RUSSIAN EXPERIMENT IN ART 1863-1922

One of the excellent Thames & Hudson World of Art series, this very readable guide is fascinating on a little-known period of art history. The original hardback edition of this book was published back in 1971, so we are delighted to see in revised paperback edition the most compact, accurate and reasonably priced survey of 60 years of creative, dynamic activity that profoundly influenced the progress of Western art and architecture. Revised and enlarged by Dr. Marian Burleigh-Motley, it contains 256 illustrations, with 21 colour plates. The cradle of the modern movement in Russian art can be traced to the colony of artists which was brought together by Savva Mamontov, the Russian railway millionaire tycoon of the 1870s, and the patronage of the Tsar. The Mamontov circle was a group of artists who declared their secession from the Academy of Art in 1863, two years after the emancipation of the serfs. They had the idea of 'bringing art to the people' and called themselves the 'Wanderers' by taking travelling exhibitions throughout the countryside. Like their contemporaries and friends Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and composers Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, these artists sought to justify their activity by making their art 'useful' to society. They declared that art should be primarily concerned with reality and explain life and comment on it. Such were the dogmas proclaimed by Chernishevsky, the aesthetic propogandist of the 1860s in Russia, together with Dobrolyubov and Nekrassov, in large part the spiritual directors of this nationalist movement in the arts. Moscow became the centre of this modern school of painting in Russia directed by Mamontov, himself a singer, sculptor, stage director and dramatist who founded the first Russian private opera company and was a generous patron of art. Here are portraits by and of Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korcin, Natalia Goncharova with her colourful looking glass of 1912, and portraits by Ilya Mashkov 1909 and Robert Falk 1915. 256 illus., 21 in colour, 324 glossy pages in compact paperback.