Studio: international art (61.1914)

Studio- Talk

Russian Orientalists, M. Saryan and P. Kusnetsoff,
with their admirable rendering of light effects and
harmonious juxtaposition of rich colours and their
shrewd characterisation of Persian life and land-
scape and the Steppes of Central Asia. An original
and expressive portrait of a lady was exhibited by
N. Ulianoff, but the numerous portraits and other
works of B. Kustodieff left a rather cold impression.
Among this group of realistic painters mention
should be made of V. Schitikoff with his poetic
landscapes.

The art of the theatre, comprising designs and
drawings for theatre decorations, costumes, and
scene arrangements, was as usual very amply
represented. Among the numerous works of
Alexander Benois one that proved especially
attractive was a beautiful composition for a stage
setting of Debussy's " Fetes," but in the case of
S. Sudeikin, a very prolific worker in this field,
one regrets to observe that his colour is becoming
disagreeably crude. The most interesting things
in this department, in my opinion, were the
costume-drawings of a young artist, V. Tatlin: not
only has he therein shown himself the possessor of
a style of his own, but he has also displayed
no small degree of humour as well as a close study
of Russian types. D. Stelletsky proves himself
an out-and-out stylist in his paintings, of which the
one here reproduced, with a motive drawn from
mediaeval Moscow, gives a good idea, though one
cannot help wishing that in his historical recon-
structions of old Russian frescoes the artist would
display a little more individuality. K. Petroff-

Vodkin's work savours more of the decorative style
of western Europe, but so far he has not yet reached
any favourable result in this direction, and
R. Bogaievsky has done nothing of late beyond
monotonously varying his earlier motives. A new-
comer so far as Moscow is concerned was a Polish
painter Eugene Zak, who lives in Paris ; his beautiful
decorative compositions, with their harmonious con-
cord of line and colour, presented a somewhat alien
appearance amidst such an utterly different type of
work as the Russian paintings. As on former
occasions the " Mir Isskusstva" exhibition con-
tained an excellent collection of black-and-white
work, but in this section I have no new arrival
of note to record.

In noticing previous exhibitions of the " Soyouz "
I have remarked on the predominance of realistic
painting ; this, too, was characteristic of the display
this year, in which landscape again occupied a
large place. There is, however, little that is fresh to
be said about the older group of landscape and genre
painters, including even the better known of them,
such as K. Korovin, Yuon, Petrovitcheff, and that
painter who is such a favourite with the public at
large, St. Shukovsky. An exception must be made
in the case of A. Ryloff, who is steadily coming to the
front with his fine and powerful pictures of Northern
Russia ; N. Krymoff, whose big summer landscape
painted wholly in tones of green counted among
the best things in the exhibition, and lastly A.
Arkhipoff, whose studies of two peasant girls in
a sunlit interior excel anything he has done for
a long time past. As a portraitist S. Maliutin