From color to light. To the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Weisberg

Curators: Anna Chudetskaya (1958–2023), candidate of art history, curator of the Vladimir Weisberg Fund in the department of personal collections of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin; Elena Kamenskaya, candidate of art history, advisor to the directorate of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkina

Participants: Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkin, State Tretyakov Gallery, State Rostov-Yaroslavl Architectural and Art Museum-Reserve, private collections.

A monographic exhibition of Vladimir Weisberg (1924–1984) opens in the year of his centenary. It has a double dedication: to the artist himself and to his researcher – Anna Chudetskaya (1958–2023), curator of the Vladimir Weisberg Fund in the department of personal collections of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. A. S. Pushkin. The concept is based on the materials of Anna Chudetskaya and her fundamental monograph “From Color to Light”.

The exhibition will be held with the support of the Vladimir Weisberg Foundation.

Vladimir Weisberg is an outstanding Russian artist and art theorist, belonging to the post-war generation of authors whose formation took place in the mid-1950s - early 1960s. The master’s work did not fit into the framework of either official art or nonconformism; he is an artist of tradition; comprehension of the laws of classical art was the goal of his theoretical searches and painting practice.

Vladimir Weisberg’s connection with the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin was a constant - from early youth until the last years of his life, he visited the museum almost weekly. This union lasted even after the artist’s death: in 1997, his widow Galina Ermina donated a collection of paintings and graphics to the Pushkin Museum. Thanks to this, the Pushkin Museum named after. A. S. Pushkin has the largest museum collection of Weisberg’s works.

Exhibition “From color to light. To the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Weisberg” - a sequential story about the master’s work - is divided into seven sections and is built on a chronological principle.

Two halls are dedicated to the so-called color period - works of the second half of the 1950s, when the master’s creative search took place against the backdrop of the cultural upsurge of the Thaw era and the revival of artistic life in the country. During these years, the Pushkin Museum became a real school for Vladimir Weisberg. To see the masterpieces of the Dresden collection at the famous exhibition of 1955, Weisberg got a job as a laborer at the museum - this gave him the opportunity to spend hours studying the paintings that fascinated him, including the Impressionists and Cezanne. Impressions from direct contact with the works had a huge impact on the formation of the artist’s creative method.

The “Transformation of Reality” hall is dedicated to the formation of Weisberg’s original painting concept. The iconic works of this period are presented here - “Homage to Cezanne”, “Composition with gauze”, “Architecture” and others. In 1962, at a symposium of philosophers and linguists of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, the artist gave a report “Three Types of Coloristic Perception,” which marked a turn in his work. Vladimir Weisberg considered the evolution of color perception as a progressive development in the history of painting, which from direct likeness to nature through the analytical stage became a tool for studying human consciousness.

The drawing room opens up to the viewer the “Weisberg laboratory”, who for a long time followed a strict schedule: painting in the morning, drawing in the evening. In everyday creative practice, the artist used drawing at the stage of direct perception, while in watercolor, when working with color in the depiction of nudes, the process of dematerialization of form began.

The final two rooms are dedicated to “invisible painting” of the mature period. “Valer architecture” was the term Weisberg used in the mid-1960s to define his painting. He built compositions on the interaction of similar color shades. The artist’s “white” work never contained pure color: white was used only in mixtures with chromatic colors. Weisberg called the subtle nuances of color and tone that made up the overall color scheme “values.” At the beginning of the “white” period, he paid attention to complex textures, applying body strokes of varying densities to the canvas, but then he completely focused on the problems of space.

“Harmony must be created on canvas,” the artist said in the late 1970s, reinforcing in practice the theory of “harmonious integrity” with painting series. Then in his works a recognizable, ideally smooth surface of the picture plane appeared, on which the image was enveloped in a single color-light environment. Weisberg’s instinctive desire to move away from the sensory-emotional perception of color to the intellectual-sensual, to “break away from the objective” and dissolve it, led the artist to an almost monochrome, saturated with tonal fluctuations, luminous pictorial haze of “white on white.”

Anna Chudetskaya, to whose memory the exhibition is dedicated, made Vladimir Weisberg the hero of her PhD thesis. This was followed by articles, albums, and the monograph “From Color to Light” (2018). Anna Yuryevna’s constant work on research and popularization of the artist’s creative and theoretical heritage did not stop until the last days of her life. Weisberg’s centenary could become another peak on the path to understanding the artist’s work.

Educational and inclusive programs, as well as a souvenir collection, have been prepared for the exhibition.

The museum expresses gratitude to the In artibus foundation.