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André Brasilier. Paintings, ceramics,
tapestries. This exhibition of works by André Brasilier marks the first time the artist is being shown in Russia. The exhibition has been organized by the State Hermitage together with the Galerie de Bussy, Paris. The more than 100 exhibits splendidly complement the museum's own collection of 19th and early 20th century French art that is shown in the General Staff building. André Brasilier was born in 1929 and has become one of the most widely known artists in present-day France. His tapestries and book illustrations, stage decorations and monumental decorative projects all achieve impressive results. Without a doubt he is one of the best ceramic artists of our day. Two decades ago his works were displayed in an exhibition of the Ceramics Museum of Mettlach alongside Picasso, Braque, Chagal and Miro. But Brasilier's main field of artistic activity is painting. His first paintings date from the first half of the last century. After completing his studies at the National School of Fine Arts in 1953, he won the Prix de Rome and spent three years in residence at the Villa Medici in Rome. During this Roman period Brasilier was especially attracted by themes from music and the circus. At the start of the 1950's, he came under the influence of Fauvism and combined the intense colors of this movement with the lessons of the French classics, but he always remained true to the light Romantic world view. From his early years Brasilier enthusiastically worked on large figurative compositions, often drawn to natural scale in a manner that had gone out of favor in modern art long ago. He revealed a unique decorative quality in the works of his youth: he used broad swathes of color with the same confidence as his contemporaries among the abstract artists, though he never gave preference to absolute fantasy in place of reality (Red Circus, Parade, Elephants, the Lady Equestrian, and others). Brasilier's musical variations are among his most important achievements. In depicting orchestra musicians, he compels us to hear the sounds of their instruments. After his first canvases about music and the circus, the artist began painting pictures of horses, which he considers to be the incarnation of beauty and the energy of the world of nature. Many of Brasilier's paintings are devoted to his muse, his wife Chantal. These canvases are executed in the purely French genre of femme-fleur (woman as flower) in which Renoir and Matisse once worked. The artist self-confidently combines in his extraordinary compositions the likeness of Chantal with a flawlessly gathered bouquet. There is a good reason why Brasilier is so highly appreciated in Japan, a country which is particularly sensitive to everything surrounding flowers. Brasilier's paintings and ceramics have common pictorial elements. His vases with horses recall the works of the masters of Ancient Greece, since the artist likes to reflect on subjects from Antiquity. Brasilier's tapestries do not look like copies of oil paintings even when there is a similar subject in his canvases. The texture of silk and wool used in tapestry making dictates its own rules, and the softness of dyed threads, the vibration that went into weaving all have an influence on the general color palette of the composition. The exhibition's curator, A.G. Kostenevich, has a doctorate in art history and is the chief researcher in the State Hermitage's Department of Western European Art. An illustrated scholarly catalogue has been issued by Acatos Publishing, Paris. It has introductory articles by Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, French Minister of Culture, St Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko, and Director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky. A.G. Kostenevich is the author of the catalogue |
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Copyright © 2011 State Hermitage Museum |
