Masterpieces of the 17th-19th-centuries French printed graphic art are on display in Donetsk now. The Art-Donbass Art Exhibition Center has been happy to provide a room for 25 works from the Donetsk Museum of Arts’ collections. “Without doubt, this is a valuable collection, transferred to Donetsk from the Hermitage Museum,” the center’s art director Kateryna Kalinichenko says. It should be noted that the museum’s collection includes 8,000 French engravings in total; however, the organizers state that 25 works they have chosen fully reflect the spirit of France. Some of them are familiar to many connoisseurs of arts and literature, as they have served as book illustrations or reproduced famous pictures, the latter category allowing us to look at the paintings of that age, too.
“According to Encyclopedie Francaise’s brilliant definition, printing is ‘the art that preserves all the arts.’ This is completely true for French engravedreproduction prints of the 17th and 18th centuries, where engravers acted as interpreters and reproducers of paintings by old masters and their contemporaries,” the organizers maintain.
The exhibits include prints by Jean-Joseph Balechou, Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, Nicolas Dupuis, Charles Cochin, and Francois Chereau.
“The pictures show the thematic diversity of French engraving art, its new expressive powers obtained by the artists through combining incision and etching techniques in one piece. The combination made engravings more picturesque, brought forward subtle nuances and the trend towards greater intimacy of shapes and scenes, all these phenomena being ascendant in the 18th century French culture. They are exemplified by Le Bas’s View of Naples and View of the Galleys in Naples, engraved after famous Claude-Joseph Vernet’s landscape paintings. Balechou’s engraving St. Genevieve, the Patron Saint of Paris (after an original painting by Charles-Andre van Loo) will attract the viewer’s attention with its lyrical interpretation of the heroine’s image and refined elegance,” Kalinichenko continues.
The Ambassador of France to Ukraine Alain Remy, who was present at the opening ceremony, said he liked the exhibition in Donetsk very much, and suggested that the future might bring further cultural cooperation, involving cross-cultural exchanges, joint projects, etc.
The exhibition will run until August 15, 2013, admission is free.
