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| India first global venue for rare Russian winter art |
| New Delhi, March 11 (IANS) |
Thirty-three rare paintings, all classical 19th and 20th century Russian winter landscapes by leading artists, have stepped out of the Russian Museum at St.Petersburg for the first time in the archive's 115-year-old history for a show in the Indian capital.
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 Coinciding with the visit of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, ''Russian Winter'' will be thrown open Friday at the Russian Centre of Science and Culture (RCSC).
"India is the first country where they are being shown. The exhibition marks the 45th anniversary of the RCSC in the capital. The significance of this exhibition is that for the first time in the history of India-Russia relations the Russian Museum has arrived in India to showcase its treasures," Fyodor A. Rozovskiy, director, RCSC, said.
A blast of white, pastel, golden and green, the paintings will be showcased at a specially-designed gallery space fitted with gadgets to control temperature and humidity to "protect the rare art works".
Offering a sneak preview of the Russian winter landscapes - mostly oil paintings painted between 1810 and 1980 - Rozovskiy said "the world was seeing the winter landscapes of Russia for the first time".
The collection boasts of masters like Boris Koustodiev, Mstislav Dobuzhinskiy, Petr Gruzinskiy, Alexei Savrasov, Konstantin Makovskiy, Nikolai Abutkov and Nikolai Egorovich Sverchkov.
"The Russian Museum has the world's best avant garde collection of art. While going through the collection, we realised that it has only 100 art works devoted to Russian winter - which is intense and different from all other winters across the world," Evgenia Petrova, deputy director of the Russian Museum and Academic Research, told IANS at the preview.
"Global warming may have changed it, but the winter in Russia is still a source of inspiration for artists. The oil paintings capture the unique facets of Russian life when days and nights stretch on, unbearably cold. We have chosen the works to chronicle the history of Russian art though its winters."
According to Petrova, for nearly five winter months the temperature in Russia remains below minus 25 degrees Celsius.
"Enormous snowdrifts dot the roadsides, rivers are frozen and trees are adorned by a lace work of frost. In Nikolai Abutkov's composition 'Winter. St Petersburg View (1859)', the full-flowing Neva river is presented as a frozen street. A part of it also serves as a well in the art work from which people draw water," Petrova said.
In the oil composition "Shrovetide (1889)", painter Gruzinsky captures the spirit of the raucous festival in a snow-laden village though a wild horse cart race.
The 121 X 193 inches masterpiece of classical realism stands out for its photographic details, fluid motion and tonalities of shades that catch the natural light of an invisible sun.
"It is small part of the St Petersburg collection that we have brought to India. The city, once the royal capital, has two trains of art- a state archive of classical Russian art and another full of modern and contemporary European art," Joseph Kiblitskiy, director of the publishing programme of Russian Museum, said. The exhibition closes April 4.
The show is a collaboration between the Russian Museum and Russian telecom giant Sistema which provides telecom services in states like Rajasthan, Haryana, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Kerala.
The telecom company has a 10-year agreement with the Russian Museum, which was set up in 1895 in St.Petersburg under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. It opened for viewing in 1898. The museum with its two permanent wings - Mikhailovsky Palace wing and the Benois Wing - has nearly 400,000 exhibits.
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