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What secret is hidden by the canvas “Cornflowers” by Igor Grabar
Igor Grabar is known not only as an art critic and restorer, but also as a talented impressionist artist. Under his leadership, the Tretyakov Gallery turned into a world-famous museum complex, and the multivolume History of Russian Art was written by his own efforts. Much is known about the professional activities of Grabar, but the details of his personal life are still shrouded in mystery. The key to its solution can serve as his picture “Cornflowers”.
Art for Igor Grabar has always been the subject of knowledge and creation. As a child, Igor showed a passion for drawing. According to his parents, he harassed piles of paper and enthusiastically painted with paints. When the boy grew up, he began to take painting lessons, spent hours in the workshop. After – he entered the Lyceum of Tsarevich Nikolai in Moscow. Igor’s childhood passed in the Ryazan province, and moving to Moscow opened up new horizons for him. Continue reading
People-birds, beautiful ladies and the joy of life
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 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
Creativity for the Mentally Ill: A Book That Changed History
Sometimes you can hear such a statement that in order to create a masterpiece, you must be either a genius or a madman. Tarragon – the hero of the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Becket, said that “we are all born crazy. And some of them remain … “Yes, and where is the line that separates genius from madness? In 1922, a German psychiatrist published a book in which he showed the work of the mentally ill, and this book made a splash among both the psychiatric society and artists.
The fact that some very talented, and even brilliant people suffered from various mental disorders is not news. So, it is known that Gogol suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, and Leo Tolstoy often had bouts of depression that alternated with numerous phobias. Maxim Gorky was prone to vagrancy and pyromania, and some experts insist that Lermontov suffered from a form of schizophrenia that he inherited from his mother. Continue reading
