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Mir Iskusstva: Russia's Age of Elegance

The artistic movement Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) developed in Russia during the final decades before the Russian revolution, spanning the reign of the last tsar, Nicholas II, from 1894 to 1918. This great flowering of artistic creativity, the so-called Silver Age, is generally unknown in the West due to the revolution which ended artistic freedom and cut off contact with the rest of the world. But now, following political changes in Russia, these works - portraits, landscapes, stylized genre scenes, theatrical set and costume designs - are being rediscovered.

The World of Art, formed in St. Petersburg in the 1890s, sought to unite painting, theatre, music, and the decorative arts in a broad concept of "art for art's sake." Under the leadership of ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, artists Leon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Yevgeny Lanceray, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, and Konstantin Somov became the core members of the movement. This powerful and widely acclaimed circle of artists grew to include such leading St. Petersburg and Moscow artists of the day as Ivan Bilibin, Alexander Golovin, Konstantin Korovin, Boris Kustodiev, Nikolai Roerich, Valentin Serov, and others. Their work graced Imperial palaces, the collections of merchant patrons, museums, and the sets of ballets and operas produced in the Imperial theatres.

Never before seen in the West, this exhibition of more than 90 works comes from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and includes portraits (Tsar Alexander III; poet Anna Akhmatova; composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov), Russian landscapes and historic scenes of St. Petersburg, and colorful watercolor designs for costumes and ballet and opera sets - Stravinsky's Petrouchka, Moussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin - by Golovin and Alexander Benois.Mir Iskusstva: Russia's Age of Elegance is organized by the Foundation for International Arts and Education, Bethesda, Maryland, and is presented in conjunction with The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Description taken from: ArtMagick. Accessed on 2/5/06