1.
Russian Empire
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The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until it was overthrown by the short-lived February Revolution in 1917. One of the largest empires in history, stretching over three continents, the Russian Empire was surpassed in landmass only by the British and Mongol empires. The rise of the Russian Empire happened in association with the decline of neighboring powers, the Swedish Empire, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Persia. It played a role in 1812–14 in defeating Napoleons ambitions to control Europe. The House of Romanov ruled the Russian Empire from 1721 until 1762, and its German-descended cadet branch, with 125.6 million subjects registered by the 1897 census, it had the third-largest population in the world at the time, after Qing China and India. Like all empires, it included a large disparity in terms of economics, ethnicity, there were numerous dissident elements, who launched numerous rebellions and assassination attempts, they were closely watched by the secret police, with thousands exiled to Siberia. Economically, the empire had an agricultural base, with low productivity on large estates worked by serfs. The economy slowly industrialized with the help of foreign investments in railways, the land was ruled by a nobility from the 10th through the 17th centuries, and subsequently by an emperor. Tsar Ivan III laid the groundwork for the empire that later emerged and he tripled the territory of his state, ended the dominance of the Golden Horde, renovated the Moscow Kremlin, and laid the foundations of the Russian state. Tsar Peter the Great fought numerous wars and expanded an already huge empire into a major European power, Catherine the Great presided over a golden age. She expanded the state by conquest, colonization and diplomacy, continuing Peter the Greats policy of modernisation along West European lines, Tsar Alexander II promoted numerous reforms, most dramatically the emancipation of all 23 million serfs in 1861. His policy in Eastern Europe involved protecting the Orthodox Christians under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and that connection by 1914 led to Russias entry into the First World War on the side of France, Britain, and Serbia, against the German, Austrian and Ottoman empires. The Russian Empire functioned as a monarchy until the Revolution of 1905. The empire collapsed during the February Revolution of 1917, largely as a result of failures in its participation in the First World War. Perhaps the latter was done to make Europe recognize Russia as more of a European country, Poland was divided in the 1790-1815 era, with much of the land and population going to Russia. Most of the 19th century growth came from adding territory in Asia, Peter I the Great introduced autocracy in Russia and played a major role in introducing his country to the European state system. However, this vast land had a population of 14 million, grain yields trailed behind those of agriculture in the West, compelling nearly the entire population to farm. Only a small percentage lived in towns, the class of kholops, close to the one of slavery, remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter I converted household kholops into house serfs, thus including them in poll taxation
2.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
3.
Imperial Academy of Arts
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The Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, informally known as the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, the academy promoted the neoclassical style and technique, and sent its promising students to European capitals for further study. Training at the academy was virtually required for artists to make successful careers, formally abolished in 1918 after the Russian Revolution, the academy was renamed several times. It established free tuition, students from across the country competed fiercely for its few places annually, in 1947 the national institution was moved to Moscow, and much of its art collection was moved to the Hermitage. The building in Leningrad was devoted to the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, since 1991 it has been called the St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The academy was located in the Shuvalov Palace on Sadovaya Street, in 1764, Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned its first rector, Alexander Kokorinov, to design a new building. It took 25 years to complete the Neoclassical edifice, which opened in 1789, konstantin Thon was responsible for the sumptuous decoration of the interiors. He also designed a quayside in front of the building, with stairs down to the Neva River, Ivan Betskoy reorganized the academy into a de facto government department, it supervised matters concerning art throughout the country, distributing orders and awarding ranks to artists. The academy vigorously promoted the principles of Neoclassicism by sending the most notable Russian painters abroad, in order to learn the ancient and Renaissance styles of Italy and it also had its own sizable collection of choice artworks intended for study and copying. The adherents of this movement became known as peredvizhniki, led by Ivan Kramskoi, they publicly broke with the Academy and organized their own exhibitions, which traveled from town to town across Russia. Ilya Repin, Mikhail Vrubel and some other painters still regarded the academys training as indispensable for the development of professional and technical skills. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Imperial Academy passed through a series of transformations, after the Academys move to Moscow that year, the building in what was then called Leningrad was renamed Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The national academy has stayed in Moscow, in 1991 it was renamed the Russian Academy of Arts. The old academys art collection, which included works by Poussin, David. During the Soviet era, academies were free of tuition fees as they were financed by the government, many would-be students would apply to the Academy for as many as six or seven years in a row without success. With just twenty places available and thousands of applicants, the competition was brutal, well-known graduates of Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1930–1950s include, The Russian Academy of Arts has been headquartered in Moscow since 1947. Its current president is Zurab Tsereteli and its vice-president is Tair Salakhov and it is also called the St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Fine Arts, Sculpture and Architecture. - Saint Petersburg, NP-Print Edition,2007, the Leningrad School Russian Academy of Arts The St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Fine Arts Sergei V. Ivanov
4.
Portrait
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A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person, for this reason, in photography a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position. A portrait often shows a person looking directly at the painter or photographer, nonetheless, many subjects, such as Akhenaten and some other Egyptian pharaohs, can be recognised by their distinctive features. The 28 surviving rather small statues of Gudea, ruler of Lagash in Sumeria between c.2144 -2124 BC, show a consistent appearance with some individuality. Some of the earliest surviving painted portraits of people who were not rulers are the Greco-Roman funeral portraits that survived in the dry climate of Egypts Fayum district. These are almost the only paintings from the world that have survived, apart from frescos, though many sculptures. Although the appearance of the figures differs considerably, they are considerably idealized, the art of the portrait flourished in Ancient Greek and especially Roman sculpture, where sitters demanded individualized and realistic portraits, even unflattering ones. During the 4th century, the portrait began to retreat in favor of a symbol of what that person looked like. In the Europe of the Early Middle Ages representations of individuals are mostly generalized, true portraits of the outward appearance of individuals re-emerged in the late Middle Ages, in tomb monuments, donor portraits, miniatures in illuminated manuscripts and then panel paintings. Moche culture of Peru was one of the few ancient civilizations which produced portraits and these works accurately represent anatomical features in great detail. The individuals portrayed would have been recognizable without the need for other symbols or a reference to their names. The individuals portrayed were members of the elite, priests, warriors. They were represented during several stages of their lives, the faces of gods were also depicted. To date, no portraits of women have been found, there is particular emphasis on the representation of the details of headdresses, hairstyles, body adornment and face painting. One of the portraits in the Western world is Leonardo da Vincis painting titled Mona Lisa. What has been claimed as the worlds oldest known portrait was found in 2006 in the Vilhonneur grotto near Angoulême and is thought to be 27,000 years old. Profile view, full view, and three-quarter view, are three common designations for portraits, each referring to a particular orientation of the head of the individual depicted. Such terms would tend to have greater applicability to two-dimensional artwork such as photography, in the case of three-dimensional artwork, the viewer can usually alter their orientation to the artwork by moving around it
5.
Impressionism
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Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the art community in France. The development of Impressionism in the arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as impressionist music. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting and they constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes were painted in a studio. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air, the Impressionists, however, developed new techniques specific to the style. The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. In the middle of the 19th century—a time of change, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, the Académie was the preserver of traditional French painting standards of content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued, landscape, the Académie preferred carefully finished images that looked realistic when examined closely. Paintings in this style were made up of brush strokes carefully blended to hide the artists hand in the work. Colour was restrained and often toned down further by the application of a golden varnish, the Académie had an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work was displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries represented the values of the Académie, represented by the works of artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme. In the early 1860s, four young painters—Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and they discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life rather than historical or mythological scenes. A favourite meeting place for the artists was the Café Guerbois on Avenue de Clichy in Paris, where the discussions were led by Édouard Manet. They were soon joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, during the 1860s, the Salon jury routinely rejected about half of the works submitted by Monet and his friends in favour of works by artists faithful to the approved style. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manets The Luncheon on the Grass primarily because it depicted a woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While the Salon jury routinely accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, the jurys severely worded rejection of Manets painting appalled his admirers, and the unusually large number of rejected works that year perturbed many French artists
6.
Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
7.
Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
8.
Ilya Repin
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Ilya Yefimovich Repin was a Russian realist painter. He was the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century and he played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European culture. His major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga, Religious Procession in Kursk Province, Repin was born in Chuguyev, in Kharkov Governorate, Ukraine into a family of military settlers. His father traded horses and his grandmother ran an inn and he entered military school to study surveying. In 1863 he went to St. Petersburg Art Academy to study painting but had to enter Ivan Kramskoi preparatory school first and he met fellow artist Ivan Kramskoi and the critic Vladimir Stasov during the 1860s, and his wife, Vera Shevtsova in 1872. In 1874–1876 he showed at the Salon in Paris and at the exhibitions of the Itinerants Society in Saint Petersburg and he was awarded the title of academician in 1876. In 1880 Repin travelled to Zaporozhia in Ukraine to gather material for the 1891 Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and his Religious Procession in Kursk Province was exhibited in 1883, and Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan in 1885. In 1892 he published the Letters on Art collection of essays and he taught at the Higher Art School attached to the Academy of Arts from 1894. In 1898 he purchased an estate, the Penates, in Kuokkala, in 1901 he was awarded the Legion of Honour. In 1911 he traveled with his common-law wife Natalia Nordman to the World Exhibition in Italy, in 1916 Repin worked on his book of reminiscences, Far and Near, with the assistance of Korney Chukovsky. He welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917, celebrations were held in 1924 in Kuokkala to mark Repins 80th birthday, followed by an exhibition of his works in Moscow. In 1925 a jubilee exhibition of his works was held in the Russian Museum in Leningrad, Repin died in 1930 and was buried at the Penates. Repin was born in the town of Chuguyev, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire and his father Yefim Vasilyevich Repin was a private in the Uhlan Regiment of the Imperial Russian Army. As a boy Ilya was educated at the school where his mother taught. From 1854 he attended a military Cantonist school and he did not have fond recollections of his childhood, mainly due to the military settlements his family lived in. In 1856 he became a student of Ivan Bunakov, an icon painter. In 1859–1863 he painted icons and wall-paintings by commission for the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, in 1864 he began attending the Imperial Academy of Arts, and met the painter Ivan Kramskoi. In 1869 he was awarded a gold medal for his painting Job
9.
Pavel Chistyakov
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Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov (Russian, Павел Петрович Чистяков, was a Russian painter and art teacher, known for historical and genre scenes as well as portraits. His father was a serf who had worked as an estate manager. Despite the financial burdens, he saw to it that his son had an education, first at a parish school in Krasny Kholm. In 1849, he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied with Pyotr Basin, from 1854 to 1858, he received two silver medals and one gold, for his depiction of Hermogenes in prison. In 1861, he graduated with the title of Artist, another gold medal, before leaving, he taught for a short time at a preparatory school in Saint Petersburg. In 1862, he headed for Germany, followed by visits to Paris. Upon returning in 1870, he was awarded the title of Academician for several works he had sent home and his few works were mostly of an historical nature, which he attempted to infuse with a psychological depth, rather than merely representing the events. He became an Associate Professor at the Academy in 1872 and, following the reorganization of 1892, from 1890 to 1912, he served as head of the Department of Mosaics and oversaw several mosaic projects, notably at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and Saint Isaacs Cathedral. His wife Vera, daughter of the painter Yegor Meyer, was also an artist of some note, the street where he lived was named in his honor and, in 1987, his home became a museum. Чистяков и его педагогическая система, Искусство,1940 Olga Lyaskovskaya, Чистяков, Tretyakov Gallery,1950 Чистяков П. Чистяков — теоретик и пед, 590pgs, Искусство,1953 Ely Bielutin and Nina Moleva, Павел Петрович Чистяков. теоретик и педагог, Академии художесть,1954, yelena Churilova, Я ещё могу съездить к Чистякову, Прана,2004 ISBN 5-86761-054-3 Biography and appreciation @ the Bezhetsk website
10.
Realism (arts)
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Realism in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements. Realism has been prevalent in the arts at many periods, and is in part a matter of technique and training. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the depiction of lifeforms, perspective. Realist works of art may emphasize the mundane, ugly or sordid, such as works of realism, regionalism. There have been various movements in the arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism. The realism art movement in painting began in France in the 1850s, the realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century. Realism is the precise, detailed and accurate representation in art of the appearance of scenes. Realism in this sense is also called naturalism, mimesis or illusionism, realistic art was created in many periods, and it is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. It becomes especially marked in European painting in the Early Netherlandish painting of Jan van Eyck, however such realism is often used to depict, for example, angels with wings, which were not things the artists had ever seen in real life. It is the choice and treatment of matter that defines Realism as a movement in painting. The development of increasingly accurate representation of the appearances of things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the depiction of the anatomy of humans and animals, of perspective and effects of distance. Ancient Greek art is recognised as having made great progress in the representation of anatomy. Pliny the Elders famous story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC may well be a legend, roman portraiture, when not under too much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its subjects. The art of Late Antiquity famously rejected illusionism for expressive force, scientific methods of representing perspective were developed in Italy and gradually spread across Europe, and accuracy in anatomy rediscovered under the influence of classical art. As in classical times, idealism remained the norm, intriguingly, having led the development of illusionic painting, still life was to be equally significant in its abandonment in Cubism. The depiction of ordinary, everyday subjects in art also has a history, though it was often squeezed into the edges of compositions. However these objects are at least largely there because they carry layers of complex significance, pieter Bruegel the Elder pioneered large panoramic scenes of peasant life
11.
Mikhail Vrubel
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Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel is usually regarded amongst the Russian painters of the Symbolist movement and of Art Nouveau. In reality, he stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought in Late Byzantine. Vrubel was born in Omsk, Russia and his paternal grandfather Mikhail Antonovich Vrubel was of Polish heritage, he served in the Imperial Russian Army, then headed the Astrakhan Cossacks. Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vrubel followed his fathers steps and made a military career and his wife Anna Karlovna von Krabbe was Danish. Vrubel was one of the four children and his mother died when he was three years old. The next year he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied by direction of Pavel Chistyakov, even in his earliest works, he exhibited great talent for drawing and an idiosyncratic style. He would later develop a penchant for fragmentary composition and an unfinished touch, in 1884, he was summoned to replace the lost 12th-century murals and mosaics in the St. Cyrils Church of Kiev with new ones. In order to execute this commission, he went to Venice to study medieval Christian art and it was here that, in the words of an art historian, his palette acquired new strong saturated tones resembling the iridescent play of precious stones. Most of his works painted in Venice have been lost, because the artist was interested in creative process than in promoting his artwork. In 1886, he returned to Kiev, where he submitted designs to the newly built St Volodymir Cathedral. The jury, however, failed to appreciate the novelty of his works, at that period, he executed some illustrations for Hamlet and Anna Karenina, which had little in common with his later Demon and Prophet themes. In 1905 he created the mosaics of the hotel Metropol in Moscow, while in Kiev, Vrubel started painting sketches and watercolours illustrating the demon, from a long Romantic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. The poem described the carnal passion of an eternal nihilistic spirit for a Georgian girl Tamara, at that period Vrubel developed a keen interest in Oriental arts, and particularly Persian carpets, and even attempted to imitate their texture in his paintings. In 1890, Vrubel relocated to Moscow where he could best follow the burgeoning innovations, like other artists associated with the Art Nouveau style, he excelled not only in painting but also in applied arts, such as ceramics, majolics, and stained glass. He also produced architectural masks, stage sets, and costumes and it is the large painting of Seated Demon that brought notoriety to Vrubel. During 1896, he met the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela. Half a year later married and settled in Moscow, where Zabela was invited by Mamontov to perform in his private opera theatre. While in Moscow, Vrubel designed stage sets and costumes for his wife, who sang the parts of the Snow Maiden, the Swan Princess, using Russian fairy tales, he executed some of his most acclaimed pieces, including Pan, The Swan Princess, and Lilacs
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Konstantin Korovin
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Konstantin Alekseyevich Korovin was a leading Russian Impressionist painter. Konstantin was born in Moscow to a merchant family officially registered as peasants of Vladimir Gubernia and his father, Aleksey Mikhailovich Korovin, earned a university degree and was more interested in arts and music than in the family business established by Konstantins grandfather. Konstantins older brother Sergei Korovin was a notable realist painter, Konstantins relative Illarion Pryanishnikov was also a prominent painter of the time and a teacher at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1875 Korovin entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and his brother Sergei was already a student at the school. During their student years, the Korovins became friends with fellow students Valentin Serov and Isaac Levitan, in 1881–1882, Korovin spent a year at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, but returned disappointed to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He studied at the school under his new teacher Vasily Polenov until 1886, in 1885 Korovin traveled to Paris and Spain. Paris was a shock for me … Impressionists… in them I found everything I was scolded for back home in Moscow, Polenov introduced Korovin to Savva Mamontovs Abramtsevo Circle, Viktor Vasnetsov, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Ilya Repin, Mark Antokolsky and others. The groups love for stylized Russian themes is reflected in Korovins picture A Northern Idyll, in 1885 Korovin worked for Mamontovs opera house, designing the stage decor for Giuseppe Verdis Aida, Léo Delibes Lakmé and Georges Bizets Carmen. In 1888 Korovin traveled with Mamontov to Italy and Spain, where he produced the painting On the Balcony, Konstantin traveled within Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia and exhibited with the Peredvizhniki. He painted in the Impressionist, and later in the Art Nouveau, in the 1890s Korovin became a member of the Mir iskusstva art group. Korovins subsequent works were influenced by his travels to the north. In 1888 he was captivated by the northern landscapes seen in The Coast of Norway. His second trip to the north, with Valentin Serov in 1894, Korovin painted a large number of landscapes, Norwegian Port, St. Triphons Brook in Pechenga, Hammerfest, Aurora Borealis, The Coast at Murmansk and others. The paintings are built on a web of shades of grey. The etude style of works was typical for Korovins art of the 1890s. Using material from his trip, Korovin designed the Far North pavilion at the 1896 All Russia Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod and he painted ten big canvasses for the pavilion as well, depicting various aspects of life in the northern and Arctic regions. After the closure of the Exhibition, the canvasses were eventually placed in the Yaroslavsky Rail Terminal in Moscow, in the 1960s, they were restored and transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1900 Korovin designed the Central Asia section of the Russian Empire pavilion at the Paris World Fair and was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government, in the beginning of the 20th century, Korovin focused his attention on the theater
