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Title:Valentine Serov Great Collections Publisher: White City Language: Russian with English Summary and all image identification information in English Price: $275 plus $15 for shipping, handling and insurance |
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Valentin Alexandrovich Serov (1865-1911)
Valentin Serov was born in St. Petersburg, the son of the well-known composer Alexander Serov. In his childhood the future artist was steeped in an artistic atmosphere: not only musicians, but also artists such as Mark Antokolsky and Ilya Repin were visitors to the house, and Alexander Serov himself was an ardent amateur artist.
Repin gave the young Serov his first lessons in Paris and continued them in Moscow and Abramtsevo. After a trip with his talented pupil to Zaporozhye, Repin sent him in 1880 to the celebrated Pavel Chistyakov at the Academy of Arts.
At Abramtsevo he painted his famous portrait of the twelve-year-old Vera Mamontova , 1887, in which he wished to achieve, in his own words, 'perfection without sacrificing freshness of painting—as in the old masters'.
Title: Valentine Serov Great Collections
Format: Hardcover with slip cover
287 pages, 330 full color images
Publisher: White City
Language: Russian with English Summary and
all image identification information in English
Product dimensions 14.75 x 10.5 x 1.25"
Price $275 plus $15 for shipping, handling and insurance.
Serov's psychological perceptiveness, his ability to see and show the spirit of the person sitting in front of him, soon made him the leading portraitist in Russia. His portraits show his contemporaries: the artist's cheerful friend, the landscape-painter Konstantin Korovin and an inspired image of Isaak Levitan. (below)
Serov's painting and drawing skills are quite outstanding. The great emotional effectiveness of his works can be explained by his ability to find precisely the right means of representation and to embody a many-faceted picture of life in a perfect form. Take any of Serov's portraits: it is not just a talented reproduction of some individual's features, but an image of the world in which that person lives.
The heroic Petrine age, severe and unprecedented, took possession of the artist's imagination. One of the best works was Peter the Great 1907, threatening and impulsive, Peter is moving against a strong wind. His preposterous carnival-like retinue, his clothes whipping in the wind, struggles with difficulty behind him. In everything—in Peter's determined striding. towards a new building, in the turbulent water, in the thin masts of the ships, and in the racing clouds—one feels the dynamism of transformations which were only possible thanks to the will, energy and efforts of courageous people.
Early on the morning of 22 November 1911 Valentin Serov was hurrying to the Shcherbatovs for a portrait sitting when he fell and suffered cardiac arrest. He died at the peak of his talent, at the age of forty-six.
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Title:Valentine Serov Great Collections Publisher: White City Language: Russian with English Summary and all image identification information in English Price: $275 plus $15 for shipping, handling and insurance |