The Central House of Artist invites you to visit an exhibition of the Vladimir Lapovok paintings "Towns and years."

Vladimir Lapovok was born on the Arbat Street in Moscow; during his long creative live, he made many paintings of European capitals and Russian little out-of-the-way places, towns. Nevertheless, most of all he loved quiet corners of home Moscow.

You will be able to see his impression of different cities on this exposition.

Russian State Library of Art invites you to the exhibition "The costume we can't see: underwear and corselets of the past centuries. On this exposition, you will be able to see underwear and corselets from the end of the XVIII - to the middle of the XX century, corselets reconstructions, clothes, books, albums, magazines, etchings, lithographs, photographs from RGBI's funds, private collections, ets.

In the Andrei Bely Memorial Apartment (affiliate of The Pushkin State Museum) was opened an exhibition devoted to the last period of the live and death of famous prose writer, philosopher and the first-string Moscow symbolist.

For the first time people will be able to see the Andrei Bely death-mask made by famous sculptor Merckulov. There are also documents, last manuscripts, books, photos; painters' drawings impressed Andrei Bely on his deathbed.

The Central House of Artist and Moscow Association of creative iron forgers - artists invite you to the exhibition "Romanticism of heavy metal"

The show (room No. 244) includes over 140 exhibits - Parmigianino's etchings and drawings, alongside porcelain, majolica, and enamels from the Hermitage collection of applied art. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts loans three Parmigianino drawings.

2003 marked five hundred years from the birth of Francesco Mazzola called Parmigianino, acclaimed as the foremost representative of mannerism, a style that was born in Italy about 1520 and determined European art for the subsequent century.

The middle of the 16th century inaugurated in Italy an important change in conscience. Parmigianino was one of the most original artists and a magnificent figure of Italian cinquecento, whose life embodied the complexity of his age.

The first section of the exhibition focuses on the artist's own drawings and etchings. The drawings showed in the exhibit attest to the graphic talent of Parmigianino, who was able to sketch a complicated figure with just a few thin lines, outline a magnificent composition of any complexity, create a fantastic image, or captivate a moment of reality by a few touches of hand. Parmigianino was one of the first to take up the avant-garde art of etching in the early 16th century.

The second section centers on the history of perception and interpretation of Parmigianino's art. Soon after he died, Giulio Bonasone created a series of engravings reproducing Parmigianino's best works. The legerity and gentleness of Parmigianino's style delighted the Venetians Jacopo Bassano and Paolo Veronese, who carefully studied his etchings and adopted the fluid smoothness of his lines. The dramatic revelations of Tintoretto and El Greco were anticipated in the Parmese master's drawings.

Acknowledging Parmigianino as its master, rococo praised his light and elegant style. The Parmese master's melancholy was dear to the age, which concealed beneath apparent nonchalance a feeling of doom.

The name of Parmigianino is a myth of European culture, whose tragic mystery has been casting its spell for five centuries.

16 December 2003 - 8 March 2004, Hermitage

To celebrate the artist's 100th anniversary, the museum presents (rooms No. 28-32) an exhibition of the outstanding American artist of the 20th century Mark Rothko from the National Gallery in Washington.

Mark Rothko (Marcus Rothkowitz) was born in Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia). In 1913, his family immigrated to the United States. After studying philosophy for two years at Yale University, he moved to New York City to study there in the art school of Max Weber, who introduced him to contemporary West European art and Russian avant-garde.

During the 1920s and 1930s Rothko painted portraits, landscapes, city scenes and nudes in a fairly traditional manner. This period in his career is illustrated in the Hermitage show by the highly expressive portraits and Street Scene with their slightly deformed figures usual in European and American art of the 1910-20s.

The exhibition opened in the Alexander Hall (room No. 282) of the Winter Palace is dedicated to two Emperors, Alexander I and Napoleon I, and their influence on the history of Europe in the early 19th century. Both their personal lives and political leader's activities were intertwined with the grandiose battle between France and Russia.

The exhibition presents a wide panorama of spiritual, political, and cultural contacts between the two nations. About 130 exhibits including paintings, drawings, sculptures, medals, orders, coins, and applied art, from George Dawe's portrait of Alexander I to Antoine-Jean Gros' Napoleon Bonaparte on Arcole Bridge, tell about the two great men. The Emperors' personal belongings and memorabilia are given a prominent place in the exhibit.

Russian DADA, OBERIU (The Society of Real Art) box, Litconstructivism, Leningrad Literary Underground

25 December 2003 - 25 January 2004, The Benois Wing

The exhibition shows 30 books created in the context of Mikhail Karasik's unique Russian publishing project. The project's participants work in the genre of "artist's book". Three poets, three art historians, and seventeen artists took part in this large Russian graphic project. Among those are Peter Shvetsov, Yulia Zaretskaya, Viktor Remishevsky, Valentin Guerasimenko, Yury Shtapakov, Andrei Chezhin, and Igor Lebedev.

The exhibition is also a presentation, since the participants did not have an oportunity to see the whole project. The four sets of books, representing four literary trends, are placed in large boxes. Those resemble enormous matchboxes with lables - names of trends. The first set, OBERIU box, was prepared a year ago and was then acquired by different museums and libraries.

The project's name - "Kharmsizdat" - is not random. Daniel Kharms' oeuvre possessed magic attractiveness in Leningrad culture of the late 1980s - early 90s. Kharms himself was a mythological figure, a secret inspirer for many artists and poets. Kharms became the centre of gravitation and reference point for many creative undertakings, extravagant gestures, and acts, at least in the last 15-20 years, overshadowing another "religious" concept - OBERIU (The Society of Real Art).

(OBERIU (The Society of Real Art) - a literary group; appeared in Leningrad in 1927 - early 1930s. K.Vaginov, N.Zabolotsky, A.Vvedensky, D.Kharms, and Y.Vladimirov were among its members. They proclaimed themselves "creators of new feeling of life and its objects", the feeling which is shown in literature through "clash of words' senses". Alogism, absurdity, and grotesque, which were characteristic of OBERIU members' oeuvre, were not simply formal methods, but expressed certain conflict nature of their worldview. Such artists as K.Malevich and P.Filonov were close to OBERIU).

Within the frame of cultural program of the XI Christmas historical regional readings in the Kovrov Historical and Memorial Museum was held a presentation of three new exhibitions:

1.Photography by Galina Zakhoder.

2.An exhibition of the folk photo studio "Kamchatka"

3.An exhibition of the coppery cultic casting XVII - XIX centuries from the private collection of the Kovrov collector Petr Abrasimov. There are about 200 arts, variety of roods, icons, and diptychs.

These exhibitions will be opened during the January.

On the New Year's Eve for little visitors of the exposition "Home nature" was opened an exhibition "Welcome, Winter-tide!" Many people think that on wintertime live in the forest stops, but they are wrong. Let's go to the winter forest, here we can see hares, squirrels, black games, pickers-hard workers. Only bears sleep in their warm lairs.

Children will be able to know habits and way of live of different animals that live in the Russian moderate climate on this exhibition.

In addition, a staff of the nature section has a surprise for visitors - an electronic weighing machine. This weighing machine will show your weight not only in kilograms but also in hedgehogs, frogs, bears - rather in parts of one bear :-)

There was opened an exhibition "A bunch of arts and crafts" in the Mendeleyevsk Museum of Regional Studies. Throughout the exhibits you can see traditions, ceremonies and beliefs of people, who lived in the Kama's water gap, variety of folklore styles, skills of can-do men.

Among the exhibits are represented archaeological evidences V-VI centuries b.c. (ceramics), woodworks, metal, wool and embroider works, national costumes, photos of region and town folklore groups.

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