Искусство

Everything looks cooler when it's in Russian. The title of this entry just says, "Art."

Today I saw some Very Important Russian artist's house (Vasnetsov's house), and maybe I should be a little more respectful of the fact that he was Very Important, but--it was not terribly exciting. He produced some neat paintings of fairy tales, sure. But I also had to listen to our guide talk about things like his dining room table. And his oven.

The really good part of the day was meeting up with Anya at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Okay, tangent here: FREAKING EVERYTHING is named for Pushkin. There are two Pushkin museums (one of them is Pushkin-related, so I guess that's okay, but he didn't actually live there), a Pushkin metro station, Pushkin street, and a Pushkin cafe. Wikipedia tells me that there's a planet and a crater on the moon named after him, but those things aren't in Moscow so I guess they don't count. But the people who named them--probably in Moscow. They're obsessed with him here. Why is this relevant? Because the museum I went to today is a visual arts museum. And it's named after a writer. This makes absolutely no sense.

Anyway, the reason we went to the museum--they have a HUGE Picasso exhibition going on until late May. There are 240 pieces, and it was wonderful. The painting at the top was one of my favorites. The exhibition seemed to focus a bit on Picasso's involvement with Russia and the ways in which he was inspired by Russia--I hadn't known that he had worked with the Russian ballet. He designed, I believe, the set and costumes for a show (at least one? I don't know). Darcy told me that the dancers performed to Satie (I didn't take the time to read the information on the walls, because I could only understand some of the Russian and the other language was French, which Darcy can read). What a show! Hearing Satie and seeing Picasso. I can't imagine. I really would like to have lived in the early 20th century.