Mikhail Vrubel is a Russian artist who is called a genius. His art is so peculiar, perfect and unique that it cannot become outdated even today. Like a hundred years ago, it evokes the same admiration for some viewers and misunderstanding of others.
early years
Mikhail Vrubel was born in 1856 in Omsk, in the family of an officer and a military lawyer. Then no one imagined that he would become a brilliant artist. In all the cities where his family moved - Petersburg, Astrakhan, Saratov, Odessa - he studied well, was fond of natural science, history, theater, music, literature, drawing. In his youth, he himself did not realize his destiny.
At the insistence of his father, Mikhail, after graduating from high school, entered the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, graduated with a gold medal, served military service and even worked a little in his specialty. Only at the age of 24 he entered the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts as a volunteer and since then devoted his life exclusively to painting.
The father, not understanding Mikhail's hobbies, still resigned himself to the choice of his son. The stepmother, who replaced the deceased mother when Vrubel was barely three years old, was a pianist. She understood and supported him.
Vrubel was lucky to learn painting from the best teacher of the Academy of that time, Pavel Chistyakov, and to be friends with the most talented artists - Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov. Despite the different characters, styles and manner of work, they recognized the unconditional superiority of Mikhail. They never envied and contributed to his recognition.
Creation
Vrubel's creative life was associated with three cities: St. Petersburg, Kiev and Moscow. He studied in the city on the Neva, and later participated in exhibitions of the World of Art association. In Kiev, Vrubel spent six years working on the restoration of the 12th century St. Cyril Church, interrupting his studies at the Academy. He restored some of the surviving paintings and added his compositions and altar images "St. Cyril", "Christ" and "The Mother of God and Child".
Working with Old Russian painting taught Vrubel to combine decorativeness with monumentality and grandeur. "The cult of deep nature" - this is how the artist himself defined his own approach to what he portrayed. The layman's eye usually sees the general shape and color of objects. But if you look closely and for a long time, you can see that the surface consists of many planes of different shapes, joining at different angles to each other, each of which is different in color and tone.
Vrubel, like no one else, was able to see, accurately convey and emphasize these thousands of faces, pieces, from which, as if in a mosaic, objects and space are formed, and build a single image from them.
His "cult of deep nature" is being improved under the influence of ancient Russian and Byzantine mosaics. This can be seen in the watercolor and graphic images of flowers, in the painting of those years "Eastern Tale", "Girl against the background of a Persian carpet."
In Moscow, the artist met the patron of the arts Savva Mamontov. After this meeting, Vrubel painted his best paintings, including "Venice", "Lilac", "Fortune Teller", "Spain". All of them belong to the Art Nouveau style.
During his lifetime, Vrubel was not widely known and recognized by his contemporaries. Nowadays, his paintings occupy a worthy place in the best museums in the world.
