Light touch

Russian drawing and watercolor in the Perm State Art Gallery

In terms of the composition of names and the breadth of genres represented - portrait, landscape, historical, animalistic compositions, illustrations, sketches of paintings - the exhibition of drawings and watercolors now deployed in the Perm Art Gallery is a real museum within a museum. In total, about seven hundred works are presented here. About a fifth of the gallery's collection is on display, giving a magnificent panorama of pre-revolutionary art.

Academic drawing is represented by pencil works by P.I. Sokolov - “The Model” was performed during his Roman retirement. The drawing by F.P. is also associated with the eternal city. Tolstoy's "Scene from Roman Life" - allegorical images in a finely designed landscape setting. No less interesting are the compositional sketches of historical painters A.E. Egorova and V.K. Shebuev, perhaps the most brilliant draftsmen of the first half of the 19th century. The sketches they created demonstrate an excellent technique for precise contour drawing, which gives an expressive representation of unrealized ideas. It is extremely rare and therefore especially valuable for Egorov to address a topic from Russian history - “Basmanov informs False Dmitry about the uprising in Moscow.” Portrait drawing from the beginning - the first half of the 19th century is represented by single copies, but among them is a drawing by Lermontov - “Scenes from Stavropol Life”.

The second half of the 19th century can be studied from the works of Konstantin and Vladimir Makovsky, I.E. Repina, V.M. Maksimova, N.D. Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, M.A. Zichy, L.F. Lagorio, A.K. Savrasova, I.I. Shishkina, V.I. Surikova, P.P. Sokolova, N.N. Karazina, G.K. Lukomsky, A.K. Beggrova, Albert Benoit, V.I. Jacobi, R.F. Frenz... Due to the intimate nature of the tasks of the original graphics, the differences in the works of adherents of the academic and democratic trends, as a rule, do not seem fundamental. The difference is visible only in the choice of motive. The main quality in the works of graduates of the Imperial Academy of Arts is the mastery of watercolor and drawing techniques. The watercolor in their works attracts with its purity and transparency, and the drawing attracts with the ability to create an image and form a form from combinations of light or energetic lines, spots and shading. “View of Venice” by A.P. looks especially impressive. Bogolyubova. The image is created by pointing with a brush (working with color shades), reminiscent of an elegant “mosaic set”. In watercolor, color spots have the ability to be either almost airy (to the point of being ghostly!), or dense and sonorous. To perform another watercolor sheet - “Signal from a Sunken Ship” - Bogolyubov used papier-pele. This was a new material for that time, with a typographical application of tone, over which the artist creates an image.

The collection of the Perm Gallery reflects the variety of drawing techniques and techniques characteristic of graphics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are excellent examples of the graphic heritage of the leading masters of a brilliant era, known not only for their paintings, but also for their unique graphic technique. Drawing, which requires special skill and faithful eye from the artist, becomes inspiredly artistic at the turn of the century. The real mastery of graphic techniques is perfectly conveyed by F.A.’s portrait and typical images. Malyavina, B.I. Kustodieva, K.S. Petrov-Vodkin, historical compositions by Victor and Apollinary Vasnetsov, I.Ya. Bilibina, M.V. Nesterov, landscapes by V.A. Serova, M.V. Dobuzhinsky, A.N. Benoit, Z.E. Serebryakova, illustrations by A.P. Ryabushkin to the epics about Vasily Buslaev, still life by V.E. Borisov-Musatov, compositional drawings by A.N. Savinov, watercolors by S.V. Gerasimova, A.V. Shevchenko and extremely rare evidence from the time of the First World War, performed by A. Maslovsky.

Another significant value of the Perm Gallery’s collection is the work of artists associated with the Urals. They occupy a special place in both the pictorial and graphic parts of the collection. The earliest in terms of execution time are pencil portraits of A.A.’s parents. Pishchalkin, dated 1830. The works of the brothers Vasily and Peter Vereshchagin, who at the beginning of the twentieth century laid the foundation for an art collection with their gift to the city, form a noticeable part of the collection. The pencil drawings of Vasily Petrovich, a professor of historical painting at the Imperial Academy of Arts and the author of many spectacular compositions, are particularly skillful and large-scale. Among his works in the graphic collection are sketches and drawings for paintings and temple paintings, including sketches for scenes from the history of Christianity, created to decorate the palace of Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich in St. Petersburg. The collection contains dozens of watercolor sheets by Perm native V.A. Plotnikov (1866-1917), who bequeathed most of his heritage to his native city. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the artist, on instructions from the academy, traveled to remote areas of Russia to create a series of images of monuments of old wooden and stone architecture. His watercolors not only have the merits of a historical document, but are also marked by a sincere desire to show the uniqueness of the country in the space from the Arkhangelsk and Vologda provinces to the Volga and the Urals.

Sergey KUZNETSOV, Perm