Academy of Arts celebrates its day

Russian Academy of Arts launches a series of cultural events on its 265th anniversary

The Russian Academy of Arts is celebrating its 265th anniversary with a series of lectures, conferences and exhibitions that will take place across the country. For several days now, academicians have been gathering in the Russian Academy of Arts on Prechistenka to discuss the history, modernity and future of Russian art. “MK” visited the main solemn meeting, where several hundred people gathered on the occasion of the date, and listened to the speech of the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Zurab Tsereteli.

How many beautiful men and women! We have specially collected the most beautiful ones to please you! – began with a smile, the president of the Academy of Arts Zurab Tsereteli.

Indeed, everyone came to the solemn meeting during the parade. In the Apple hall, there is nowhere for an apple to fall so as not to fall on someone’s jacket. However, Zurab Konstantinovich knows how to dilute the atmosphere of officialdom with notes of light ease, without which art is unthinkable.

“The history of the Academy of Arts is long and continues,” he said. – We need to raise and study history. I remember when I was a student, we were forced to draw the dead so that we would know anatomy. Sit by the corpse for hours and draw. It was a difficult but very rewarding experience. Modern students do not know anatomy. Therefore, I propose to open an anatomical department at RAC so that young people learn to draw.

Art education remains one of the main themes in the Russian Academy of Arts, although by no means the only one. The official birthday of the Academy of Arts is November 17 (6th according to the old style) of November 1757, when the daughter of Peter I, Empress Elizabeth, now established the largest center for the study, preservation and development of art and art history in Russia. But the idea to open such an educational and research center was born much earlier: the idea of ​​creating the Academy of Sciences and Arts was expressed by Peter I back in the late 1690s. The daughter embodied the desire of her father – with the active participation of the scientist Mikhail Lomonosov and the educator Count Ivan Shuvalov, who are involved in the founding of Moscow State University. It was the favorite of the Empress Shuvalov who invited teachers from abroad, recruited the first students and donated his art collection to the academy, thus laying the foundation for the library and museum.

In 1758, the construction of the academy building on the banks of the Neva began; it was completed in 1788. At the same time, the Educational School was opened, which later grew into a powerful art school and educated the classics of Russian art. Among them are Ivanov, Bryullov, Repin, Polenov, Surikov, Martos, Ton, the list of the first names occupies dozens of pages. The “chicks” of the Academy of Arts built and decorated the largest artistic ensembles, for example, the Kazan and St. Isaac’s Cathedrals, the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow (for this, in 1847, the Mosaic Institution was opened at the Academy). Under Alexander III, a separate museum, the Russian Museum, was created for the collection of the academy accumulated by that time. He, like many other brainchildren of the Russian Academy of Arts, is today a “calling card” of Russian culture.

Today the collection of the Russian Academy of Arts includes more than 3,000 works by outstanding masters. The central event of the 265th anniversary was the thematic exhibition at the Art Gallery on Prechistenka “From the Museum Fund of the Russian Academy of Arts”, where works by famous Russian artists were presented. Among them are Pavel Nikonov, Tatyana Nazarenko, Konstantin Khudyakov, President of the Academy Zurab Tsereteli and others. The exposition is mostly painting, and this emphasis is not accidental. Does the easel painting remain a relevant platform for experimentation and the search for your own visual language? What are the possibilities for expanding the usual boundaries, genres, techniques and technologies? Or has the oil on canvas exhausted its possibilities? These are the questions that this research project poses to the viewer. Diverse works give an unambiguous answer: without a picturesque, figurative language, nowhere. Each author has his own, and finding it is not easy. Picturesqueness can manifest itself in different forms, be it sculpture, art glass or ceramics, but this is the foundation from which the artist starts in search of himself.

Together with the exhibition in the White Hall of the Russian Academy of Arts, a conference entitled “Dialogue of Cultures in History and Modernity. Panorama of artistic contacts between Italy and Russia. They will talk about the connections between Russian and Italian cultures, compare artistic phenomena in the art of the two countries from the Renaissance to the present day, and discuss the mutual influence of national schools. In the current conditions, however, among the speakers there are only domestic art historians and museum workers, but they, unlike a number of Western colleagues, are not going to cross out history under the onslaught of current political events. You can’t throw out a word from a song, just as you can’t throw out the aesthetics of the Quattrocento and the Italian Renaissance from Andrei Tarkovsky’s work.

On its birthday, the Russian Academy of Arts will launch a chain of cultural events every day – a new opening of an exhibition, a round table or a meeting. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novokuznetsk, Smolensk, Nizhny Tagil, Barnaul, Ryazan, Krasnoyarsk, Dmitrov, Nalchik – the geography of influence and activities of the artistic structure today extends throughout the country.