Exhibition of artist Alexander Altman opens at the House of Russian Diaspora

by time news

The exhibition “Alexander Altman. The Romance of the Suburbs. The Russian Landscape of the “Paris School”” opens in the House of Russian Diaspora.

The surname Altman immediately refers us to the famous portrait of Anna Akhmatova – blue-yellow, brittle, unforgettably avant-garde. But Nathan Altman wrote it. Alexander Altman, an impressionist artist, a prominent representative of the “Paris School”, lived almost all his life in France.

He is not a post-revolutionary migrant, but a poor young man who went to Vienna and then to Paris. After a faint of hunger, he ended up in the Rothschild clinic and made a portrait of an old Jewish man that the trustee of the hospital liked. And it was a smile of fate: the artist and his philanthropist met.

Based on his first plein airs, an exhibition was assembled in Paris. Like Bakst, Bilibin, Goncharova, Dobuzhinsky, Kandinsky, Petrov-Vodkin, Bonnard, Denis, Matisse, Rousseau, he was a participant in the salons of Vladimir Izdebsky in a number of Russian cities, which influenced the formation of the Russian avant-garde.

The canvases presented at the exhibition in the House of Russian Diaspora are the master’s landscapes. They are the suburbs of Paris, where French plein airism was born.

“The exhibition is intended to show that for Altman, as well as for other artists who developed the traditions of impressionism, the plein air became a deity who was worshiped, and work in the open air became a method of conveying the subtle states of the surrounding world, admiring the changeable weather depending on the season,” – emphasize the organizers of the exhibition.

The curator of the exhibition, Lyubov Agafonova, believes that Alexander Altman “can be considered a full-fledged creator of the Russian Silver Age.”

The paintings at the exhibition are complemented by a collection of original postcards from the turn of the 19th-20th centuries from the collection of the Russian State Library of Arts with images of picturesque places in France that the Impressionists loved so much, and unique photographs of the artist himself from the collections of the Pushkin House Literary Museum.

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