Monthly Archives: November 2018
Fayum portraits
These amazing works of art, which are often called “icons before icon painting”, are not just historical values. They can serve as a magnificent and impressive illustration of the mutual penetration of cultures.
The Fayum portraits were created for the ritual of burial in ancient Egypt during the times of Roman rule of the first and third centuries of our era.
The first find in the Fayum oasis in 1887 assigned them the name Fayum. Portraits continued to be called, even discovering similar treasures in other parts of Egypt. To date, about 750 ancient masterpieces have been collected. Continue reading
PORTRAITS as a mirror of the soul
Portrait is a realistic genre depicting a person or a group of people existing in reality. The portrait – in French reading – portrait, from the old French portraire – “to reproduce something the line in line”. Another facet of the name of the portrait lies in the outdated word “parsuna” – from the Latin. persona – “personality; individual”.
The origin of the term “portrait”
The Frenchman Andre Felibien (1619 – 1695), the official court historian of King Louis XIV, was the first to suggest that the word “portrait” be the images of exclusively “human beings”, thereby separating man from the animal and plant worlds.
The origin of the portrait genre Continue reading
Alexandra Exter: Amazon, carried away by the whirlwind of the revolution
Malevich, “inventing” Suprematism, did not let anyone into the workshop. The only exception was the avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter. Once a resident of Kiev, having moved to France, she taught at the school of Fernand Leger, created “model” clothes, and after a long oblivion her paintings are now valued “by a million.” Our small excursion is on the Kiev routes of the “Amazon of the Russian avant-garde”.
“Kiev artists are primarily not artists, but some people without any taste, for whom, judging by their works, the drawings on the candy boxes represent an unattainable ideal,” Alexandra Exter wrote these words when she visited one of the city’s art exhibitions in 1912 year Continue reading
