Arts & Ideas Free Thinking - Russia and the Arts: Julian Barnes, Roxana Silbert and Suhayla El-Bushra
5 snips
Mar 17, 2016 
Julian Barnes, a renowned novelist and essayist, reviews a captivating exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery showcasing Russian cultural icons. He dives into the striking contrasts in portraits of literary figures like Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Meanwhile, Roxana Silbert, a creative theatre director, shares insights on staging Gogol's The Government Inspector, exploring its relevance to modern audiences. Suhayla El-Bushra discusses adapting Erdman's The Suicide, drawing parallels between Russia's past and today's political landscape, highlighting timeless themes of delusion and complicity.
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Portraits As A Secular Pantheon
- The Tretyakov Gallery and National Portrait Gallery set up secular pantheons of cultural figures rather than politicians.
- Portraits functioned as a civic iconostasis, elevating artists into a national moral register.
Painting Hides Writers' Interior Lives
- Painters often reveal less about writers than photographs do, because writers sit guardedly for portraits.
- Julian Barnes argues some subjects 'give much less away' in painted portraits than in photographs.
Oil Paint As Status Assertion
- Portrait painting resisted photography by insisting on oil as the medium of greatness.
- Barnes notes that collections asserted that great contemporaries must be rendered in oil to confer status.
