“You depict our lives and fates like judges…”

The life of an artist is inseparable from his creative activity. Often significant events or vivid impressions (and sometimes a phrase heard by chance, or a fleeting vision) will become the basis for a work of art. But, at times, an artist’s creative activity will also have an influence on his everyday life, on his conduct and on his fate as a whole.

Thousands of scholars study the creative biographies of artists, and their activity sometimes culminates in real revelations: they reveal hitherto unknown pages of an artist’s life, they establish the authorship of pictures, they offer new interpretations of an artist’s subjects.

The brilliant – and, at times, tragic – fate of prominent artists has often been the subject of biographical novels and films. These offer historical accounts in a form accessible to the reader or viewer, and ideally act as a stimulus to further interest in the creative personality of the artist, to the reading of more serious books, to the study of reproductions of his works, to the visiting of museums and exhibitions. Such information – serious in its selection of illustrative and documentary material, but popular in its mode of presentation – may easily be offered by various multi-media programmes. The uniting of a series of visual examples with historical and biographical information based on scholarly research, and the possibility of including additional archival material – all this makes such programmes into pre-eminently rich sources of information about an artist’s life and work. This information can be of interest to specialists, as well as to all those interested in artistic culture in general or in the works of a particular artist.

The basis of such a programme, obviously, will be a collection of the artist’s works in electronic form. They may be drawn from a single museum collection, but often a multi-media programme will present pictures, sketches, etchings, and sculptures drawn from various exhibitions and institutions both in Russia and abroad. The number, and the high quality, of electronic reproductions; detailed annotations; biographical essays; analyses of an artist’s unique style; reminiscences by an artist’s friends; memorial writings – all this together constitutes the undoubted value of “multi-media monographs”.

In this section we present to you some examples of programmes devoted to prominent Russian artists.