Paintings from St. Petersburg

Paintings from St. Petersburg

Paintings from St. Petersburg, Siberia, Crimea and the Ukraine  1940s-2000

Illustrated; Aba Kor  Chess in the Park 1970 Oil on canvas 50 x 60 cm

"At the end of the Soviet system the professional artists were left high and dry. They were given ownership of their apartments, and were left with the contents of their studios, a lifetime of paintings.  

Apart from the unsold finished paintings, the studios were full of preparatory sketches. These immediate impressions of life by these highly trained artists were a revelation. 

The finished, exhibited works had to be idealised to conform to Stalin's definition of Socialist Realism and except for a very few artists, this process took away all the spontaneity so apparent in the preparatory works.

www.leningradschool.com has a chronology of the Artists' Union of St Petersburg, with many of our aritsts prominent in the annual listing of exhibitions".

extract "Art in Russia" Letter from John Barkes, 2011