Ringworm As Its Healing

FROM RUSSIA

January 26 to April 18

Royal Academy of Arts

London

The Impressionists have really made history. Their names are pronounced with admiration of art even by those who do not intend to, but that he was dazzled by the gold of the sunflowers and the tenuous fragility of lilies.

influences that this revolutionary movement has generated not only in France but in the rest of the world and in this particular case in Russia, it is really about Russia poco.Della turn of the century is reminiscent of the February Revolution and then the d 'in October, the overthrow of the Tsarist regime, events so formidable as to leave little room for cultural change. But in Russia from the late nineteenth-early Nine were many who look to the West and the new artistic movements, both eyes of collectors, that of painters.

The first hints of renewal came even earlier, in the sixties of the nineteenth century, when a group of artists in St. Petersburg decided to emancipate the Imperial Academy of Arts, founded the company then known as The Wanderers. They rejected the biblical and mythological subjects from art to introduce Italian rather than scenes of daily life and snapshots of their contemporary Russian society, such as Ilya Repin, who painted October 17, 1905 and Leo Tolstoy barefoot .

Thirty years later the Muscovite Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozowa formed, in fifteen years, two of the largest collections of French art. In particular, so Shchukin became Matisse's patron, which he bought and which commissioned many works on large canvases, as Dance . Since 1909 these two museums were open to the public and private Russian artists who had no opportunity to form in the spirit of Paris could still know the works of French artists through these collections.

This show is simply wonderful. And do not rule out returning to see her again soon. I consider it unique because it collects a espoizione authors and works geographically distant, belonging to different historical past, each of them approached by the witness of a particular current, never cancel but rather putting them in a culturally refined design. Gauguin, Matisse, Chagall, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Corot, Repin, Mashkov, Altman, Golovin, are all here.

Not to miss: Ida Rubinstein, the famous Russian ballerina who had shared the stage with the company Ballets Russes Diaghilev, portrayed here by Valentin Serov in a bare-shouldered. The face shot for three quarters, the lithe body and edgy at the same time. The look intense and focused as if it were a scene.