Portrait of Anna Akhmatova
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| Portrait of Anna Akhmatova |
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| Nathan Altman , 1914/15 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 123.5 x 103.2 cm |
| State Russian Museum , St. Petersburg |
The portrait of Anna Akhmatova from 1914 is one of the most famous works by the painter Nathan Altman . It shows the poet Anna Akhmatova . The painting is in the possession of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg (inv.no. ЖБ-1311)
background
Altman had a close friendship with Anna Akhmatova at the time he was painting the portrait. He had studied in Paris from 1910 to 1912 and was then heavily influenced by Cubism . Also futuristic elements can be found in his paintings. Immediately after his stay in Paris, he created a woman's head whose motif, composition, coloring and treatment of the forms are very similar to a portrait created in 1913, which bears the name “Anna Akhmatova” on the back. The woman at the piano, Madame Vlasiewa , who is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow , also comes from this creative phase . The portrait of Anna Akhmatova , which Altman painted in oil on canvas in 1914, is closely related to all of these works .
Description of the picture
The portrait of Anna Akhmatova shows, slightly upright, a full-length portrait of the poet. Anna Akhmatova is shown sitting, the viewer sees her from the right side. The poet has crossed her arms in front of her abdomen so that her left hand is over her right forearm, and crossed her right leg over the left. The left foot stands on a stool with rough wood grain, which can be seen at an angle and cut in the lower right corner of the picture. The seating furniture on which Anna Akhmatova has settled looks a bit more luxurious. It is in part alienated from the Cubist style; you can see a round, turned brown leg and a blue cushion. Blue tones predominate in the entire picture, so the poet wears a bright indigo blue long dress with a white collar around the deep neckline with darker stockings and high-heeled shoes and a golden yellow stole . It seems to be leaning against a kind of pillar, which is held in lighter gray and blue tones and takes up a little more than a third of the background. On the right-hand side of the picture, crystal-like shapes over green-blue hemispheres and pyramids can be seen in the background, which gives the impression of an abstract landscape. The floor in the foreground, on which the stool and the only leg of the chair stand, is gray-black and appears smooth and shiny; its rear boundary is broken and does not continue to the right of the sitter's legs at the same level as to the left. Anna Akhmatova, depicted with pale bluish skin, looks to the right out of the picture; her head can be seen in three-quarter profile from the right. She wears her black hair in a bun with a pony cut. The brows are also dark, the nose strongly curved and the chin energetic.
According to a description by Joseph Brodsky , the sitter looked “simply overwhelming in real life. Five feet tall, dark-haired, light-skinned, with the pale gray-green eyes of the snow leopards . "
The painting was reproduced and, among other things, sold as a postcard. Anna Akhmatova once said in a conversation in which such a reproduction was mentioned: “I always dreamed that my husband would hang my portrait over his table. But nobody did that, neither Kolja nor Volodja nor Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch. He only hung it up now when we broke up. That means he put my photo and that of his daughter on his table under the glass. "
A quote from the painting by Nathan Altman can be found in Serge Poliakoff . The caricature shows Anna Akhmatova in the same pose and get-up as in Altman's picture among the guests at a cabaret.
Exhibitions
In 2007/08 the portrait of Anna Akhmatova was shown as part of the exhibition Bonjour Russia in the Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf . Then the exhibition was shown in London . In 2016 the picture is on display as part of the exhibition Chagall bis Malewitsch in the Albertina in Vienna .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ works Nathan Altman on bildindex.de
- ↑ Quoted from Birgitta Ashoff, Anna von Ganz Russland , in: Die Zeit 26, 1989 .
- ↑ Lidii︠a︡ Korneevna Chukovskai︠a︡, Lydia Chukovskaya: records of Anna Akhmatova (= Edition Orient-Occident . Band 7 ). Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1987, ISBN 3-87808-269-X , p. 20 (317 p., Limited preview in Google Book Search - Russian: Записки об Анне Ахматовой . Paris 1976. Translated by Kay Borowsky and Nelli Kosko).
- ↑ http://artoftherussias.wordpress.com/
- ↑ Bonjour Russia
- ↑ brikada. Magazine for women ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
