Recreational Centers in Chisinau in the Vision of Visual Artists

One of the genres of easel painting that remains less pretentious to politics is landscape. The city of Chisinau, one of the most important cities of the Republic, was and remains a source of inspiration for artists Eugenia Gamburd, Rostislav Ocușco, Mihail Petric, Filimon Hămuraru, Ludmila Țonceva, Vasile Toma, Inesa Țîpina, Petru Jireghea, Ion Jumatii, Ion Chitoroagă, Florentin Leancă and others. That is one of the topics addressed by artists reflecting moments of relaxation, rest, sports - recreational centres (parks, lakes, stadiums etc.). This article analyzes the paintings from the collection of the National Museum of Art of Moldova, but also the private collections of plastic artists concerning the rest areas of Chisinau. These paintings made on the subject under research can be attributed not only to the landscape genre but also, in some cases, to genre painting. The subject becomes current for painters with the arrangement of the capital’s parks: The square of the Ensemble of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Chisinau, the Public Garden of Chisinau, the Botanical Garden, the Valley of Roses park, the Valley of Mills park, the Ghidighici Reservoir, the Dinamo Stadium etc.

Performance Matters in Heine: The Case of Pauline Viardot’s ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’

Heinrich Heine’s poem ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’ (Die Heimkehr 29) can be read as a meta-poem about the ambivalence of his ironic art. The poet looks through his window into the stormy darkness, and we cannot tell if his perceptions of a mother carrying groceries and her daughter sitting at home are real or imagined. Reception of the poem has been similarly divided, with some critics likening the poem to a genre painting in a realist vein, and others citing it as another manifestation of Heine’s love-hate relationship with Romantic idealism. Literary translations and musical settings of the poem each take their own stand on the poem’s ambiguities, but the manner and context of performance will be crucial to what any presentation or adaptation of the poem might mean. A particularly cosmopolitan example of such a context is Pauline Viardot’s intimate Karlsuhe salon in the winter of 1869. In performing her own musical setting of the poem in this environment, Viardot seems to have identified with the mother represented in the poem and performs herself as a caring, nurturing matriarch to her own daughters. Ivan Turgenev must have been present at this performance, and his Russian singing translation of Viardot’s song corroborates this sentimental interpretation. Meanwhile, Louis Pomey’s French singing translation, decidedly more acerbic and cutting, may have been prepared for a more public audience interested primarily in Heine’s wit rather than Viardot’s personal family relationships. Finally, a contemporaneous passage in Viardot’s correspondence reveals her offense at Richard Wagner’s recently re-published essay Das Judentum in der Musik and suggests a political performance context for her song in which Viardot now expresses quasi-maternal sympathy for her Jewish colleagues maligned by Wagner’s screed and defends the notion of a cosmopolitan, international family of artists.

РЕПРЕЗЕНТАЦИЯ ПОНЯТИЯ «СОЦИУМ» В РУССКОЙ ЖИВОПИСИ БЫТОВОГО ЖАНРА XIX ВЕКА

The aim of the study is to reveal the ways of representing the concept of “society” in the works of the genre art in the Russian painting of the 1860-1870s. The research is carried out using the method of philosophical and art history analysis of works of fine art. The main object of the study is the painting “Rural procession on Easter” by Vasiliy G. Perov. The study describes the specific features of the genre art in the Russian painting of the 19th century. The research shows how works of the genre art realize their didactive and educating functions. A theoretical analysis of the concepts of “everyday life”, “being”, “society” made it possible to conclude how genre painting of the 19th century models both an ideal person who is in co-existence with the absolute spirit, and a person who is far from the ideal. In the research the authors reveal two worldview models that developed in Russian painting in the 1860-1870s: a model of a perfect human being and a model of a person who is mired in everyday life. The study proves that the latter human model is represented in index signs of characters that worship only material values. The study investigates the versatility of the pictorial model of the Russian society, represented not only as a community absorbed in the routine of the everyday life, but also as a group of people whose life is elevated upwards to the true existence. The research has resulted in the typology of characters of paintings of the genre art, where the type of the character depends on the model of the society represented by the work of art. In its conclusion the study discloses two models of representing the society in Russian painting of the genre art in the 19th century. According to the first model, the everyday principle acts as an absorber of being. The second model represents a society in which everyday life manifests true existence, in harmony with nature and filled with the divine essence.

‘This spasm upon canvas’: George Eliot, Gustave Courbet and Realist Aesthetics

This article offers sustained consideration for the first time of George Eliot’s entanglement with mid-nineteenth-century French art. Taking realism’s transnational nature as its point of origin, this essay probes Eliot’s claim in Adam Bede (1859) for seventeenth-century genre painting as the most conspicuous visual precedent to define, embody and vindicate her aesthetic choices – at just the moment when Gustave Courbet makes realism scandalous in the Salons of the Second Empire. Questioning Eliot’s deliberate disavowal of influence, I trace the modes of transmission through which Courbet’s art was exported to and circulated within Britain during the 1850s; while London’s official art world was unreceptive to French art in the nineteenth century, a different picture emerges if we consider the visibility afforded by independent galleries and the periodical press, and if we take account of these diverse reading, viewing and citational practices. I then offer close readings of works by Eliot and Courbet to suggest that both evidence a discomfort with representation as the primary methodology of realism, and consider the consequences for the ideological, epistemological and affective energies of realist aesthetics. Reading Eliot alongside Courbet reveals her radicalism, but this only becomes clear when we place her realism within the orbit of a broader European tradition and understand her aesthetics as a form of praxis.

The Image of the Orthodox Clergy in Russian Genre Painting of the 19th and Early 20th Century

The article traces the transformation of the artistic public's view on the clergy and their place in the life of Russia on the basis of the images of priests created by domestic masters of the genre in the 19th – early 20th centuries. Genre painting originated in Russia in the second quarter of the 19th century and allowed artists to move away from symbolic academic themes and turn to subjects from the everyday life of their contemporaries. However, as a rule, there was no place for the clergy in those works. The exception was the work of A.G. Venetsianov, who was at the root of the creation of genre painting in Russia. In the period of liberal reforms, the church was viewed as something reactionary and clergy was often portrayed in sharply satirical or comic situations (V.G. Perov, F.S. Zhuravlev). In the post-reform period and with the development of realistic worldview, the images of the priest lost their comic focus on the canvases of K.A. Savitsky, G.G. Myasoedov and I.E. Repin. Late 19th and early 20th centuries for the Russian culture was the period of searching spirituality and coming to understand approaching social upheavals in Russian culture, which was clearly demonstrated by M.V. Nesterov's turn to depicting the image of a priest. His disciple P.D. Korin, who witnessed active persecution of the church in the early 1920s, emphasized in his famous, but unfinished portraits of priests the heroic resistance of the clergy to impending persecution. It is important to say that after decades the artist did not get back to the unfinished canvas, since the situation in the country changed, and the genre of the painting changed to historical.