An exhibition of one painting by Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov "Zhukovka on Klyazma"

September 10 at the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts (Lenin St., 104, the main exposition) will open an exhibition of one painting by Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov "Zhukovka on Klyazma", dedicated to the 175th anniversary of the artist.

The work of Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov (1844 - 1927) is one of the most significant phenomena in Russian painting of the second half of the 19th century.

He entered the history of art with his quiet, but very strong and penetrating word of the poet in painting, one of the reformers who brought understanding of the open-air study as an independent work and, thus, had a great influence on subsequent generations of artists. The founder of the genre of "intimate landscape."

In the artist’s legacy - works of various genres - he painted portraits, landscapes, turned to historical, mythological and genre painting. However, he still gained fame as a landscape painter. And if at the beginning of his career he showed himself to be a master of the lyrical landscape, then subsequently his painting acquired epic features.

V.D. Polenov was remembered, first of all, as the creator of remarkable examples of the Russian landscape and the sunny, joyful simplicity of his paintings. The sky is bright, high, washing the domes of churches and wooden roofs of courtyards, glare on the walkways, lilac shrubs and lush thickets of grass - all this is artless, familiar, and in all this she, Mother Russia.

The work "Zhukovka on Klyazma", dated 1889, has the author’s repetitions stored in the State Tretyakov Gallery and in the Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum. The history of this picture can be traced from the letters of the artist’s sister. On the bank of the Klyazma in Zhukovka was the Polenovs’ summer house.

In the picture, the emotional mood of lyrical contemplation is transmitted here through a bend on the right bank, where the master most often worked, subtly feeling the enchanting motif with green thickets reflected in the mirror water of the river. The landscape with its calm and wide spread of space, an abundance of light, air, smooth, flowing rhythms of lines, a centric balanced composition makes a surprisingly pacifying impression. The quiet, lyrical, contemplative mood and simplicity of the motive determines the whole structure of the landscape, leaves its mark on the interpretation of the image of nature.

V.D. Polenov masterfully, like no other, shows the quiet sound of the nature of God’s world. There is a fixed desire for a concrete, sometimes fleeting state of living nature, where it is at the zenith of maturity, filled with inner strength.

To see the beauty of familiar things and convey it in such a way that touches the heart, only great talent can do it.

Multifaceted and complex at the same time, the artist remained a mystery to critics and connoisseurs of painting.

The exhibition runs until November 3.