Exhibition "NATIVE SPEECH. School of Russian Landscape" Automatic translate

The exhibition will include works by Isaac Levitan, Ivan Aivazovsky, Vasily Polenov, Ivan Shishkin, Alexei Savrasov, Lev Lagorio and many other famous landscape painters. Visitors will see the masterpieces of the School of Russian Landscape (Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and MUZhVZ in Moscow), kept in private collections.

"Native speech. A Book for Reading is a Soviet primary school textbook containing works by Russian writers and reproductions of paintings by Russian and Soviet artists that have been reproduced in it since 1946, which in those years were considered as a unique program for comprehending art from the primary school school throughout the USSR. The cultural policy of the Soviet authorities after the Second World War was focused on the formation of a definition of the national in Russian art, where the dominant role was assigned to the landscape.

One of the characteristic phenomena of Russian culture of the 19th-20th centuries was literary centrism, which was gradually strengthened and was characteristic of various areas, including those where the pictorial principle was strong. Art acquired ideological certainty, transforming under the brush of the artist, and "demanded words" through which it was possible to tell and convey socially significant ideas. The Russian landscape of the middle of the 19th century, just like in the middle of the 20th century, was shackled by the idea of ​​searching hand and foot for the “national” in art, and the measure of the “naturalness” of this art was not a visual image, but a word that could describe it.

“Russian art requires words. That’s how we were taught. Since we wrote essays on reproductions of paintings by the Wanderers at school, we know for sure that in this case one cannot do without lengthy explanations. This rule, brought up by the practice of the 19th century, we extend both to the Russian avant-garde and to the Soviet

officialdom, and to the Soviet "second avant-garde". Sometimes it seems that in Russian fine art there are more words than visual images. It is just right for each painting in the museum to give out a special brochure. And it will not be about how this picture is written, but about what it is written about. “- Kira Dolinina “Take off Levitan for me.” Moscow. 2018.

The transformation of the story took place gradually. The first landscape painters of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were guided by the dry idealization accepted in European academism. This is not surprising, since all the teaching of painting at the Academy of Arts was conducted by invited European masters.

A little later, Russian landscape painting went into the mainstream of romanticism, this trend continued until the end of the 19th century. Artists stopped hunting for the best and most representative views and began to pay attention to the change of seasons, the peculiarities of lighting at different times of the day. Thus, the outstanding marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky created a whole catalog-encyclopedia of the states of the sea element. And Alexei Bogolyubov, while remaining faithful to perspective painting, did not allow exaggerations in the depiction of nature for the sake of greater showiness, which was characteristic of his older colleague. He called himself a naturalist, and Aivazovsky - an idealist, in every possible way emphasizing the difference in approach to depicting a seascape.

The appeal to the “national” in the landscape was an important step towards the formation of a realistic artistic method, which manifested itself to the greatest extent in the second half of the 19th century and was associated with the activities of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions - real revolutionaries of their time. The rejection of the academic and romantic idealization of the landscape in painting led to the strengthening of the position of realism, the development of the practice of plein air and etude. Artists turned to nature as the best and perfect teacher. But nevertheless, at the same time, they found their own way to convey certain states of nature or ideological messages through the image of the landscape. So Ivan Shishkin focused on creating epic landscapes imbued with national pride, and Alexei Savrasov and, later, his student Isaac Levitan, on the “mood landscape”,creating philosophical landscapes full of mystical depths - on the collective image of Russian nature, depriving landscapes of illustrativeness, turning painting into poetry. "Poetry of painting" would later become the main characteristic of Levitan’s work. He will enrich this "dictionary" with melancholy, the play of light, the search for the divine principle in the smallest detail.

The development of the practice of plein-airs, observation of the momentary variability of nature, the acquaintance of Russian artists with the work of the French Impressionists, led at the end of the 19th century to the formation of a special trend in Russian painting, the so-called "Russian impressionism", which, although based on the technical achievements of French artists, but nevertheless, in Russia it had its own face. Realistic materiality prevailed in Russian impressionism. The works of Russian impressionists are filled with a riot of color, the dynamics of impasto strokes, naturalistic attention to the material object and extreme picturesqueness. A vivid illustration of this can serve as individual stages of the work of Konstantin Korovin, Petr Petrovichev, Nikolai Dubovsky and Arnold Lakhovsky.In their landscapes, with the fragmentation of the composition typical of impressionism and the vibration of the picturesque surface, majesty and everyday life are combined. The same festive everydayness is read in the urban landscape of the Soviet artist, student of Konstantin Korovin, Sergey Vasilyevich Gerasimov, where the author prefers the play of colors of mountain ranges created by nature, crowning the perspective of a bright resort street, to the industrial romance of cranes.

Having become symbols of the “national” in the Russian landscape, the works of landscape painters went to the pages of the book for reading for elementary grades “Native Speech”, the name of which is currently perceived by many with a certain amount of irony, through the prism of the past, with a touch of nostalgia and sentimentality, mentally returning to childhood, to the first acquaintance with the paintings of great Russian artists from the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum.

We invite you to take this “journey into childhood”, into the beauty of Russia, sung by many generations of Russian landscape painters, into those childhood experiences familiar to many generations of Soviet people, when they, being first-graders, wrote essays based on the reproductions of paintings depicted in “Native Speech” corners of nature and epic distances of Russia from the hot South to the Far North.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Project “NATIVE SPEECH. School of Russian Landscape” Collector Club continues its active exhibition and educational activities, designed for a wide range of viewers.