Lecture by Joseph Troncale about the artist Felix Lembersky - 7.30 pm, 14 May - Pushkin House, Bloomsbury

[Robert Chandler]

Please forward this to anyone you know in London who is at all interested in painting!

http://www.pushkinhouse.org/single-event/events/art-that-stops-the-mind-and-moves-the-heart

Felix Lembersky was probably the finest artist working in Russia in the 1950s and 1960s.  For several different reasons, his work was more or less forgotten for about 40 years.  The current exhibition at Pushkin House is the first time his work has been shown in London.  Joseph Troncale, who has curated previous exhibitions of his work in the USA, writes:
 
In the world where commerce and art all to often conspire to merely titillate, distract, or shock the viewer with a kind of maddening paced one-ups-man-ship, it is important and deeply heartening that work such as Felix Lembersky’s takes its place in the heart of London. Lembersky’s work was not about making a choice to conform or not to conform as some kind of grand gesture, but it was the most personal compulsion within the artist to define culture as a value in and of itself beyond ideologies, both for himself and for all of humankind.  A painting or a drawing was always much more to Lembersky than something simply to be intellectually engaged. He expected his viewers to go beyond themselves, beyond their mental frameworks of reference, to stand outside of the ordinary and to feel the extraordinary in a kind of ecstasy. In such a way we participate with him in drawing back the curtain, as Avgust Lanin wrote, on a reality that is not yet understood and, in this case, defies understanding and can only be felt. «You have to plumb the depths» of Lembersky's paintings, continues Lanin, «to arrive at such a response to his work. The artist demands a response from his viewers that is equal in intensity and depth to his own.» It seems that, after all, «pure feeling,» as Malevich intimated, is the only force capable of penetrating Lembersky's work.


Professor Joseph Troncale is co-director of the Russian Studies Program at the University of Richmond and is the chair of the Department of Modern Literatures and Cultures at the University of Richmond for 2013-2014. He currently teaches Russian language courses in addition to seminars on Russian literature, Russian painting, Russian cinema, and the history of Russian cultural and intellectual development.  He has also written widely in each of these areas.





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