Install biography details

Details Repin. For the first time in the history of exhibition activities in one space, items of decorative and applied art, costume and life from the collection of the I. Repin museum “Penata” and the paintings of I. Repin from many Russian museum meetings were collected. Thus, a creative “cuisine” of the great Russian artist will appear before the viewer, and to a certain extent a hidden process of crystallization of a work of art is reconstructed.

This rare possibility arose as a result of the fact that Repin’s house in the Penata museum is closed for reconstruction and parted with its exhibits for some time. The things surrounding the masters in life and inspired his work will now serve as a new “reconstruction”, in which the viewer is as if invited to the artist’s workshop and participates in the creation of his famous paintings.

Numerous studies of the work of I. Repin, the epistolary heritage of the artist and the memoirs of his contemporaries indicate the meticulous preparation of the master for writing paintings in various genres. Repin studied historical literature, consulted with historians, ethnographers, prepared and collected household items and costumes for the characters of the future picture.

Part of this material was preserved in the collection of the I. Repin museum “Penata”. This is a “Kobenyak with a vidlogue”, a bandura and a wick gun depicted in the painting “Cossacks”, painted by the artist himself boots that we see on the canvas “Ivan the Terrible and his son of Ivan”, Roman armor and Arabica brought from Palestine for a cycle about Christ and many other objects.

It is these things that make it possible to discover new information about a long time ago, seemingly studied works, as well as clarify the dating and place of writing many paintings. For example, the work vase of Mikhail Vrubel, depicted on one of the portraits of Natalia Nordman, allows us to say that it was written not in Italy, but in the foam. In turn, the history of the creation of Repin's paintings provides a unique opportunity to establish the origin of the things themselves.

So, the Moorish chair, stored in the meeting of the "Penators", is depicted in the painting "Negro", performed by an artist in Paris during a pensioner trip, which means that he was brought from France.

But details are not only specific things, it is an attempt to detail the life of the artist and his environment with the help of memories, photographs, letters of Ilya Repin, members of his family, friends and acquaintances. Such examination “under a magnifying glass” can also be applied to the thesis of Repin, which has become part of the famous “gold release” of the year.

These are the memories of the painter, where the tragic details of the process of creating the painting “Resurrection of the daughter of Jair” are revealed, and a comparison with Vasily Polenov, a classmate along the Academy of Arts, where the creative path of the great master began. A kind of “expanded look” - a method formulated by M. Matyushin and assumed, among other things, the interaction of objects and space - became the basic principle of show at this exhibition.

Considering, it would seem, insignificant details, from the word to the subject related to the personality of I. Repin, in comparison with the outstanding works of the great artist, visualizing his micro and macromirs, you can try to approach several sides at the understanding of such a unique “spatio-temporal phenomenon”, like Ilya Repin.