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Moses Feigin’s solo exhibition “Confession of a Harlequin”

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, 18 May – July, 2010.
Anton Nikolaev, Vesti.Ru

Two actors, attired like subjects in the artist’s paintings of clowns, at the opening of the Feigin exhibition at the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, 2010

In 2008, Moses Feigin made the Guinness World Records as the oldest at the time working as an artist of the world. Then he was 103 years old. Recent years, Moses Feigin virtually blind, yet – continued to write.”Do not write, he could not. Many of these paintings – the artist’s daughter, Anna, – Feigin wrote at night. He survived, and their students, and their teachers, among whom were Konchalovsky, Mashkov and Osmerkin – members of the legendary avant-garde of the “Jack of Diamonds”. When asked how he felt about the works of great artists of the past, Feigin just waved, “They are all boys: and Rubens, and Leonardo, and Rembrandt.”

“As an artist Moses Feigin held just in the last decade of his life, when he got the opportunity to write what he wanted. Previously, he for many years, like many at the time, was forced to make a living by official orders – portraits of members of the Politburo. Once he ordered a four-storey high-rise to the head of Stalin at Tinkers waterfront. To appreciate his work, the artist had to several times a day to rise to the height of the 29th floor is an unfinished building,” says the grandson of the artist Leonid Feigin.

"Confessions of the Harlequin" exhibition catalog. Moses Feigin 1903-2008. Painting and graphics.

“In 1959 in Moscow, the American National Exhibition. Exposition American art like emancipated artist. Since then, his paintings resemble a never-ending carnival where all the characters the tragic” said the daughter of the artist Anna Feigin. ”The exhibition at the Pushkin Museum will be shown only a small part of the creative heritage of Moses Feigin. And it’s not that the museum does not have enough space. Just most canvases were destroyed by the artist during his lifetime explains curator Anna Chuditskaya. Out of poverty, which, however, Moses himself Feigin erected in principle, he did not buy a new canvas, and glosses over the old: from the top, said new pictures. Similar to how it did painters. So, looking at any of these paintings, viewers can only guess what is hidden under multiple layers of paint Moses Feigin.
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