Monthly Archives: September 2019
How Russian artist Makovsky painted a portrait of the US president and opened the “Russian style” to Americans
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Western world discovered the Russian style. Sundresses, kokoshniks, furs and precious fabrics, boyars and feasts – this is exactly such Russia that the great Russian artist Konstantin Makovsky showed the Americans on his canvases. The success of the “Russian Rubens” in America was so great that Konstantin Egorovich in 1901 decided to visit the New World. During this trip, the craftsmen were invited to paint a portrait of US President Theodore Roosevelt.
The conventional wisdom that talent should be hungry was clearly not related to Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky. At the end of the 19th century, he was probably one of the most successful and sought-after masters in Russia. Continue reading
10 contemporary blind artists who surprised the world with their art
It will not be a revelation to anyone that painting is an exclusively visual form of art, therefore the phrase “blind artist” itself sounds like nonsense. But in fact, there are amazing people who are actually blind (they have eyesight, but not enough for certain types of activities), but at the same time they wrote stunningly beautiful paintings that can compete with the works of sighted artists.
1. Michael Williams
Michael Williams was born in the American city of Memphis in 1964. For the first time, a boy became interested in art, watching his mother (who was an artist) paint a cowboy leaving for sunset. Continue reading
How Pavel Tretyakov competed with the emperor
Before the revolution, patronage of the arts was considered not only charitable, but also beneficial for the donor himself, and the point here was not taxes at all. According to the ideas of merchants in the old days, this activity avoided the terrible temptation – the power of money. Most often, wealthy industrialists became patrons of shelters, hospitals, and educational institutions. At first, the partners and competitors laughed at the Tretyakov brothers’ passion for painting, but time, of course, put everything in its place.
Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov were the eldest children in a well-known merchant family. Continue reading
