Tumgik
#Hermitage Museum
Text
Tumblr media
2,300-Year-Old Plush Bird from the Altai Mountains of Siberia (c.400-300 BCE): crafted with a felt body and reindeer-fur stuffing, all of which remains intact
This artifact was sealed within the frozen barrows of Pazyryk, Siberia, for more than two millennia, where a unique microclimate enabled it to be preserved. The permafrost ice lense formation that runs below the barrows provided an insulating layer, preventing the soil from heating during the summer and allowing it to quickly freeze during the winter; these conditions produced a separate microclimate within the stone walls of the barrows themselves, thereby aiding in the preservation of the artifacts inside.
This is just one of the many well-preserved artifacts that have been found at Pazyryk. These artifacts are attributed to the Scythian/Altaic cultures.
Currently housed at the Hermitage Museum.
45K notes · View notes
metamorphesque · 6 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
looking at people looking at art
895 notes · View notes
illustratus · 8 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Head of Ares
828 notes · View notes
lionofchaeronea · 15 days
Text
Tumblr media
Self-Portrait, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1800
151 notes · View notes
otmaaromanovas · 8 months
Text
NEW dress belonging to OTMA has been discovered
Tumblr media Tumblr media
A BRAND NEW, never-before-seen dress belonging to one of the Grand Duchesses has been discovered by the Hermitage Museum and exhibited for the first time.
It has not yet been identified who the pink and red dress belongs to. The sisters used to have their first name and patronymics stitched into the waist of their dresses in order to differentiate between them. Similarly, the dress maker is not yet known, though it is highly likely that it was produced in the workshops of either Olga Bubenkova or August Brizak, two of the Romanov family’s favourite designers.
The dress, alongside many other pieces of clothing and personal items, can be seen at the Hermitage Museum’s new exhibit, ‘OTMA & Alexei’.
Sources and photos: Дети последнего российского императора. Выбор куратора, Hermitage Museum, RomanovsOneLastDance 
Tumblr media
304 notes · View notes
ancientsstudies · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Hermitage Museum by dobrevyana.
2K notes · View notes
recherchestetique · 13 days
Text
Tumblr media
bracelet from the Sarmatian tribe (Scythian art) in gold and turquoise. 2nd century BC/2nd century AD Hermitage Museum. St. Petersburg. Russia
25 notes · View notes
a-sculpture-a-day · 9 months
Text
Tumblr media
Portrait of Benedetto Pamphili, Alessandro Algardi, c. 1646, terracotta, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
93 notes · View notes
mypepemateosus · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
9 notes · View notes
theintexp · 1 month
Text
The Battle of Borodino on 26 August 1812 by Peter von Hess
Tumblr media
The Battle of Borodino took place near the village of Borodino on 7 September (O.S. 26 August) 1812 during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The Grande Armée won the battle against the Imperial Russian Army, but failed to gain a decisive victory and suffered tremendous losses. Napoleon fought against General Mikhail Kutuzov, whom the Emperor Alexander I of Russia had appointed to replace Barclay de Tolly on 29 August (O.S. 17 August) 1812 after the Battle of Smolensk. After the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon remained on the battlefield with his army; the Imperial Russian forces retreated in an orderly fashion southwards. Because the Imperial Russian army had severely weakened the Grande Armée, they allowed the French occupation of Moscow, using the city as bait to trap Napoleon and his men. The failure of the Grande Armée to completely destroy the Imperial Russian army, in particular Napoleon's reluctance to deploy his Imperial Guard, has been widely criticised by historians as a huge blunder, as it allowed the Imperial Russian army to continue its retreat into territory increasingly hostile to the French. Approximately a quarter of a million soldiers were involved in the battle, and it was the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars.
Although the Battle of Borodino is classified as a victory for Napoleon since he and his men managed to capture Moscow, the fierce defense of the Imperial Russian Army devastated the Grande Armée to such an extent that it caused France and its army to become militarily impuissant. Also, the city was actually used as bait to lure and trap the French forces. When Napoleon and his men visited the city, he found that it was burnt and abandoned upon his arrival. While Napoleon was in Moscow, he sent a letter to the tsar who was residing in Saint Petersburg demanding that he surrender and accept defeat. Napoleon received no response. Whilst patiently waiting for an answer from the tsar, as soon as the cold winter and snowfall started to form, Napoleon, realizing what was happening, attempted to escape the country with his men. Seeing that they were fleeing, the Imperial Russian army launched a massive attack on the French. Attrition warfare was used by Kutuzov by burning Moscow's resources, guerrilla warfare by the Cossacks against any kind of transport and total war by the peasants against foraging. This kind of warfare weakened the French army at its most vulnerable point: logistics, as it was unable to pillage Russian land, which was insufficiently populated nor cultivated, meaning that starvation became the most dangerous enemy long before the cold joined in. The feeding of horses by supply trains was extremely difficult, as a ration for a horse weighs about ten times as much as one for a man. It was tried in vain to feed and water all the horses by foraging expeditions. Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who invaded the Russian Empire, fewer than 100,000 returned. Sources. The Battle of Borodino, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
youtube
8 notes · View notes
Tumblr media
Theodor Hildebrandt (1804-1874) "Children Expecting the Christmas Feast" (1840) Oil on canvas Located in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
140 notes · View notes
4eternal-life · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media
Henri Matisse  (French, 1869–1954)
Vase of Sunflowers,   1898
oil on canvas,  46 x 30cm
Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
@ Wikimedia Commons 
On the basis of style, scholars have allocated this still life to a group of works created in Corsica in 1898-1899. The trip to Corsica, the influence of the blinding light of the southern sun and the rich southern landscape, contributed to Matisse's rejection of the Impressionist atmosphere of changing, flickering light and air in his paintings. Almost Cezanne-like, Matisse made the air heavier, intensifying light and form.
The sunflower motif - the flowers still continuing to radiate the sun's energy - may well not have been an accidental choice. Like the energetic impasto brushstrokes, it leads us to recall the work of van Gogh and to consider the latter's influence on the development of the young artist. - 1890s
70 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
Raphael Loggias Corridor inside the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, RUSSIA
65 notes · View notes
armthearmour · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
A gilt pollaxe on a one handed haft,
OaL: 31.7 in/80.5 cm
Italy, ca. 1530-1550, housed at the State Hermitage Museum, Moscow.
227 notes · View notes
lionofchaeronea · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Lilacs, Vincent van Gogh, 1889
842 notes · View notes
Photo
Tumblr media
Pierre Soulages (24 December 1919 – 26 October 2022)
Known as “the painter of black and light,” Pierre Soulages has forged a career remarkable not only for its rigorous invention, but for its longevity. Since the postwar period, the artist has evaded participation in such movements as Abstract Expressionism, tachism, and informel—rather contextualizing his paintings in terms of vitalism, classicism, and prehistoric forms. 
Already in 1948, he refused the terms of lyrical abstraction: “Painting is not the equivalent of a sensation, an emotion, or a feeling; it is the organization of colored forms, on which is made and unmade a meaning that we impose on it.”
Mr Soulages has explored such contingency predominantly with the color black, arriving at tactile canvases which might recall nocturnal landscapes or charred earth. Since 1979, he has pursued his series Outrenoir, whose title is a portmanteau Soulages defines as “beyond black.” With these variously gouged, scraped, and slicked tar-like surfaces, he transforms the spatial and temporal dimensions of painting. 
Critic Donald Kuspit once described the abstractions as “negatively sublime”—they inflect obdurate materiality with the mercurial aspects of light, achieving the effect of the immeasurable.
As a child, Soulages was drawn to the prehistoric menhirs found in his hometown of Rodez and the Romanesque architecture of the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in nearby Conques, and he would paint winter trees in black on a brown background, rendering branches in such a way to suggest movement in space. These early influences and endeavors would go on to shape his work for seven decades. 
In 1938, he moved to Paris to train as a drawing teacher and take the entrance exam for the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Though he was accepted, he declined the offer, dissatisfied with the school’s mediocre standards. He returned to Rodez newly inspired after visiting exhibitions of work by Cézanne and Picasso. He was soon conscripted into French military service, but he forged papers to avoid mandatory labor for the Nazi party and spent the occupation in central France working as a wine producer.
In 1946, Soulages returned to Paris to devote himself to painting, and he eventually settled into a studio on Rue Schoelcher near Montparnasse. He first exhibited his paintings—bold, flat marks of walnut stain on paper—in the Salon des Surindependents of October 1947, where he caught the attention of Francis Picabia. The following year would prove significant to Soulages’s exposure throughout Europe and the United States: He was the youngest artist to be included in Grosse Ausstellung Französische Abstrakte Malerei (Grand Exhibition of French Abstract Painting), the major traveling exhibition of abstract art organized by the Württembergische Kunstverein in Stuttgart; and James Johnson Sweeney, the future director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, made a visit to Soulages’s studio after hearing talk in Paris of a painter who worked in black with broad brushstrokes.
In 1949, the artist mounted his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lydia Conti in Paris, and his paintings were included in a group exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where his work was received as a French analog to that of the New York School artists. In 1950, his paintings were juxtaposed with those of Franz Kline in the acclaimed exhibition Young Painters in the US and France, curated by Leo Castelli at Sidney Janis in New York. 
Three years later, Sweeney included the artist in Younger European Painters at the Guggenheim, alongside Karel Appel, Alberto Burri, Hans Hartung, and Victor Vasarely, among others. Before the exhibition closed, Soulages had signed with the legendary Samuel Kootz Gallery, where he had his first solo exhibition in New York just two months later. 
Mr Soulages’s first retrospective was presented in 1960 at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, followed by iterations at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and Kunsthaus Zürich. His first American retrospective was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1966. There, he suspended his paintings, back to back, from cables attached to the ceiling so that they appeared to float freely in space. The following year, the first retrospective dedicated to Soulages in France was presented at the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
In 1979, Soulages debuted his “mono-pigmented” black paintings at the Centre Pompidou, inaugurating Outrenoir, the body of work which would dominate his practice for the decades to come.  “These paintings were first called ‘Black Light,’ thus designating a light that was inseparable from the black that reflected it,” Soulages has said. “In order not to limit them to an optical phenomenon, I invented the word ‘Outrenoir’ beyond black or—across black—a light transmitted by black.” Soulages received the Grand Prix National de Peinture in 1986, and the following year he was granted a major commission from the French state to design 104 stained-glass windows for the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy. Over eight years, he expanded his engagement with light and architectonics to produce one of the great site-specific projects of the postwar period. In 1992, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from the Japan Art Association.
Mr Soulages has been honored with two additional retrospectives in France, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1996, and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in 2009. In 2001, he was the first living artist to be given a full-scale survey at the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, and in 2014, the Musée Soulages opened in the artist’s hometown of Rodez, housing five hundred paintings spanning Soulages’s career. 
More than 150 of his paintings are in public collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
On the occasion of Soulages’s centennial birthday in December 2019, the Musée du Louvre paid homage to the artist with a survey of his seven-decade career, concurrent with an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Before Soulages, the Louvre has honored only two other artists with an exhibition during their respective lifetimes: Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall. To shed greater light on the French artist’s presence in the United States, Lévy Gorvy presented the major survey Pierre Soulages: A Century in New York from September to October 2019. This exhibition was accompanied by a publication, featuring essays by Brooks Adams and Alfred Pacquement as well as poems by Sy Hoahwah and Virginie Poitrasson.
Peinture 81 x 60 cm, 3 décembre 1956, oil on canvas signed and re-signed, dated 12-56-1-57, 81 x 60 cm (approx. 31.8 x 23.6 in). © Adagp, Paris 2020.
50 notes · View notes