ART RUSSE ACQUIRES A RARE PAINTING BY KOPNINA
09 Dec 14
ART RUSSE has acquired "Girls" (1960), a painting by Tatyana Kopnina, a renowned Russian artist and an outstanding representative of the Leningrad school.
The canvas depicts a scene with two girls on a big couch. A young girl in a red dress sits with a book and shows it to a teenage girl, who lounges on a couch appearing rather bored. Next to the couch big, wooden doors tlead into a sunlit room. The doors' white panels look like a frame, giving the impression of a painting within a painting: a still life with flowers in a vase. The print on the wall is Fedor Reshetnikov's "Arrived on Holidays" (1948), a famous canvas that won the Stalin Prize and became one of the most popular paintings in the USSR.
Kopnina's "Girls" is an example of the `childhood' theme, which was very common in socialist realism. Since her first exhibitions in early 1950s, Tatyana Kopnina became known for her images of children and youths. In her works, she always tried to convey her characters' story through subtle details in facial expressions, eyes, pose, and clothes. Her sincere interest in details help capture the cheerful, optimistic atmosphere of the early 1960s.
TATYANA KOPNINA (1921 - 2009) was a Soviet and Russian painter and art teacher. Between 1941 and 1950 she studied at the Ilya Repin Institute of Art in St Petersburg, where she was a student of Alexander Zaytsev, Genrikh Pavlovksky and Semion Abugov. She frequently took part in exhibitions in Russia and abroad and is known as a representative of the Leningrad school. From 1960 until 1990 she was an art teacher at the Secondary Art School of the Repin Institute of Arts. Her paintings are owned by museums and private collections in Russia, Belgium, Japan, the U.S., China and other countries.
