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The exposition dedicated to 185 anniversary of Ivan Shishkin is open

Landscape painter is a true artist,

he feels deeper, purer …

Nature is always new …

and always ready to load with an inexhaustible fund of its gifts, which we call life.

What can be better than nature …

Ivan Shishkin

 

On 25^th of January, 2017 in Kirovohrad Regional Art Museum an exposition “King of the Forest” dedicated to 185 anniversary of the outstanding landscape painter, etcher, academician, professor of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, one of the founders of the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions (The Peredvizhniki), Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898).

… When one utters the name of the famous Russian artist Shishkin, everybody at once mentions his famous painting "Morning in a Pine Forest" (1889, State Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Federation). Even in Soviet times in grocery stores there were candies "Bear toed" sold with a reproduction of the picture on the wrapper, which is popularly called "Three Bears" (although there are four bears depicted on canvas). And I remember from childhood a carpet above my bed representing a dense forest and playful bear cubs (even photos have survived)…

Ivan Shishkin is one of the most famous and celebrated landscape painters. Full of an infinite love to his motherland, the artist throughout all his life praised an extraordinary beauty of its images, conveying a distinctive, majestic spirit of nature. Shishkin’s canvas are fairly considered masterpieces of  the world painting treasury, and his talent introduced a new era of domestic landscape of the twentieth century. Among the older generation of artists Ivan Shishkin represents with his art an extraordinary phenomenon, which was not known in the field of landscape painting of previous period. At the beginning of his creative path the artist already wrote in his album that "the most important for the landscape painter is a careful study of nature", and he had never betrayed this principle. In all his works, he is an amazing connoisseur of plant forms.

Everything that Shishkin paints on his canvases: birches, oaks, pines, spruces; everything situated under the trees: rocks, grass, water; everything is depicted so realistically that there appears a feeling as if we were in this forest and felt its breath and its greatness, the pulse of life.

A picture "Pine Forest" (1883-1894), painted by three artists - Ivan Shishkin and his students, Andrei Shylder and Julii Klever, is represented in the exhibition hall of Western European and Russian Art of late XVIII - early XX century. But it's safe to say that this picture is a typical Shishkin’s landscape with a philosophical interpretation of nature. The image of  the nature is monumetal. There is a kind of romantic mystery, as if the nature allures a man in an unexplored space. Romance in the landscape greatly combines with epic grandeur of the nature: with powerful force go upward slender and proud giant pines, creating slow rhythm of movement, which grows calm and stops in quiet, almost stiffened silhouettes of the peaks. The canvas impresses with it's size (235,5х161,3), the time spent on its creating (11! years), and it really is a gem of the room. The artwork was transferred from the funds of the State Tretyakov Gallery in 1962 and restored by art restorers of the National Research and Restoration Center of Ukraine in 2004.

Along with paintings a special place in the Shishkin’s creative work belongs to graphics. The artist skillfully mastered the art of drawing and engraving. In 1891 more than six hundred sketches and engravings of Shishkin were exhibited in the Academy. The exhibition gave an idea of the enormous labor of the artist, who deeply felt and tried to convey the beauty of nature and its extraordinary strength. In 1894 he released the album “60 Etchings by I. I. Shishkin. 1870 - 1892”. The stock collection of the art museum is lucky to have prints of original etchings for popular Russian magazine "Niva" - "Forest River" (1893) and "In the protected Peter's the Great oak grove (In Sestroreck)" (1893).

These paintings are not of a big size, but with a touch of the same beauty and mystery of nature, which we used to see in the world-famous works of the master painter. The prints were purchased in 1962 from a local resident Potapova. The book "Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin. Correspondence. Diary. Contemporaries about the artist" (1984) revealing a multifaceted world of the master of painting completes the exhibition.

A famous artist-peredvizhnik, the closest friend of Shishkin Ivan Kramskoi told about him: “Ivan Shishkin simply amazes us with his knowledge... And when he has the landscape in front of him it’s as if he is in his element; immediately he is bold and agile and does not need to think about how, what or why... he knows everything here, I think he is the only one among us who knows nature in a scholarly way... Shishkin is a milepost in the development of Russian landscape-painting; he is a whole school in one man”.

 

Lesia Nestroina, research assistant of  
Kirovohrad Regional Art Museum
scientific-educational activity department