Call for Sublime: From "Last Day of Pompeii" to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes

 Tue 31 January 2012 – 7.30pm
Lecture/Talk, Pushkin House, London
Call for Sublime: From "Last Day of Pompeii" to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes
by Ilia Dorontchenkov
TEN CENTURIES OF RUSSIAN ART: IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY LECTURE SERIES
VIEW THE WHOLE LECTURE SERIES

Carl Briollov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1833) 

This lecture covers almost hundred years of Russian art: from its first masterpiece which rejoined provincial Russian school with European Romantic mainstream and was accepted as an important social event in Russia – Carl Briollov’s The Last Day of Pompeii (1833) to the triumphal Drang nach Westen of Russian Modernism – Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons (1910s). Between these milestones a whole range of important phenomena will be presented – sentimental images of Russian peasants of Alexei Venetsianov and Romantic Utopia of spiritual transfiguration in Alexander Ivanov’s Appearance of Christ to the People (1837-58). Art of the Itinerants will be discussed as the most radical Realist movement in Europe and the phenomena which still shapes Russians’ understanding of art. Vasilii Surikov’s historical machines will be paralleled to Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and Isaac Levitan’s landscapes seen through the lenses of Chekhov’s psychological analysis. Finally, the World of Art movement will be discussed as a major cultural turn in the development of Russian national culture on its way to avant-garde.

Ilia Dorontchenkov, Professor and Chair at the Department of Art History, European University of St. Petersburg and Professor at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (Academy of Fine Arts)

Tickets: £7, conc. £5 (Friends of Pushkin House, students and OAPs)
http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/call-for-sublime-from-last-day-of-pompeii-to-diaghilevs-ballets-russes