Soviet Art

Geli Mikhailovich Korzhev-Chuvelev, Morning
Oil on Canvas, 1958
Taken from the website of The Museum of Russian Art

Wendy & I visited The Museum of Russian art on Saturday. The exhibit, In the Russian Tradition, is a breathtaking and provokative experience that I would suggest to anyone with a passion for art, general aesthetics, or history. The actual museum was relocated from the basement of a corporate building (as historically verbalized by Wendy) to a church just south of downtown Minneapolis. The church provides the perfect climate for the museum: lofty, warm with dark wood, and intimate rooms and niches for collections. What first amazed and struck me was the enormity of these paintings, their height sometimes surpassing 8 or 10 feet, and the slathering of vibrant, rich oil paints. The paints were often so radiant that I had to orbit the painting in a semicircular pattern until I found an angle that disallowed glare from overhead lighting. Reds boomed and whites glowed. What I loved most in this museum, if not everything, was the sense of snow and spring puddles. I have never seen such snow scenes where snow tracks and drifts literally glowed in their blues and milky colors. Even from above, my eye was constantly drawn to the snow scenes. The eyes of Russian beauties clothed in their work clothes or solely black soviet boots followed us through the museum. There was not a single painting that I disliked. I have not had such a thought-provoking nor emotionally connecting experience with art since The Last Expression: Art in Aushwitz at Northwestern University. There is a rumor that you can take classes at the museum about the art that I hope to do sometime next year. I want so badly to share this museum's art with you all but as I pass through the paintings displayed on the website, I realize how impossible it is to truly capture the glare, enormity, wetness as though just painted-ness, and beauty of them. You must experience them for yourself. I have posted some of the painting here for you to enjoy: they have been pulled from the website found here. After the museum I went home and read Kafka: The Metamorphisis. Anyone willing to talk beetle with me when I get home? Ahem, John. Ahem, Squirrel. Ahem, Ebeth. Ahem, my dear dear formerDostoyevsky classmates.

Road Worker. Nina by Oleg Leonidovoch Lomakin
Snow in March by Igor E. Grabar
Waiting by Yuri I. Pimenov
Winter has Come, Childhood by Sergei A. Tutunov