The formation of the art of socialistic realism in Mongolia: the main stages, the role of the Russian art school

Статья посвящена стилю социалистического реализма в изобразительном искусстве Монголии. Выделены основные этапы становления и факторы его формирования: революционные события и утверждение идеологии социализма; поддержка нового направления правительством Монголии, а также влияние российской художественной школы. Показана роль Российской академии художеств, Института им. И.Е. Репина, Института им. В.И. Сурикова в обучении и передаче художественных традиций и навыков монгольским художникам. Отмечено своеобразие монгольского варианта стиля соцреализма, синтезировавшего приемы и методы российской школы живописи с народными формами художественного творчества и буддийским искусством; показана непреходящая значимость и востребованность данного стиля в современном искусстве Монголии. Охарактеризовано творчество ведущих монгольских художников, и проведен искусствоведческий анализ ряда произведений. The article is devoted to the style of socialistic realism in the fine arts of Mongolia. The main stages of formation and factors of its formation are highlighted: revolutionary events and the establishment of the ideology of socialism; support of the new authorities of Mongolia, as well as the influence of the Russian art school. The role of the Russian Academy of Arts, the I.E. Repin St. Petersburg State Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the Moscow State Academic Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov in teaching and transferring artistic traditions and skills to Mongolian artists is shown. The peculiarity of the Mongolian version of the style of socialist realism, which synthesized the techniques and methods of the Russian school of painting with folk forms of art and Buddhist art, is noted; the enduring importance and relevance of this style in the contemporary art of Mongolia is shown. The work of leading Mongolian artists is characterized and an art history analysis of a number of works is carried out.

The Image of the Yellow (Huang He) River in Chinese Painting

The article is devoted to the creative works of artists who have created pictures of life of the people living along the Yellow (Huang He) River in all nine regions of China. The Huang He River, as the main artery of the country, has long been the subject of study by historians, writers and painters. However, contemporary artists who dedicated their works to the river have not been researched. This work examines the collective image of the Huang He River in the works of Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present day in order to get acquainted with its peculiarities. The methodological basis for the study of contemporary art is the historical and cultural and socio-cultural approaches. The methods of historical-comparative and sociological analysis of art, biographical and iconographic analysis, semiotics and hermeneutics methods are used. For the first time the features of oil painting in different regions along the Huang He River are presented: the geomorphological characteristics, national characters and folk customs in the river basin, and the cultural protection function of painting. The names of a number of Chinese artists have been introduced into Russian art history, and the panorama of the development of painting in the works of Chinese masters painting on the Huang He River has been shown. The works of these artists are correlated with the traditional art and religious ideas of the people living along the Huang He River: the role of created paintings in preserving the cultural code of the inhabitants through the portrayal of national costume, folk and religious holidays is traced. The results can serve as a basis for historical and comparative studies of the artworks of Chinese masters and become the basis for courses on the history of Chinese art.

Inspiracje Grigorija G. Gagarina i jego rola w procesie kształtowania stylu rosyjsko - -bizantyńskiego w architekturze dziewiętnastowiecznego Imperium Rosyjskiego – zarys zagadnienia

The paper represents an attempt to outline Grigory G. Gagarin’s artistic interests and his influence on creating one of the national style variants in the 19th -century Russian Empire: the Russian -Byzantine style. This article is not only a selection of theoretician’s quotes, but also an attempt to create an appropriate background and clear context for his theses. Moreover, the paper is to constitute a coherent outline of his thoughts having an impact on the creating of the national style and the search for architectural inspiration from selected periods of history. An interesting fact is that because of Gagarin’s first attempts to develop consistent norms and determinants of inspiration, among others, for architects and artists, he created foundations to formulate in the future a clear theoretical assumption of the Russian -Byzantine style. What is more, the theoretician did not avoid the confrontation of Russian art with Western European culture. Gagarin tried to not only indicate the relationships between the evolution of specific styles in art and architecture, but also their mutual influences and consequences. In the paper’s narration another important thread in the theoretician’s activity is also mentioned: his attitude to the cultural heritage of the North and South Caucasus. In the 19th century, the region’s territories formed the southwestern borders of the Russian Empire, and moreover they were the destinations of Gagarin’s diplomatic activities for the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Empire. The paper is an introduction to further research not only into Gagarin’s position in the process of creating the national style in the Russian Empire in the19th century. Furthermore, the research will bring up his functioning in the Western European artistic-cultural society of that time and his attempts to find mutual inspiration in Western and Eastern Europe.

The Recipe for Success: Repin’s Painting Barge-Haulers on the Volga and Stasov’s Conception of Russian Art

Barge-Haulers on the Volga is one of the most famous works of the Russian realist painter Ilya Repin. As I demonstrate in this article, on the one hand, it brought Repin resounding success and, on the other, it molded his creative conception. The Russian art critic Vladimir Stasov outlined the artist’s success. In March 1873, Stasov’s poetic depiction of Repin’s painting, where he expressed his admiration for Repin’s talent, focusing on specific aspects that he contended had to be included in a perfect work of Russian art, was published in the daily newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti. I attempt to show that Stasov’s praise had a devastating effect on Repin’s creative process. By examining Repin’s post Barge-Haulers successful works for this pattern, I show how the painter tried to incorporate every one of the “ingredients” that Stasov outlined and ultimately created a typified group of paintings documenting life on the periphery of the Russian Empire with those features, which marked his entire career.

FORMATION OF THE NEW HERO IMAGE IN RUSSIAN ART OF THE 1920’S AND 1930’S

The art of the Soviet era attracts more and more attention of researchers and the public year by year. The exhibitions held over the past decades in Russia and abroad, the published monographs dedicated to works of art of the era and particular artists, the international creative contacts in cultural field — all of that has introduced previously unknown works into art history studies, which has allowed to re-evaluate the objectives and tasks of the art of the period and the development of the artistic process in general. That is why it is of great interest to study the ways the plastic arts formed and developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The 1917 revolution in its foundations had not just a change in social and political reality, but also a change in the very essence of man. The new era demanded a new hero, shaped his appearance in its works. The soviet man, thought of as a new man, became a fundamentally new object of art. If the 1920’s became the time of the search in proletarian art and the flourishing of avant-gardism, then in the 1930’s the objective of art in building the lifeworld of a new man began to be understood much narrower and stricter, and this Man who perceives art began to be described as a “normal” (that is, average, “ordinary”) consumer of cultural tradition. The “New Man” in the plastic arts of the 1920’s and 1930’s was formed as the new hero of society; avant-garde artists sought his originality in the images of generalized and abstract aviators, peasants, women; artists of socialist realism began to form the images of “typical” heroes of the time (military men, athletes, rural workers, scientists) as new “Renaissance people”, equally ready for work and defense. At the same time, two main tendencies, two directions that correspond to the two tasks of socialist realism, clearly lie in the image of the “new” Soviet man: the depiction of reality (that is, the new Soviet man that really exists) and the depiction of the ideal (that is, the ideal man).

«Успение Богородицы» в средневековом искусстве Армении и Руси

The article is devoted to parallel identical phenomena in Armenian and Russian art, phenomena that are not due to mutual influence, but reflect similar processes in the development of Eastern Christian art in territories that are quite distant from each other. In the context of the study of the origins and development, the general features of the iconography of the Dormition of the Theotokos in Armenian and Russian art are considered, namely the iconographic version of this scene with the episode of the Punishment of Sophoniah (Avfonia). Its appearance was associated with the tendency to expand and enrich iconographic schemes with narrative and didactic elements, with a freer use of non-canonical apocryphal texts as sources of iconography.

Symbolism in the Russian visual art in the era of Art Nouveau: analytical overview in the light of latest research

The subject of this article is the works of the Russian artists of the late XIX – early XX centuries in the context of problematic of symbolism and Art Nouveau, as well as the scientific foundation that has developed as yet in studying this topic. Research methodology is based on the conceptual synthesis of classical art history approaches towards the analysis of artistic material with the theoretical interdisciplinary methods of humanities, such as iconology and hermeneutics, as well as the contextual-associative method developed by the author. The goal of this article consists in determination of the peculiarities of symbolism in Russia due to the transformation of the attitude towards the spiritual problematic of art of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, which is relevant for the modern art history. The author is firs in the Russian art history to conduct a comprehensive analytical overview of the development stages of symbolism in the Russian visual art based on the years-long work with the archival materials, scientific publications (that cover over a century), and works of the Art Nouveau authors stored in the museum funds, many of which after 1917  appeared to be on the periphery of attention of art historians due to ideological reasons. The revealed individual characteristics of symbolism as a holistic artistic phenomenon, created on the level of modern humanistic knowledge, determine the novelty of this work and can valuable in further study of symbolism and Art Nouveau. Broadening of representations on the Russian art of the late XIX – early XX centuries, allow returning the heritage of the symbolist artists into the context of art, which is of undeniable importance from the perspective of restoration of natural logic of the development of the history of art in Russia, making this publication valuable in various fields of study of art and culture.

Metamorphoses of Portrait Genre in Russian Art at the Turn of the 18th–19th Centuries

The article is dedicated to the research of changes in the development of portrait painting in Russian art at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. A more common approach in the academic literature is a study of typological variants for the portrait image within the stable system, formed under the influence of classicism, or the review of a new concept in portrait painting, embodied by the artists of Romantic period. In that regard the transitional stage, related to the fundamental revision of portrait’s nature as a specific genre, lacks the close attention of researchers. The crisis of Enlightenment’s ideals at the end of the 18th century causes a rethinking of the relationship between a person and the outside world. This tendency directly influences the art of portraiture, which is now distinguished by more expressed dynamism of image. This is particularly important to the national tradition of portrait painting in the 18th century, which before showed the static approach for the representation of model and the moderation of portrait characteristic. Meanwhile, the fluidity becomes not only a method of artistic expression in a single work, but also a guiding principle for the modification of portrait painting at the system level. In other words, there is a new understanding of the fundamental categories inherent in the portrait genre: the popularity of more compact forms of portrait art, the ratio of ceremonial and chamber trends, new relationships between the master and the model, the active interaction of the individual and the surrounding nature. The interest in English culture also plays an important role in these processes. Despite the transitional nature of the era and external influences, Russian portrait painting at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries remains one of the main national features of genre — the prevalence of semi-ceremonial variants of image.

ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE A. BLOK’S POETRY IN THE SYMPHONIC SCORE OF B. TISHCHENKO'S BALLET THE TWELVE

The article examines the relationship between music and poetry in the ballet The Twelve by the outstanding Russian symphonist of the second half of the XX century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko (1939–2010). The performance by the famous choreographer L. Yakobson, staged at the Kirov Theater in Leningrad in 1964, became one of the first avant-garde ballets in the Soviet Union. The study focuses on the different approaches of the composer and choreographer to the stage performance of A. Blok's poetry, which led to serious creative disagreements and even conflicts during the preparation of the premiere. Tishchenko in his reading relied on Blok's verse, its rhythm, size and complex, sometimes unexpected semantics. The speech beginning in The Twelve is quite tangible, the composer often follows Blok's lines literally. They now and then emerge in the flow of music, controlling it not only in the figurative-semantic and plot plans, but also in the rhythmic-intonation. The article concludes that Tishchenko's work has led to an impressive artistic result: the ballet score is written in a fresh, original and modern language. Tishchenko's music became the basis of the first avant-garde Soviet ballet performance and, in this context, firmly entered the history of Russian art