November Auction

Congratulations to J. Granney who placed the the winning bid of $2,500 for October's auction painting "Autumn in Gurzuf" by Alexander G. Gulyaev. The estimated price for the painting was $4,500- $5,500. The winning bid culminated a day of excitement with several bidders submitting bids and counter-bids. We invite you to participate in this month's auction and thank everyone who placed bids last month.

Bid Form, Auction Rules & Past Auction Results  

 

Rashid M. Nurmuhametov, "Portrait of the Wise Man"  22¾'' x 19½'', (57.50 x 49.50 cm) 1956, Oil on Canvas  Estimated Value $3,000- $3,500, Current Bid $250

It's Snowing- Ski Season Begins November 19!

Park City's First Snowfall,  back on October 6, 2011

 As you can see from the photo we had our first snowstorm of the season back on October 6th, and have had several storms since then. If that doesn't whet your appetite for the openings of Park City's three world-class winter resorts, maybe these little tidbits will:

-Deer Valley Resort has been voted the #1 ski resort in North American by the readers of SKI Magazine for the last four years in a row.

-Canyons Resort featured a dramatic re-creation last season with the cutting-edge Orange-Bubble Express high-speed quad with enclosed cabins and heated seats.

-Park City Mountain Resort has created a newly dedicated beginner learning zone featuring two brand new Magic Carpet conveyor lifts; a new dirt work foundation to the 22-foot Eagle Superpipe; and the brand new Flying Eagle Zip Line; all for winter adventures that allow families to continue making memories.  

The season's first snow, October 6, 2011

Park City Resort Openings

•    Population: 8,000 
•    Elevation:  7000' on Main Street
•    Annual Snowfall: 350"  
•    Skiable Terrain: 9026 Acres
•    Single-track Trails: 150+ miles
•    Restaurants: 131
•    Annual Visitation: over 3 million
•    Founded in 1869 as a silver-mining town
•    Site of the 2002 Winter Olympics
•    Home of the U.S. Ski Team
•    Home of the Sundance Film Festival 
•    And most importantly, home of the Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery! 

September 29, 2011- January 22, 2012 

 

The Peredvizhniki, or often refferred to in English as The Wanderers or The Itinerants, were a group of artists who came together in 1870 in protest of the conservative attitudes of Russia's Imperial Academy of Art. The group aimed to portray contemporary Russian society, and to use art to highlight social and political issues. They organized travelling exhibitions to take art to the people and beyond the cities of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Works by the Peredvizhniki have enjoyed huge popularity in Russia since the late 19th century but are little known in the rest of the world.

  

This autumn's exhibition at The Nationalmuseum is the first of its kind in Sweden. Thanks to the generosity of the Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, and the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, in providing us with works on loan, we are able to present a comprehensive survey of the group's art.

  

This group of Russian painters, whose work is little known in the West, was the most remarkable in the history of Russian art. Founded in the mid-19th century, the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions (known as Peredvizhniki in Russian) consisted of a group of realist painters who decided that the best way for their work to be seen was to hold exhibitions in the salon style of the French painters of the time, but in the form of travelling shows which moved around Russia. This helped to popularise the work of these painters, and of Russian art in general, and it helped them to sell their paintings and thus finance their work. The painters traveled with the exhibitions, recording the lives and customs of their fellow countrymen, and providing an insight into the life in Tsarist Russia, right up until the 1918 Revolution.

  

Social Realism and Folktales 

   

The exhibition shows the diversity of the group's work. The Peredvizhniki believed it was important to produce socially engaged art focused on social injustice and tough living conditions. Artists such as Vladimir Makovsky, Ilya Repin and Nikolai Yaroshenko depicted secret political meetings, convicts and starving peasants. One of the highlights of the exhibition is Ilya Repin's famous Barge Haulers on the Volga, one of the best-known works in the entire Russian canon.

 

However, members of the group were also fascinated by Russia's past. The exhibition includes images inspired by folktales, depictions of religious traditions, and scenes from daily life in years gone by.

  

Landscapes Laden with Symbolism

  

Several of the Peredvizhniki specialized in landscape painting. For them, it was all about portraying what was typically Russian. Images of Russia's plains and forests came to symbolize the motherland and were influential in shaping national identity. At times, Russian landscape painting calls to mind the dreamy, melancholy landscapes painted by Scandinavian artists of the fin de siècle.

 

The landscapes could also contain a political message. Isaac Levitan's Vladimir Highway, which to the uninitiated appears to be an idyllic scene of a sandy road across a meadow, in fact depicts the route to the penal colonies in Siberia.

 

Intellectual Circles

  

In the exhibition, we encounter several of Russia's leading authors and musicians of the time. Some members of the group moved in prominent intellectual circles. The exhibition includes portraits of composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky and writers such as Tolstoy. 

  

The exhibition "The Peredvizhniki: Pioneers of Russian Painting" is open to the public at theThe Nationalmuseum. Södra Blasieholmshamnen, Stockholm, Sweden through January 22, 2012. 

More Information, The Peredvizhniki -Pioneers of Russian Painting 

The Most Famous Artists of the Peredvizhnik

 (The Wanders or The Itinerants)

The Itinerants 1888, including the most famous:  Ilya Repin, Ivan Shishkin, Isaac Levitan, Vasily Surikov, & Valentin Serov

The Itinerants had a profound impact on the work of the realistic artists of the Russian Realism period. The Itinerants broke with the formal school of art that was gospel at Russian academies. Generations of Russian painters had painted as if they were oblivious to the real world of pain, hunger, and poverty that enveloped Russia. Until Repin and the other itinerants simply refused to ignore the real world around them, Russian artists painted only idealized Russian life and ancient Roman and Greek idealism.    

Once this break was made--it changed Russian realism forever. The Itinerant break allowed Russain artsists the freedom to paint the true story--minus all saccharine--of Russian life and the rural life in particular. The lasting impression of Russian Realism of the Soviet painters has its roots in the honesty and unvarnished truth of the Itinerants. 

The Master:  Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844-1930) 

Ilya Repin "Barge Haulers on the Volga"

Repin was born in the town of Chuhuiv near Kharkiv in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. His parents were Russian military settlers. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter named Bunakov and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. From 1873 to 1876 on the Academy's allowance, Repin sojourned in Italy and lived in Paris, where he was exposed to French Impressionist painting which had a lasting effect upon his use of light and color. His style was to remain closer to that of the old European masters, especially Rembrandt, and he never embraced Impressionism.

Throughout his career, Repin was drawn to the common people from whom he traced his origins. He frequently painted country folk, both Ukrainian and Russian, though in later years he also painted members of the Imperial Russian elite, the intelligentsia, and the aristocracy, including Tsar Nicholas II.

Joining the Itinerants

In 1878, Repin joined the free-thinking "Association of Peredvizhniki Artists", generally called "The Wanderers" or "The Itinerants" in English. About the time of his arrival in the capital, a core group of students rebelled against the academic formalism of the Imperial Academy. Repin's fame was established by his painting of the Barge Haulers on the Volga, a work which portrayed the hard lot of the poor folk. From 1882 he lived in Saint Petersburg but visited his Ukrainian homeland and on occasion made tours abroad.

Ilya Repin, "Religious Procession in Kursk Province", 1880-83

Historical and contemporary subjects

Beginning shortly before the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Repin painted a series of pictures dealing with the theme of the Russian revolutionary movement: Refusal to Confess, Arrest of a Propagandist, The Meeting, and They Did Not Expect Him. The last is considered his masterpiece on the subject, mixing contrasting psychological moods and Russian and Ukrainian national motifs. His large-scale Religious Procession in the Province of Kursk is sometimes considered an archetype of the "Russian national style," as it displays various social classes and the tensions among them, set within the context of a traditional religious practice and united by a slow but relentless forward movement.

In 1885, Repin completed one of his most psychologically intense paintings, Ivan the Terrible and his Son. This canvas displayed a horrified Ivan embracing his dying son, whom he had just struck and mortally wounded in an uncontrolled fit of rage. The terrified face of Ivan is in marked contrast with that of his calm, almost Christlike son.

Ilya Repin, "Ivan the Terrible and his Son"

One of Repin's most complex paintings, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire occupied him for more than a decade. He conceived this painting as a study in laughter, but also believed that it involved the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He wanted to portray Cossack republicanism, in this particular case, Ukrainian Cossack republicanism. Begun in the late 1870s, he completed it in 1891, when it was immediately purchased by the Tsar for 35,000 roubles, an enormous amount at the time.

Ilya Repin "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire", 1880-91

During his maturity, Repin painted many of his most celebrated compatriots, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy, the court photographer Rafail Levitsky, the scientist Dmitri Mendeleev, the imperial official Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the composer Modest Mussorgsky, the cellist Aleksandr Verzhbilovich, the philanthropist Pavel Tretyakov, and the Ukrainian poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko.

In 1903, he was commissioned by the Russian government to paint a 13' x 29' (400 x 877 cm) canvas, representing a ceremonial session of the State Council of Imperial Russia.

Ilya Repin, "Ceremonial session of the State Council of Imperial Russia", 1903

Alexander Glazunov's Oriental Rhapsody, Op. 29 (1889) is dedicated to Ilya Repin.

The world record price for a painting by Repin is $7.2 million at Christie's for "A Parisian Cafe" .

He is in the highest category "1 - an artist of the world fame, tested with time (for no less than a century)" in "United Artists Rating".

 Isacc Levitan (1860-1900)

Isaac Levitan, "Lake. Russia" 1900

Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898)

Ivan Shishkin, "The Rye Field" (1878)

Emiliya Shanks (1857-1936)

Emiliya Shanks, "The New Girl in School" (1892)

The exhibition "The Peredvizhniki: Pioneers of Russian Painting" is open to the public at theThe Nationalmuseum. Södra Blasieholmshamnen, Stockholm, Sweden through January 22, 2012.

More Information, The Peredvizhniki -Pioneers of Russian Painting 

 Thomas Kearns McCarthey Gallery  

444 Main Street, P.O. Box 1695, Park City, UT 84060  

Tel: 435.658.1691  Fax: 435.658.1730