![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Is Russian
Jun. 4th, 2019 10:38 amMy friend lydamorehouse has a gift for finding the perfect place to take visitors to show off her city. When we said we'd be in town for the weekend, and had Sunday free, after tossing around some ideas, she said, How about the Russian Art Museum? Oh, hell yeah!
The Museum of Russian Art is in a little converted church in south Minneapolis. I don't know if it has a permanent collection, or just assembles guest and touring shows, but the two shows they have currently are fabulous.
On the ground floor and upstairs was a painting show called The Body in Soviet Art. The paintings in question are post-Stalinist, mostly from a period called the Kruschev Thaw, when the old-guard, Social Realists got the boot and both style and subject matter diversified. The subjects, while still including hard-working proletariat--tractor drivers, women plasterers and loggers--also include some lovely portraits, people at rest and play (and bicycling!). The style is where things really open up. There's a lot of impressionist influence on composition, light, brushwork. A couple of portraits, back to back on the same display panel, could have been early and late Rembrandts. And a big panel of winter life in the courtyard of a housing block harkens way back to Pieter Breughel the Elder in the way he fills the scene.
There's also a little gallery of nude studies, very student-life-drawing-class-ish, and a bunch of more recent political allegories upstairs, surreal and creepy monsters dissecting the body politic (as represented by nude female figures). Surreal, check. Creepy, double check.
Less creepy, but still very surreal (and, okay, a little creepy) was the show in the basement: Surreal Promenade - Sergei Isupov. He's a sculptor in porcelain, born in Russia, but now living in Massachusetts; the show was apparently organized in conjunction with the NCECA conference last winter. The subjects and juxtapositions can be a little unsettling, but the craftsmanship is amazing.
The Museum of Russian Art is in a little converted church in south Minneapolis. I don't know if it has a permanent collection, or just assembles guest and touring shows, but the two shows they have currently are fabulous.
On the ground floor and upstairs was a painting show called The Body in Soviet Art. The paintings in question are post-Stalinist, mostly from a period called the Kruschev Thaw, when the old-guard, Social Realists got the boot and both style and subject matter diversified. The subjects, while still including hard-working proletariat--tractor drivers, women plasterers and loggers--also include some lovely portraits, people at rest and play (and bicycling!). The style is where things really open up. There's a lot of impressionist influence on composition, light, brushwork. A couple of portraits, back to back on the same display panel, could have been early and late Rembrandts. And a big panel of winter life in the courtyard of a housing block harkens way back to Pieter Breughel the Elder in the way he fills the scene.
There's also a little gallery of nude studies, very student-life-drawing-class-ish, and a bunch of more recent political allegories upstairs, surreal and creepy monsters dissecting the body politic (as represented by nude female figures). Surreal, check. Creepy, double check.
Less creepy, but still very surreal (and, okay, a little creepy) was the show in the basement: Surreal Promenade - Sergei Isupov. He's a sculptor in porcelain, born in Russia, but now living in Massachusetts; the show was apparently organized in conjunction with the NCECA conference last winter. The subjects and juxtapositions can be a little unsettling, but the craftsmanship is amazing.
