Exhibitions: Painting and graphics of Pyotr Nilus from the collection of the Voronezh regional Art Museum is presented in Moscow

As part of the project “Golden Map of Russia”, the State Tretyakov Gallery from December 7, 2012 presents an exhibition “Pyotr Nilus. In search of the elusive. Paintings and graphics from the collection of the I. N. Kramsky Voronezh Regional Art Museum”.

Pyotr Alexandrovich Nilus (1896-1943) is a painter, writer, public figure, one of the prominent representatives of the Association of South Russian Artists and the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions. P. A. Nilus shared the dramatic fate of many local artists, who after emigrating in the early 1920 continued to work and exhibit in Europe, but they have been practically forgotten in their homeland.

For display in the Tretyakov Gallery form the vast holdings of the I. N. Kramsky Voronezh Regional Art Museum storing the ancient Egyptian, ancient monuments and works of the Russian Art of the XVIII-XX century are not randomly selected paintings and drawings of P. A. Nlilus. His work has a particular importance for the museum. In exile, the artist had a long friendship with the native Voronezh writer Ivan Bunin, who called P. A. Nilus a “poet painting”. In 1995, a large part of the creative legacy of the artist of the Paris period - more than 70 paintings, drawings and personal things, photographs, letters, exhibition catalogs – on the decision of the stepdaughter of painter V. L. Golubovskaya, was evacuated from France, and in memory of the friendly ties of P. A. Nilus and Bunin transferred to his homeland in the Voronezh Art Museum.

P. A. Nilus left an extensive pictorial and epistolary heritage. Apart from the Russian collections, works of the author are stored in the Louvre and other museums of France, in the National Gallery in Sofia, the collection at Georgetown University in Washington. Since 1995 the I. N. Kramsky Boronezh Regional Art Museum held seven personal exhibitions of the artist, considering the popularization of P.A. Nilus as an important task.

The exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery features about 50 paintings and drawings of the paris period: landscapes, “marines”, still life, 2 self-portraits.