Depiction of Africa in Russian Painting of the 20th and the Beginning of the 21st Century

The research on Russian painting of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century in the context of early and modern African culture/art belongs to the realm of theoretical reflection within such disciplines as cultural geography, anthropology of place and space, cultural and existential experience, geocriticism (painterly depictions of natural and urban space), geopoetics (painterly topography), and is interdisciplinary in nature. The analysis of Russian-African interdisciplinary dialogue in visual representations of Africa, as an aspect of the Russians’ awareness and idea of this continent, requires an answer to the following questions: what attracted Russian artists to Africa and how did it influence Russian culture/art? And the other way round – what did Russians, especially those travelling through Africa, bring to African culture? In Russian painting, which is diverse in terms of genres (landscape, portrait, still life), Africa functions as a nationally, culturally and socially heterogeneous continent. The early and modern African aesthetics/ art is the source of inspiration for iconographic and formal innovations. In iconic texts, visual translation, representation and interpretation of Africa manifests itself at the imagination-related levels: at thematic and motivic, narrative and compositional levels, at the level of a painterly code and in the conceptualization of artistic language. The painterly depiction of Africa, to which each of the Russian artists contributes their own representation types, artefacts, poetics and semantics, is usually created on the basis of the observation of real space, which, transformed in the iconic text, functions in an artistic, aesthetic, ideological and emotional projection. The reflection focuses on the painterly depictions and various representations of Africa which include motifs referring to African culture/art – the effect of ethnographic and artistic travels to various regions of the Dark Continent. The exemplary material selected from albums, Internet exhibitions of Russian paintings and artists’ professional websites has been analysed in terms of iconography (identification of the elements of the represented world and the relations between them), the connection between the title of the work and the visual representation, the formal determinants of the painterly depiction of Africa, and the poetics of reception.Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00. Publikacja dofinansowana przez Fundację Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego oraz Katedrę Historii Sztuki Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego