Versailles dreams Benois

[Тютчев]

Versailles DREAMS Benois

9 June 2010
Mikhailovsky Palace

The program of the III International Festival "The Imperial Gardens of Russia»

In the Russian Museum collection contains over 6,000 works of famous Russian artist, critic and art historian Alexander Benois (1870-1960). The exhibition features about 40 paintings and graphic works created by the wizard in different years on Versailles - an outstanding monument to French architecture and gardening art of the XVII century. Benoit, in his own words, was "intoxicated Versailles" and "completely settled in the past." In a series of watercolors and gouaches "Last walk of Louis XIV» (1897-1898), as well as in the "second series of Versailles" (1905-1907) and the work carried out in 1922, long after the artist ever left Russia, he adheres to a clear, somewhat dry plastic language, which distinguishes the French landscape and architectural graphics XVII century. This series of long cemented by Alexander Benois, from childhood are showing increased interest in the art of Russian and Western classical and baroque, the fame of the singer Versailles and Louis.
In the works "Versailles series" Nature and history are brought in inseparable unity. Architecture, sculpture and alleys of the famous residence of French kings look like silent witnesses irretrievably bygone era of the great, keeping the memory of the creator and owner of the ensemble of Versailles. Along with the sketches, written from life, the artist served as genre paintings, recreating not just a typical scene distant historical period, but its very unique atmosphere. The high craftsmanship allowed Benoit to submit an image of the park of Versailles as an image of an era, worked out its own etiquette, fashion and grand style, keeping the attractiveness for the artist, lived and worked in a disturbing, full of disasters and shocks the twentieth century.

http://www.rusmuseum.ru/exhib/lenta/...salskie_grezy/