Anniversary art exhibition "Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Klimentovskaya (1916-2000). Painting"

September 29 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lyudmila Alexandrovna Klimentovskaya, a wonderful Russian artist.

Her fate was bright and dramatic. A native of the village of Zaniny-Pochinki, Ryazan Region, she received professional education at the Ryazan Art School - her main mentor was Y. Y. Kalinichenko, Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR, one of the most recent masters of the Association of Traveling Exhibitions. In 1939, having arrived in Leningrad, unexpectedly even for herself, Klimentovskaya suddenly became an artist-trainee of the famous Leningrad Academic Opera and Ballet Theater named after S. M. Kirov. Her very first works in the field of stage design are so successful that in early 1941 she received an invitation to become an artist at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater. True, having arrived in Moscow, Lyudmila Alexandrovna learns that decoration mechanisms have collapsed in the theater. And she (as it was supposed, temporarily, until the end of the repair work at the Bolshoi Theater) was arranged by the production designer of the Moscow Drama Theater named after M. Ermolova. But even this was a huge success for a very young artist. From her first steps in art, she was among the leading theater artists of the USSR. And there is no doubt that Klimentovskaya, with her talents, industriousness, adamant will, would be able to eventually take a very worthy place in this series.

But the Great Patriotic War broke out. And the circumstances were such that Klimentovskaya was forced to leave Moscow. She moves to her homeland - to the Ryazan region, for some time she works as a teacher in a rural school. And then she goes to work at the Ryazan Museum of Art and soon becomes its director. However, in 1945 she was already - the main artist of the Sevastopol Drama Theater. Three years later - the main artist of the Dzerzhinsky Drama Theater. And at the same time, he is more and more enthusiastically engaged in easel painting.

Gradually, this particular field of activity becomes the main one for it. In 1950, Klimentovskaya joined the newly formed Union of Artists of the USSR. And at the same time organizes the Kaliningrad branch of the Union of Artists, becomes its first chairman. And a year later he becomes the chairman of the organizing bureau on the creation of a branch of the Union of Artists in the Kaluga Region. A lot of effort was put by her to ensure that the local artistic group stood out from the Union of Soviet Artists of Tula and Kaluga that already existed at that time.

The Kaluga period of Klimentovskaya’s life and activity lasted almost half a century - until the very last days of her life. It was in Kaluga that all her best paintings were painted - landscapes, still lifes, paintings. It was here that she became a true master of lyrical artistic narration. And our exposition presents just the work of this period. Perhaps, artistically remarkable are the wonderful picturesque sketches, most often of very small sizes, but performed widely, confidently, artistically. These are the views of that old Kaluga, from which little remains today. Its streets, courtyards, nooks and crannies, the immediate vicinity… And not only the outward appearance of life and architecture are recreated in them, but also the signs of an underlying spiritual being. Klimentovskaya herself very accurately determined the theme of such sketches - Kaluga Tsiolkovsky.

Indeed, in these images the provincial city comes to life with the history of which the fate of Tsiolkovsky so organically merged. And at the same time, for many years the artist worked enthusiastically on the creation of paintings, the only hero of which was this great thinker.

Klimentovskaya was proud that she was “twice the compatriot” of Tsiolkovsky: she was born, like him, in the Ryazanshchina, lived in Kaluga for half a century, in the homeland of astronautics. A lyric artist, she felt a spiritual kinship with one of her great fellow countrymen, Sergey Yesenin. She has a lot of paintings from the Yesenin warehouse. Canvases in which the painting is not only poetic, but also gravitates, like Yesenin’s lyrics, to sincere song. The vastness of Russian fields, heroic to become forests - this is the essence of the content of its most elaborated landscape paintings.

Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Klimentovskaya - Honored Artist of the Russian Federation. She was awarded the medals "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War", "Thirty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. ", "Veteran of labour".

She died on March 15, 2000. Her daughter Galina Mikhailovna Borisova donated a large collection of paintings by Klimentovskaya to Kaluga. And soon a permanent exhibition of these works was opened, at first it was a department of the Kaluga Oblast art gallery "Image". Since 2002, it is the Municipal Art Gallery of the Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Klimentovskaya.

The current exhibition presents mainly works stored in the funds of the Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts. At the same time, a number of interesting works, including compositional landscapes and thematic paintings, were provided both by the art gallery of her name and the State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky.