Retrospective for the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Veysberg at the Pushkin Museum

The Pushkin Museum's Gallery of European and American Art hosts "From Colour to Light", an exhibition marking the centenary of Vladimir Veisberg, a landmark figure of Soviet unofficial art. It offers a unique chance to see a retrospective of the creator of the "white on white" manner and to follow Veisberg's passage from a bright, Mashkov-like style to his own signature misty canvas. If Veisberg's milky, blurred paintings are regarded as a classic of unofficial Soviet art of the 1960s to 1980s, his colour works, which lean rather towards the Knave of Diamonds circle, are seen far more rarely. The exhibition shows about a hundred works, covering the artist's entire creative biography.

Veisberg is a most interesting personality: a man who completed his artistic education on his own, studying under the greatest masters by endlessly visiting museums, and who built a life in art as simple and unvarying as the movement of a precise clockwork mechanism. On the other hand, Veisberg studied art like a scholar, and the exhibition presents fragments of his paper given at the Academy of Sciences symposium on the structural study of sign systems, "Classification of the Main Types of Colouristic Perception". As a result of his scientific researches, Veisberg proposed dividing the viewer's impressions of painting into the instantaneous, the long-term and the infinite.