7 daagse exclusieve moderne kunst cultuur reis Moskou -  Biënnale

 by Olga Smirnova - Curator and local Guide in Moscow

Exciting Art scene in Moscow

                                                         Come and see ! Olga Smirnova

Modern & Contemporary Art -Rendevouz en Moscu -

Let us take a look at some of the most outstanding artists from the 19th to 21st centuries who became famous not just in Russia but also around the world

Levitan, Shishkin, and Aivazovsky, among many others, are names known to every well-educated person in Russia and abroad. These artists are Russia's pride. Today, too, there is no shortage of talented Russian artists. Their names are just not yet so widely known.

In most of his paintings, Alexey Chernigin uses oil on canvas to capture beauty, romance, and moments of true feeling. Alexey Chernigin inherited his talent and passion for art from his father, the famous Russian artist Alexander Chernigin. Every year, they hold a joint exhibition in their native Nizhny Novgorod.

This young and incredibly talented artist from Krasnodar calls his paintings "fun and irresponsible garbage." Konstantin Lupanov paints what he loves. The primary subjects of his paintings are his friends, acquaintances, relatives, and his beloved cat, Philip. The simpler the subject, says the artist, the truer the painting.

Stanislav Plutenko's creative motto is: "To see the unusual and to do the unusual." This Moscow artist uses a unique technique, combining tempera, acrylic, watercolor, and a very thin glaze applied by airbrush. Stanislav Plutenko has been rated among the top 1000 surrealists of all time.

This contemporary Russian artist, centuries from now, will no doubt rank among the world's great painters. Nikolai Blokhin is known above all as a portrait painter, although he also paints landscapes, still lifes, and genre paintings. But it is in his portraits that his talent is most strikingly apparent.

Looking at the hyperrealist still lifes of this Russian artist makes you want to reach out your hand and touch, or take right from the canvas, whatever they depict. They are just that real and alive. The artist Dmitri Annenkov lives in Moscow and works in various genres. He is remarkably talented in all of them.

It is impossible to feel indifferent toward the work of artist Vasily Shulzhenko. He is either loved or hated, praised for understanding the Russian soul or accused of hating it. The Russia his paintings depict is harsh, uncensored and grotesque beyond compare, complete with alcohol, debauchery, and stagnation.

Under the pseudonym Arush Votsmush hides Alexander Shumtsov, a talented artist from Sevastopol. "The word "conflict" refers to that moment when you see something surprising, and it forces your inner wheels turn in the right direction. A good conflict is exciting, it gives you goose bumps. And you can get goose bumps from anything: cold water, a holiday, something that suddenly brings you back to your childhood, when a feeling first surprised you and took hold of you... I never try to prove anything to anyone with my work. What I do, above all, is enjoy myself. It's the "clean" high of creativity. Or a clean life, without drugs. Just miracles."

Vinogradov and Dubossarsky are the great, raunchy delinquents of contemporary Russian painting. The creative duo formed in the mid-1990s, and has already gained worldwide fame. It was for good reason that writer Victor Pelevin used works of Dubossarsky and Vinogradov as illustrations for one of his novels.

The young Russian artist Mikhail Golubev lives and works in St. Petersburg. His work consists of "thought paintings," fantasy paintings, and philosophical reflections. He is an extremely interesting artist with a view of the world that is unique, yet feels very familiar.

These is not a photograph, but painting by the Russian realist painter Serge Marshennikov. Many of his most famous paintings depict the artist's wife and muse, Natalia. The couple has been together for many years, and is raising a 10-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, the whole world admires this artist's sensual and tender work.

Famous classic  20 st Century  painters:

1. Karl Bryullov

One of the best Russian portraitists, Bryullov traveled extensively in Europe, spending a large part of his life in Italy. The monumental canvas The Last Day of Pompeii, its vast size (6.5 meters in width) dramatically depicted the moment when the antique town was destroyed, brought him international recognition. Its first display in Rome produced a furor. Then the painting was moved to the Louvre in Paris, where it was awarded a gold medal at the 1834 Paris Salon. Afterwards it was presented as a gift to Tsar Nicholas I and is now in the Pushkin Museum in St. Petersburg. The portraits he was commissioned to paint by the Italian nobility in large numbers also made Bryullov immensely popular. The artist spent the last years of his life near Rome, in the house of his friend Angelo Tittoni, whose family inherited part of Bryullov's artistic legacy.

2. Vasily Vereshchagin

Vassili Verestchagin, Painter, Soldier, Traveler was the title of a book published by the Association of American Artists for his first exhibition in the U.S. The three descriptions encapsulate his whole life. A famous battle scene painter and ethnographer, Vereshchagin took part in military campaigns and witnessed what he later depicted on canvas (he even met a soldier's death during the Russo-Japanese War). He owed his fame to major European and American exhibitions which he staged himself, carefully designing their "scenography" and displaying series of paintings alongside artifacts from his travels. Among the best known are an exhibition of his Turkestan series at the Crystal Palace in London in 1873 and a triumphant exhibition in New York in 1888, followed by a three-year tour of major American cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis etc.) and an auction in 1891 at which 110 works were sold.

3. Léon Bakst

In 1909-1910 Sergei Diaghilev brought his Scheherazade and Cleopatra ballets to Paris. Their astounding success brought fame not just to the dancers but also to Bakst, the artist who designed the costumes and scenery. "Russian Orientalism" with its exquisite eroticism moved from the stage to fashionable living rooms - Bakst sold his sketches to designer Paul Poiret, introduced the fashion for turbans, wide trousers and colored wigs, and dressed the extravagant Marchesa Сasati. After the ballet premieres came an exhibition at the Louvre, which proved to be a sell-out, and commissions for portraits and wall paintings from American millionaires such as the Rothschilds and Morgans. In 1914 he held his first exhibition in the U.S., which successfully toured from New York to Philadelphia.

4. Boris Kustodiev

The creator of the most "Russian" of paintings depicting fairs and merchant's wives by their samovar, Kustodiev is the only Russian artist to have been awarded a gold medal at the Venice Biennale in its entire history. In 1907 the Russian Pavilion was curated by impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Thanks to him, Europe saw the best Russian painters of the time, but it is Kustodiev who was awarded the top prize. The jury was much impressed by his Portrait of the Polenov Family, which is now at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, and Portrait of Count N.P. Ignatieff. A study for the latter could be viewed at TEFAF - The European Fine Art Fair - in Maastricht in March.

5. Wassily Kandinskyy

inventor of abstraction divided his life among Russia, Germany and France. His main work was done in Munich, the city where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, formed the Blue Rider group of expressionist artists, mounted his first one-man exhibition and taught at art school, later relocating to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin". It is in Munich that one of the best collections of his canonical works is to be found. Another major collection where the emergence of non-objective art can be traced is the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

6. Kazimir Malevich

Malevich's Black Square of 1915 became a symbol of the avant-garde and a manifesto of the new art world in which the principal criterion was no longer art's likeness to the real world. Outside the borders of the USSR, the triumphant march of Suprematism - the movement that Malevich invented - began in the late 1920s: A large exhibition of the artist's work was held in Warsaw, followed by Berlin. The paintings he selected for the show never returned to Russia - they can be seen today in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Malevich also remains the most expensive Russian artist - his Suprematist Composition was sold by Sotheby's in 2008 for $60m dollars.

7. Nicolai Fechin

Born in Kazan, Fechin - a virtuoso portrait painter who created his own recognizable style - did not approve of the Revolution and in 1923 emigrated to the U.S. where he lived for 30 successful years. In New York he held exhibitions and found a ready clientele, which included major collectors and celebrities. His works are to be found in many American museums and private collections and appear regularly at auction the world over.

8. Pavel Tchelitchew

A classic exponent of modernism, a mystic, the "Russian Dali," Tchelitchew was one of the most colorful emigres of the revolutionary period. Until recently Tchelitchew was better known in Europe and America than Russia. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds around 150 examples of his work, while Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery has one, bequeathed in the artist's will. A scion of a noble family, he emigrated to Berlin in 1920, later moving to Paris and then, in the 1930s, to the U.S. One of the first to recognize his talent was the legendary Gertrude Stein - she bought his Basket of Strawberries, which hung in her apartment next to her beloved Picasso. Both then in Paris and later the two were compared, and the comparison was not always to the Spanish artist's advantage. In America he was to find real fame - he created scenery and costumes for the ballets of Balanchine and painted portraits. Official recognition came with a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942.

9. Ilya Kabakov

The chief representative of the Moscow Conceptualists and the most successful of the unofficial artists in the USSR, Kabakov managed to impart a universal human dimension, comprehensible and eagerly received throughout the world, to everyday Soviet living conditions and wholesale lack of freedom. He has lived in New York since the late 1980s, holding one-man shows throughout the world at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou in Paris and Tate in London.

10. Grisha Bruskin

Worldwide fame came to Bruskin in literally a split second with the fall of an auctioneer's hammer. In 1988, at the one and only Sotheby's auction to be held in Moscow, his Fundamental Lexicon was sold for what was an unprecedented sum for Russian unofficial art - $416,000. The purchaser was the Oscar-winning film director Milos Forman. Two weeks later Bruskin was already in America, where, unlike the USSR, his exhibitions were not banned but, to the contrary, his work was actively exhibited. He then signed a contract with one of the giants of the art market, Marlborough Gallery, which continues to represent his interests to this day.

& Masters from the past