An exhibition of Arkhip Kuindzhi opens at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

For the 175th anniversary of Arkhip Kuindzhi, the Engineering Building of the Tretyakov Gallery decided to open a large retrospective of his work. In total, 180 works of this master will be presented at this exhibition. In addition to paintings that are kept in the Tretyakov Gallery, works of art from the reserves of museums in Belarus and Azerbaijan, as well as some works that are included in private collections, will be exhibited.

Among the works on display, visitors to the museum will be able to see the famous works of Kuindzhi: "Birch Grove", "Night on the Dnieper", "Dnieper in the Morning". This time there will also be works of art that have not been exhibited in Moscow before: "Volga", which is kept in the Azerbaijan National Museum of Art and "Sunset in the Steppe", which is part of the collection of the Art Museum of Buryatia.

Olga Atroshchenko is the curator of this project. She said that Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi was born near Mariupol in the family of a simple shoemaker. He entered the history of Russian painting as a legendary landscape painter. In the first two works, you can still see human figures, but in the future Kuindzhi prefers writing exclusively types of nature.

When painting landscapes, this painter tried to discern its very essence and did not connect in any way with the mood of a person, which can often be seen in the works of other artists who were contemporaries of Arkhip Kuindzhi. In his works, the artist's love for nature is visible. His disciples said that in the Crimea they had to clear streams. The grass that escaped from him was not thrown away, since their teacher transplanted it to a new place.

There is an opinion that this great landscape painter used special colors, which he created on his own, to create his paintings. Nobody can say for sure whether this is so. At the same time, the curator of the retrospective said that 20 Kuindzhi's works were studied by specialists who work in the department of complex research. They did not find any special colors in any of these paintings. Perhaps this opinion arose due to the fact that the landscape painter felt the colors very well and perfectly transferred them to the canvas, due to which the paintings seem to be alive.

The exhibition of works by Arkhip Kuindzhi opens on October 6 at the Tretyakov Gallery, and will last until February 17 next 2019.