Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel Vrubel was born in Omsk, Russia, into a military lawyers family. His father was of Polish ancestry (Polish: Wróbel), while his mother who was Danish died when he was three years old. And though he graduated from the Faculty of Law at St Petersburg University in 1880, his father had recognized his talent for art and had made sure to provide, through numerous tutors, what proved to be a sporadic education in the subject. The next year he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied by direction of Pavel Chistyakov. Even in his earliest works, he exhibited great talent for drawing and an idiosyncratic style. He would later develop a penchant for fragmentary composition and an unfinished touch. In 1884, he was summoned to replace the lost 12th-century murals and mosaics in the St. Cyrils Church of Kiev with new ones. In order to execute this commission, he went to Venice to study medieval Christian art. It was here that, in the words of an art historian, his palette acquired new strong saturated tones resembling the iridescent play of precious stones. Most of his works painted in Venice have been lost, because the artist was more interested in creative process than in promoting his artwork. Demon Seated in a Garden, 1890 In 1886, he returned to Kiev, where he submitted some designs to the newly built St Volodymir Cathedral. The jury, however, failed to appreciate the novelty of his works, and they were rejected. At that period, he executed some illustrations for Hamlet and Anna Karenina which had little in common with his later Demon and Prophet themes. In 1905 he created the mosaics of the hotel Metropol in Moscow, of which the centre piece of the facade overlooking Teatralnaya square is occupied by the mosaic panel, Princess Gryoza (Princess of Dream).
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 20:04:00 +0000
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