This cross-cultural case study was conducted through questionnaire format by way of email correspondence with eight Russian art educators in May to June 2006. It was conducted to give an initial overview into Russian Art Education from the perspectives of eight Russian art educators. The data was analyzed to discover any commonalities in values, beliefs, and attitudes that may have significance to Americans wishing to learn about the structure, content, and pedagogy of Russian art education. The findings of this study reveal that Russian art educators embrace a very traditional and classical approach to the teaching of art. Today Russian art educators are also working toward a more democratic society through art education. The participant interview responses generally reflected a desire to positively communicate and express their educational ideas and beliefs. Recommendations include further research through additional case studies in different areas of the country and more English translations of Russian art education are suggested.

No description available.

This cross-cultural case study was conducted through questionnaire format by way of email correspondence with eight Russian art educators in May to June 2006. It was conducted to give an initial overview into Russian Art Education from the perspectives of eight Russian art educators. The data was analyzed to discover any commonalities in values, beliefs, and attitudes that may have significance to Americans wishing to learn about the structure, content, and pedagogy of Russian art education. The findings of this study reveal that Russian art educators embrace a very traditional and classical approach to the teaching of art. Today Russian art educators are also working toward a more democratic society through art education. The participant interview responses generally reflected a desire to positively communicate and express their educational ideas and beliefs. Recommendations include further research through additional case studies in different areas of the country and more English translations of Russian art education are suggested.

The following paper is an opportunity for me to introduce Pavel Petrovich Chistyakov and his pedagogical ideas to English-speaking educators. His life's accomplishments seem even more remarkable when considering the fact that he was born into a family of serfs and later became a professor at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. Among his students were well-known Russian artists such as Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Surikov, Victor Vasnetcov, and Vasily Polenov. In this paper, I present you with a brief analytical summary of his methodology on teaching drawing and painting, his pedagogical approaches, as well as his ideas on the development of art education in the public school setting. Chistyakov's pedagogical system still seems relevant today and, with slight adjustments, can be adapted to various teaching situations depending on the educational environment and students' abilities.

No description available.

Esforçamo-nos por realizar uma leitura com ferramentas multidisciplinares na busca por transcender o reducionismo e os excessos de formalidades e de subjetivismo na abordagem do objeto arte, aproximando esta da ciência. Como objeto de estudo, selecionamos uma pequena parte da arte russa com o objetivo primordial de lê-la como uma narrativa pictórica. A partir disso, tratamos a pintura artes plásticas como uma narrativa que, por ser uma linguagem, porta as seis funções. A elaboração da narrativa pictórica, ao reunir inspiração, intuição e dedução, observações perceptivas racionais e emocionais, além de promover um predomínio da função poética, se vale da aplicação de leis estéticas comuns às artes plásticas não apenas da Rússia, mas à arte produzida em qualquer país. As seis funções da linguagem de Roman Jakobson e as nove leis da estética de Vilayanur S. Ramachandran são conjuntamente as chaves da nossa leitura. Na medida em que se baseia em leis universais da estética e da arte assim chamadas porque remetem à habilidade presente em todos os cérebros humanos que se desenvolvem normalmente , tal leitura, sem destituir o papel da cultura ou da individualidade do artista, centra-se não na diferença entre os vários estilos artísticos, mas em princípios que transcendem as barreiras culturais. Por essa razão, ao considerar a existência dos universais artísticos da neuroestética, consideramos também a ocorrência da convergência poética como uma afinidade artística entre os agentes expressivos que possuem elementos similares em sua realidade circundante para expressar sua mensagem. / We endeavoured to carry out a reading with multidisciplinary tools in the quest to transcend reductionism and the excesses of formalities and subjectivism in the art object approach, bringing art near to science. As object of study we select a small part of Russian art with the primordial objective of reading it as a pictorial narrative. From this, we treat painting plastic arts as a narrative that, because it is a language, bears the six functions. The elaboration of the pictorial narrative by gathering inspiration, intuition and deduction, rational and emotional perceptual observations, besides promoting a predominance of the poetic function, uses the application of aesthetic laws common to the plastic arts, not only of Russia, but to the art produced in any country. Roman Jakobsons six functions of language and Vilayanur S. Ramachandrans nine laws of aesthetics are together the keys of our reading. Insofar as it is based on universal laws of aesthetics and art so called because they refer to the ability present in all human brains that normally develop such a reading, without depriving the role of culture or the individuality of the artist, focuses not on the difference between the various artistic styles but on principles that transcend cultural barriers. For this reason, when considering the existence of the artistic universals of Neuroaesthetics, we also consider the occurrence of poetic convergence as an artistic affinity between expressive agents who possess similar elements in their surrounding reality to express their message.

The Novgorod icon of Divine Wisdom is a great innovation of fifteenth-century Russian art. It represents the winged female Sophia flanked by the Theotokos and John the Baptist. Although the icon has a contemporaneous commentary and it exercised a profound influence on Russian cultural history (inspiring, among others, the sophiological theory of the turn of the twentieth century), its meaning, together with the dating and localisation of the first appearance of the iconography, has remained a great art-historical conundrum. This thesis sheds new light on this icon and explores the message, roots, function and historical context of the first, most emblematic and most enigmatic Russian allegorical iconography. In contrast to its recent interpretations as a Trinitarian image with Christ-Angel, it argues that the winged Sophia is the personification of the Orthodox Church. The Novgorod Wisdom icon represents the Church of Hagia Sophia, that is Orthodoxy, as it was perceived in fifteenth-century Rus’: the icon together with its commentary was a visual-textual response to the Florentine Union between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, signed in 1439 but rejected by the Russians in 1441. The thesis is based on detailed interdisciplinary research, utilising simultaneously the methodologies of philology, art history, theology and history. The combined analysis reveals that the great innovation of the Novgorod Sophia icon is that it amalgamates ecclesiological and sophiological iconographies in new ways. Hence the dissertation is also an innovative attempt to survey how Orthodoxy was perceived and visualized in medieval Rus’. It identifies the theological questions that constituted the basis of Russian Orthodox identity in the Middle Ages and reveals the significance of the polemics between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches for the history of Medieval Russian art.

The subject of my thesis is Russian artist Alexandra Exter’s work in the performing arts, with a focus on her theatrical set and costume designs in the Kamerny Theater, her creations for Iakov Protazanov’s 1924 science fiction film, Aelita, and finally her exquisitely fabricated set of approximately forty marionettes. Within these colorful wooden figures are reconciled conflicting notions of stasis and dynamism, sculpture and performer, human and object. Drawing upon Victor Shklovskiĭ’s formalist definition of “enstrangement,” I examine her introduction of the object in place of the human performer as a means of exposing the creative process, forcing the viewer to actively engage with the production. Thus, her manipulation and eventual replacement of the human performer not only exemplifies the interconnectivity and mutability of Russian avant-garde art, but impels the viewer to reconsider the familiar in terms of the strange, ultimately calling attention to the humanity of the dehumanized performer.

This dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems. / text

abstract: The purpose of this research is to assemble a collection of Russian Art song repertoire selected for beginner level training, with an exposition of the criteria for their appropriateness as teaching pieces. This examination defines the scope of vocal, technical, language and interpretive abilities required for the performance of Russian Art song literature. It also establishes the need for a pedagogical approach that is free from Eurocentric cultural biases against Russian language and culture. Intended as a reference for teachers and students to simplify the introduction of Russian Art song into the repertoire of the advanced secondary or beginning undergraduate student, it includes a discussion of learning priorities and challenges particular to native English speakers relative to successful Russian language lyric diction assimilation, with solutions. This study is designed to furnish material for a published edition of songs in the appropriate transpositions for high, medium and low voice including word-for- word and sense translations with IPA transcriptions, along with program notes for each piece. Repertoire is selected from the works of Alyab'yev, Gurilyov, Varlamov, Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, as well as a few folk songs. The repertoire is grouped by difficulty and accompanied by English translations, interpretive analyses of the Russian Language poetry, and International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions modified for lyric diction. The degrees of difficulty are determined by vocal registration demands, word lengths and rhythmical text setting, as well as the incidences of unfamiliar phonological processes and complex consonant clusters occurring in the text. A scope and sequence chart is included, supplemented with learning objectives and teaching strategies, which organizes the repertoire according the order in which the pieces are to be taught. A palatalization guide is provided, to provide solutions for common pronunciation problems. Included in the appendices are listings of additional recommended Russian art song titles and recommended listening and viewing. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2014