Scientific Papers of St Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts’73. Issues of the Foreign Art Development

The article represents the first publication of the recently discovered painting belonging to the circle of Venetian artist Pietro della Vecchia (1603–1678) from a private collection. The subject of the painting and the suggestions about expected author were made due to the course of its conservation and technical researches. Bright images and their typical iconography were inspired by the personages of the “Comedia del Arte” who had been popular in the Venetian everyday life and art. A comparison with the compositions by Pietro della Vecchia himself, which are similar in subject, characters, manner and technique of painting, gave reason to consider it the work of the workshop of the famous Venetian artist. That suggestion is based on the several analogies, similar to it by their technique, style and subject, especially on comparison with another depiction of the same scene known under the title “The Old and Young Couple” (1652–1660) by Pietro della Vecchia at the Galeria Estense in Modena. Both compositions depict popular grotesque types of “Vecchi” (Old people), “Innomoranti” (Lovers) and “Zani” (Servants). Technical data, wood panel, gesso, pigments and paint medium definitely confirm their similarity.

The article is devoted to study of the evolution of compositional thought in Ancient Egyptian art through the prism of the evolution of orthogonal projection. The characteristics of the compositional features of ornamental artistic visualization with origins in pictography are given. The role of orthogonal projection in the formation of ancient Egyptian art is shown. The methodology of orthogonal projection and axonometry is analyzed as autonomous methods (techniques) of depicting space on a plane.

The article explores the art of the School of Fontainebleau through the lens of the mask motif, both grotesque and theatrical, which is one of the style-forming elements of this school. The ways in which this motif entered France in the 16th century and the unique ways in which it was interpreted by the artists of this School are examined. The article discusses the points of contact between the School of Fontainebleau and the festive traditions of the Valois court. It suggests that this connection may have contributed, among other factors, to the widespread use of images of masks in paintings, graphics, and decorative-applied arts of the school.

The presented article examines the work of Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian conceptual artist, entitled “Décor: Conquest”, created in 1975. The author of the article examines the artist’s manifestation of institutional criticism in the considered project, and analyzes the methods of conceptual art that Broodthaers employs in this work. The text reveals the problem of the role of artistic practices in the examined work in the context of the development of the direction.

The article examines the mass-produced prints of the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–1926) eras. Special attention is paid to a little-known type of printed matter – “Kuchi-e” which appeared at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries as a result of the great popularity of women’s literary magazines and novels. The engravings of “Kuchi-e” were printed both in woodcut and other ways. Usually, such engravings depicted beautiful ladies and were placed in literary magazines as a frontispiece or attached to a book spine, their main purpose was to give readers an idea of the plots of the works.

This study advanced our understanding of the pictorial or graphic images of the church defining the religious building, its exterior and interior. The places of worship were reinterpreted by Dutch artists in connection with the Reformation, stood out by the 17th century as a special genre in the period 1630s–1690s. Throughout the entire period of studying paintings depicting religious buildings, various definitions corresponding to the concept of researchers appeared in publications: “architectural painting”, “architectural landscape”, “church interior”, “church perspective”. Thus, a unified approach in defining different types of such images has not been by now developed. The search for an adequate terminology reflects the course of scientific thought and is inextricably linked to the problems of methodology, classification, genre stratification, ways of spatial constructions and their interpretation. The article presents a historical overview of the formation of terminological concepts and analyzes related problematic issues.

The views of the university cities of Oxford and Cambridge occupy a special place in the creative legacy of the English graphic artist David Loggan (1634–1692). A master of graphic portraiture who created a series of images of political figures and scientists of the 17th century, David Loggan is known primarily as a connoisseur of the past, close to the circle of English antiquaries. The image of the university city acquires expressive features of a medieval architectural complex in the master’s works. The style markers indicating that buildings belong to historical eras become Gothic elements – tall spires, pointed towers, pinnacles, wimpergs and buttresses – on the outside; pointed arches, rib vaults of complex pattern and large–scale windows – in the interior. The etching, complemented by a chisel, allows the artist to create well-developed, detailed images of architectural objects of university cities, the Gothic buildings of which are represented in D. Loggan’s graphics reliably and consistently.

Posthumous fate of the major literary work of the Gothic revival architect A. W. N. Pugin – his illustrated book “Contrasts” – is a paradox. Nowadays most researchers consider “Contrasts” as the first example of architectural manifesto based on juxtaposition, while missing rather ambiguous relations between text and illustrations. Meanwhile Pugin himself stated that illustrations (and not the text) were central for the concept of the book, and the text was just a support.

The anniversary of the first exhibition of the “Societe Anonyme” on April 15, 1874, spurred a wide range of scientific research, dedicated to Impressionism. It brings about possibilities to reconsider some of long existing concepts and, in particular, to reevaluate the role and significance of impressionist still-life painting. Identification, classification and analysis of the paintings, exposed at eight impressionist exhibitions, allows us to define general tendencies of impressionistic genre perception, as well as to specify individual peculiarities of its interpretation by C. Monet, A. Renoir, G. Caillebotte, P. Cezanne, P. Gauguin and reveal the potential of its future development.

The article is devoted to the work of now forgotten French graphic artist of the second half of the 19th century Constantin Guys. For the first time in Russian art history the biography of the artist is reconstructed, and the main stages of his work are highlighted. The experience of long-term work as an artist-reporter of the newspaper “The Illustrated London News” allowed a self-taught artist Konstantin Guys to form a special, innovative artistic method, the main principles of which are outlined in the article. The influence of Constantin Guys’s work on his younger contemporaries - Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas is considered separately.

This article examines the development of Korean painting during the period of Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. During this time, Korean art was marked by a strong aspiration to preserve national identity, which found expression in the emergence of the hyangt’osaek movement (“local color” or “national color”), based on the recognizable representation of the country’s ethnographic characteristics. In the works of Kim Eunho (1892–1979) and Chang Woosoung (1912–2005), one can trace both the desire to maintain national identity and the adaptation of traditional painting practices to new cultural conditions through integration of European pictorial techniques and methods. Special attention is given to hyangt’osaek as a form of artistic expression of national identity, as well as an example of the organic synthesis of Korean tradition with modernist tendencies. The analysis of the works of Kim Eunho and Chang Woosoung highlights the role of the aesthetics of “local color” as one of the key stages in the formation of the school of painting in 20th-century Korea.

The article examines current trends in posthumanism in contemporary art. Various artistic practices emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries that rethought the concept of humanism in art and rejected anthropocentrism. Writers, artists, and philosophers analyze post-postmodern art, proposing new ways to understand it and to derive a theory of the posthuman and his cultural meaning. The basic idea of posthumanism is the elimination of hierarchy while simultaneously striving for the harmonization of the individual with himself, society, and nature through both spiritual and technological self-improvement.

Wang Teniu is a contemporary artist of Chinese realistic painting, professor at the Tsinghua University Academy of Fine Arts, who has played a significant role in contemporary art. Wang Teniu is a representative of a creative family consisting of several generations of artists who have had a significant impact on the development of Chinese culture. In 1998, he graduated from St Petersburg Repin Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, workshop of academician Andrey Mylnikov. Chinese art historians attach great importance to study of his creative work. The main attention in the works on Wang Teniu is paid to analysis of the master’s narrative painting on historical subjects. Taking into account the diversity of interests of this master and his serious contribution to development of modern Chinese art and Chinese-Russian artistic relations, it is required to study his creative work in various aspects comprehensively and thoroughly. The article reviews the influence of Russian art on the creative work of Wang Teniu. The author of the article relies on the method of figurative, stylistic and formal analysis of works, iconological and biographical research methods. The article uses unique materials from the artist’s collection, published documents of the artist on Russian art, interviews with Wang Teniu, and his personal archives.