From icons and onion domes to suprematism and the Stalin baroque, Russian art and architecture seems to many visitors to Russia to be a rather baffling array of exotic forms and alien sensibilities. Without any sense of the rich tradition of Russian culture, an appreciation of the country's enormous artistic wealth becomes a game of historical anecdote--"the church where so-and-so took refuge from what's-his-name"--or a meaningless collection of aesthetic baubles--"I like the blue domes the best." In fact, Russian art and architecture are not nearly so difficult to understand as many people think, and knowing even a little bit about why they look the way they do and what they mean brings to life the culture and personality of the entire country.
(Source: geographia.com)
Like music, the visual arts in Russia were slower to develop along European lines than was literature. With the exception of the portraitist Dmitry Levitsky, no great Russian painters emerged in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In the 1830s the Russian Academy of Arts (which had been founded in 1757) began sending Russian painters abroad for training. Among the most gifted of these were Aleksandr Ivanov and Karl Bryullov, both of whom were known for Romantic historical canvases. A truly national tradition of painting did not begin, however, until the 1870s with the appearance of the “Itinerants.” Although their work is not well known outside Russia, the serene landscapes of Isaak Levitan, the expressive portraits of Ivan Kramskoy and Ilya Repin, and the socially oriented genre paintings of Vladimir Makovsky, Vasily Perov, and Repin arguably deserve an international reputation.
(Source: britannica.com)
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