Luminous landscapes

The septuagenarian Russian artist Oleg Vassiliev is exhibiting for the first time in London. Vassiliev was born in Moscow, in 1931, and studied graphic art at the Surikov Art Institute (Moscow State Art Institute), a training which provided him with both an extraordinary technical understanding of the use of pencil, and the means of a livelihood as a book illustrator in Soviet Russia. In the spring and autumn months Vassiliev was able to explore the landscape immediate to Moscow with fellow artists, as well as ideas as to what constituted art. The resultant paintings, though not overtly politically motivated, inevitably fell into the category of ‘unofficial art’ when publicly exhibited; Vassiliev emigrated to the USA in 1990.

Vassiliev’s paintings and drawings have embraced several specifically Russian and international aspects of art practice and its history. Both early works and the current eight paintings and drawings on display show the legacy of the revival in late-19th-century landscape painting in Russia and Northern Europe; much of this art falls within the category of Landscape Symbolism and the attendant discovery of national landscape characteristics. For Russia this meant the sheer vastness of the country, its cultivated land as well as the wilderness, meadows, woodland and waterways, and the creation of new subjects and ways of composing compositions. In Russia the aptly named artists’ co-operative ‘The Wanderers’ was established in 1870. Particularly important to Vassiliev were the paintings of Alexei Savrasov, who created images of country roads and muddy cart-tracks; Ivan Shishkin, who studied in Germany at the Düsseldorf Academy, a leading centre in European landscape painting, and who espoused large-scale paintings with precision realism; and the poetical mood of Isaak Levitan’s paintings. Vassiliev has also worked in a less figurative and abstract way, in response to Russian modernism, exemplified by the archetypal modernist Kasimir Malevich.

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