Valentin Dyakonov. The whole world

Jacques Callot. "The whole world is a theater...". Pushkin Museum im. Pushkin

The exhibition of the famous 17th century etcher Jacques Callot in the Pushkin Museum is done almost perfectly. Reading the accompanying text is a pleasure, quite rare in both private and public exhibition halls. Each series has short but informative explanatory labels. In general, you won't be able to get lost. You get to know Callot's art like a philatelist with a stamp - you look at it from a very close distance, since the etcher was a great master of miniature details. The creators of the exhibition embarked on an interesting experiment. They enlarged some of the etchings so that the characters depicted on them became human-sized, printed this on rectangular pieces of fabric, put them in frames and placed them in a small room like screens. The etchings only benefited in clarity, and viewers were convinced that the details were really drawn to the subtleties, as if the master’s chisel was thinner than a hair.

In Callot's art, two directions can be roughly distinguished: democratic and aristocratic, courtly. Callo created a gallery of canonical images of the Italian "commedia dell'arte". His etchings inspired many theater directors, including the greatest Russians of the 20th century - Meyerhold and Tairov. Separate episodes are dedicated to hunchbacks, mainly courtiers, and street beggars. The “nobility of Lorraine”, a social entity that arose in the era of free purchase and sale of titles, was also honored. The central work of the democratic line is the sheet "Fair in Impruneta" (1620), which depicts a people's fair with all possible details. There are 1138 figures on the sheet, and what some of them do, only a historian of the Annales school can say for sure.

The aristocratic trend is represented by etchings depicting festivities organized by the ruler of Florence, Cosimo II de' Medici, for whom Callot served as court artist. The themes of the holidays are a complex interweaving of ancient Greek mythology and the aesthetics of “precision”. Here is an example of a festive scenario: the two most influential Florentine workshops, clothiers and dyers, are fighting for an island specially placed in the middle of a certain river. The goal of the winners is to find the treasure and present it to a beautiful lady, in this case, Cosimo's wife.

Both directions are united by theatricality, relating to the life of both high-ranking aristocrats and ordinary townspeople. Beggars, for example, are not victims of circumstances, but their creators. In the first engraving of the series dedicated to them, a robust-looking tramp carries a banner with the inscription "Captain of Swindlers." And even Callot paints the fair so that in the foreground there is a stage for actors and magicians.

The exhibition will run until April 11.

Exhibition of nominees for the Silver Camera Award. Moscow House of Photography

competition The “Silver Camera” is being held in Moscow for the fourth time. And from year to year the level of submitted work is growing. In parallel, one must think, with the status of photography as an art form, which (status) such competitions are designed to raise. Fifty percent of the exhibition of award nominees at the Moscow House of Photography is good photography, twenty percent is wonderful. The rest are not very diverse games with geometricism, beautiful shadows and texture based on the material of Moscow architecture.

Despite the fact that “Silver Camera” is a competition for the best reportage, a wide variety of techniques are used, including those that are poorly compatible with reporting. There is pictorealism (“To Fyodor Mikhailovich from Nikolai Vasilyevich”), and work with half-color, semi-colored printing (“Waste-free technologies. The holiday is over, long live the holiday”). This work, by the way, combines reporting with interesting technology. A garbage truck takes out balls from Red Square left over from some kind of celebration; teenagers surround it and take out balls as a souvenir or to play with. Unfortunately, there is only one hard action report, and it is dedicated to the riot of football fans at Manezhnaya last summer. Fans of lyrical minimalism will certainly enjoy the “Lights” series of small photographs of Moscow illumination, from bridges to trees, and “Moscow courtyards”, taken from the same high point at different times of the year. From above, old playgrounds resemble the squiggles of Kandinsky or Yuri Zlotnikov.

What image of Moscow emerges from the nominees’ works? Does a person with a camera see the same as the average person? Having analyzed the frequency of occurrence of certain subjects and objects, we come to the following conclusion. Moscow is homeless people (2 series of photographs) and ballet (also 2 series). The most interesting places in Moscow are sweet factories (Konfael and Red October), factories (ZIL). Muscovite - Andrei Konchalovsky (appears in three different episodes). The building is the Bagration Bridge, an ugly pipe, once photographed very well and once the subject of a whole series of photographs. Events - demonstrations of the communists (2 episodes) and the NBP (one, but large-format) and behind the scenes of fashion shows (2 episodes). The Moscow holiday is highly professional with a militaristic flavor (“DPS Day”, “Airborne Forces Day”). In my opinion, the social stratum of pensioners is most adequately represented at the exhibition. Outside our homes, we really most often see them in transport (the “Passengers” series) and at demonstrations (the “Dandelions of War” series). Here, as they say, is a precise hit in Moscow. In other cases (see statistics) - depending on your luck. It’s better not to go to such holidays or such events.

Another reason to visit the Silver Camera is interactivity. At the entrance you are asked to fill out a questionnaire, based on the results of which, after February 10, the most popular episode will be given the “Audience Award”.

The exhibition will last until February 22.

Boris Sveshnikov. Moscow Fine Art Gallery

Boris Sveshnikov (1927-1997) is a prominent figure in unofficial Moscow art. has opened at the Fine Art gallery An exhibition , which presents works from the collection of the artist’s family. The earliest is 1951, the latest is 1994. He found his style, which cannot be confused with anyone else’s, around the mid-60s. From that time on, his paintings resemble stained glass made from pieces of blue and green glass. Early paintings are either variations on the themes of Dutch classics, or gloomy symbolism in the spirit of Böcklin, such as “The Black Lighthouse” of 1954.

Sveshnikov is an artist with camp experience, he served 7 years, from 1946 to 1953. By some miracle, he had the conditions for creativity (simple design work). In the works of Sveshnikov, who entered Moscow artistic life with a series of sketches of camp life, which were compared with Goya’s etchings, the main theme was frailty. In European painting, the gloomy tales of the surrealists were presented as an expression of the inner world, automatic writing, “the sleep of reason gives birth to monsters.” In the USSR, it seems that they were not professionally interested in the inner world (not counting the diagnoses of sluggish schizophrenia given to dissidents). Likewise, most of the unofficial (not to mention official) artists known to us today worked with a recognizable nature and were not carried away by subjectivity. Monsters were born that way; there was no additional need to put the mind to sleep.

Sveshnikov finds interlocutors on his topic among the old Dutch. The graphics presented in Fine Art are reminiscent of the etchings of Hans Holbein, in which the skeleton-death accompanies all levels of society (accompanies in the literal sense - holding beggars, princes, merchants by the hand). In Sveshnikov, the figure of death passes a letter to the old woman through the cemetery fence, apparently calling him to the next world. The 1992 painting “Autumn Wasteland” - instead of leaves there are skulls and two skinny pickers with sacks. Other stories may be more cheerful, but Sveshnikov’s stories are memorable. And in contrast - wonderful watercolors of the 70s, calm landscapes, free of metaphors, painted, it seems, in a moment of relaxation.

The exhibition will last until February 25.

Alvar Aalto: architecture for reading. Museum of Architecture named after. Shchuseva

The work of the architect Alvar Aalto is considered a national cultural treasure in his homeland, Finland. He is like our Konstantin Melnikov, only Aalto has an order of magnitude higher number of implemented projects. And he lived later, had the opportunity not only to learn from functionalism and constructivism, but also to take into account their shortcomings.

The exhibition moves from country to country. The materials are taken from the collection of the Aalto Museum in the city of Jyväskylä, where Aalto erected more than 30 buildings. The design of the exhibition is the work of the Higher School of Arts and Crafts in Geneva. Thus, the project is international and of very high quality.

Aalto's works are usually classified as functionalism. On one of the Internet sites dedicated to Finnish culture, his style is called “heroic functionalism.” Why is not very clear. Apparently, heroism lies in Aalto’s refusal to solve the utopian problems with which functionalism is often associated. Most of Le Corbusier's works, for example, are not so much architectural solutions as poetic variations on the theme of human coexistence. “Of course, we can fly, we even must, but one foot, or at least one heel, must be firmly planted on the ground” - this statement by Aalto is perceived as polemical in relation to the “floating” (see the State Planning Committee building on the Red Gate) architecture of Le Corbusier . Aalto built a lot, but he had a special passion for designing libraries. The exhibition is dedicated to them; it presents 12 completed and 10 unrealized projects. Upon reflection, this type of building seems most suitable for functionalist architecture. State institutions and huge constructivist windows are two incompatible things; the authorities do not want to be transparent. In standard housing projects, functionalism is obligatory, but is rarely noticeable as a style - that’s why it is standard. And for libraries, large windows are the most natural solution, because the main thing is that the letters are visible.

The exhibition runs until February 29.

Valentin Maria Til . Retrospective. Sam Brooke Gallery

Petersburg curator and artist Valery Valran has already brought to the Sam Brook gallery one legend of the Leningrad underground - abstractionist Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, who developed his own pictorial system within the framework of non-objectivity. On February 4, he exhibits another legend - photographer Valentin Maria Tilya, passport name - Valentin Smirnov. At the vernissage there will also be a presentation of a collection of essays by Valrun about the Leningrad underground with articles about Maria Tila, Mikhnov-Voitenko, rock music and photography.

Underground photography as part of unofficial art is just beginning to emerge, pardon the pun. Some photographers who started in the 70s are now very famous. Maria Thiel did not have much luck with fame, although he was one of the first to experiment with overlaying negative on negative and other printing techniques. Now Maria Til lives in France and uses the pseudonym "Samarin".

Maria Tila has a reputation as an eccentric and original. However, in this he is unoriginal, since all notable figures of the St. Petersburg underground have such a reputation, from the “Mitka” Dmitry Shagin to the “neo-academicist” Timur Novikov.

Thiel's work is influenced by American Abstract Expressionism. He considers his task to be “to give the image a maximum of degrees of freedom of metamorphosis, without imposing anything on it.” Most of all, his photographs are reminiscent of the paintings of the famous post-avant-garde artist Sigmar Polke, in which one can see the same combination of anthropomorphic figures, random spots and varied textures. But Polke, like a true absurdist, juggles with random pictures, and Till cares about the process (one of the meanings of the English process, by the way, is development). In his creative laboratory, Thiel, like a biologist, monitors the emergence of artistic life. Therefore, it is very difficult to distinguish defeat from victory in his case. You can’t tell a biologist that the resulting bacterium has some kind of unaesthetic shape. Thiel's photographs, the result of the spontaneous generation of signs, are one of the most original projects in this art form.

The exhibition will last until February 14.