Word: exhibitable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WHEAT. WHEAT FIELDS. RED FIELD. AN enormous amount of wheat." These words, torn from Woody Allen's satirical epic "Love and Death," spring to mind when viewing the new exhibit at the Fogg Art Museum, Russia: The Land, the People: Russian Painting 1850-1910. In the Russia of the late nineteenth century, "Land" Wheat and "People" Peasants, at least if you take these paintings at face value...
...paintings of this period fall into fourlarge categories: genre paintings, landscapes,historical works and portraits. Yet theorganization of the exhibit ignores thesedistinctions in subject, dividing the paintingsinstead according to period: the four rooms plusthe hallway in the Fogg roughly reflect theprogression of Russian realism, from its originsin the elevated social consciousness of the 1850sto the emergence of a more abstract art in theearly 1900s...
...first room of the exhibit contains worksdating from the 1850's through the early 1870's.This was a period of great social upheaval inRussia, culminating in the freeing of the serfs in1861. Nevertheless, the bulk of the populationcontinued to live in extreme poverty and hardship.Artists sought to convey the harsh realities ofpeasant life, to expose the grimness of themedieval legacy, by treating their subject matterwith a critical--and realistic...
...these new problems.The image of the peasant dominated many canvassesof the period; as Lecturer in History andLiterature Cathy Frierson has pointed out, it wasthe objective of many realist painters to"penetrate and master the peasant soul." IvanKramskoi's portrait, "Mina Moiseev" is the firstwork to confront visitors to the exhibit, and itgives clear insight into the Itinerant painter'sdetermination to study the psychological behaviorof the peasant. Using a restricted palette,Kramskoi does not idealize his subject, and therealism captures a sense of the wisdom, kindnessand ruggedness in the subject...
...last room in the exhibit contains worksfrom the early years of this century, works whichreflect the emergence of new ideas in art as wellas life. Indeed, the connection between art andreality developed over the course of the lastcentury began to split during these years as theevents of the twentieth century forced artists tosearch for new sources, for a new individualismand originality...