Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky
- Submitting institution
-
University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 12912
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This output is the result of a culturally and politically sensitive five-year partnership with Russia's national gallery which brought an unprecedented selection of Russian portraits to Britain and galvanized a similarly ambitious exchange exhibition in Moscow. Predicated on primary research which adopted an innovative transcultural lens, the exhibition and its catalogue established new social, political and interdisciplinary contexts for the understanding and interpretation of Russian portraiture. It also pioneered a comparative study of the patronage and practice of portraiture in Britain and Russia which uncovered unknown intersections as well as points of divergence in a complex cultural field.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky (London, National Portrait Gallery 2016) is lead output in this multi-component single item. Blakesley curated the exhibition and edited the catalogue, submitted with contextual information enabling reviewers to visualize the exhibition. She also wrote five of the catalogue’s chapters, commissioned and edited the sixth, and authored all of the catalogue entries.
Arising from Blakesley’s research on imperial Russian painting, the exhibition was the first to expose Russian portraiture’s idiosyncratic engagement with other art forms in the period 1870-1914. Following extensive archival work, analysis of under-researched paintings languishing in storerooms, and fresh consideration of canonical works, it assembled 26 portraits from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, including several never exhibited abroad. These were interrogated from cultural, political and material perspectives to generate new understanding of patronage, production, iconography and reception, and provide carefully historicised data for the exhibition’s didactic panels, catalogue and public programmes.
In the exhibition’s first gallery, Blakesley’s selection and analysis of portraits of critics, writers and actors uncovered ways in which Russian Realism flexed in response to different literary and dramatic styles. Sections on ‘Composers and Musicians’, ‘Estate Culture’ and ‘Poets’ in the second gallery revealed Cubist and Symbolist innovation that arose in tandem with advancements in other cultural fields, as well as offering new findings about key patrons.
The catalogue contextualised these exhibits within a transcultural framework and a longue durée to expose the international contexts as much as the local specificities of imperial Russian portraits and contest the nationalist lens through which these have invariably been viewed. Including reproductions of paintings, prints and photographs not included in the exhibition, it provided a more granular and discursive complement to the finely-focused visual display."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -