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A Life Most Solitary?
The place: Mexico. The year: Post-1910. Mexico was on the verge of change. Political instability, the blight of dictatorship, a peasants’ revolt: with events such as the Mexican Revolution fresh in everyone’s minds, passions must have run high. Actions were no longer as restrained. The freedoms of speech and desire were rife. We need only look to those well-known Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera for reference. Despite the volatile relationship shared by the painters (both of whom had several extra-marital affairs during their time together), Kahlo lived in an isolated world. A pain-filled existence was all she ever knew from the age of 6, when she contracted polio,…
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Ilya Repin: Stalin’s Golden Boy
Ukrainian-born Ilya Repin’s life spanned the turn of the 20th century, a particularly turbulent period in Russian history. A member of the Itinerants, he is one of the most celebrated social realist painters of all time, painting the lives of poor peasants and revolutionaries in exquisite detail, eschewing the burgeoning contemporary European impressionist movement. His paintings are a satirical commentary on the contemporary society of the Russian Empire, depicting scenes of peasantry (‘Barge Haulers on the Volga’), political and military scenes (‘Demonstration 17 October 1905’) and Cossack life (‘The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV’). Soon after his death in 1930, Repin had developed into a cult…
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