, concerns what is happening on the canvas. A whole performance was played before the viewer – with many actors, with understatement or, conversely, excessive pretentiousness, with the irony that the author put into the work – not just a painter, but also a playwright. Continue reading
People-birds, beautiful ladies and the joy of life: 6 forgotten artists who will change the idea of Soviet painting
They worked in the harsh conditions of socialist realism, but paintings with farmers and tractors are not their style. Their paintings were crushed by bulldozers, not allowed to go to exhibitions, forgotten for many years. Some of them were lucky, and they received professional recognition, participation in exhibitions, posters mentioning their names … but few today remember their work. Artists of the Soviet era combined art and family – or preferred the workshop to a family hearth, searched for their own path, fought, dreamed … and, of course, did it.
Alexandra Beltsova
Alexandra Beltsova was born in Latvia. During the years of training, she met the artist Roman Suta, who became her husband and associate. Together they traveled to Berlin, where they met many avant-garde artists, and to Paris, where they participated in exhibitions along with Picasso and Le Corbusier. Continue reading
“The Secret of Things” in the paintings of Rene Magritte, who wanted to “make everyday life less dreary”
“To make everyday life less dreary” – this was the task set by the Belgian artist Rene Magritte. His paintings do not just attract attention – they can inspire alarm, puzzle, bewitch, even frighten.
Belgian bourgeois
Rene Magritte was born in the small Belgian town of Lessin in 1898. Soon the family moved to Charleroi. The artist’s childhood was not easy, and everything else was marred by tragedy: when Renee was 14, his mother committed suicide.
Magritte studied for two years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, after which he began to work in the field of advertising. The search for Magritte’s own path in art took place under the clear influence of the surrealists. The artist’s style – “magical realism”, as he himself later called it – developed after 1926. Continue reading