Until March 19, the St. Petersburg State Museum-Institute of the Roerich Family will host an exhibition dedicated to the 120th anniversary of Yuri Nikolaevich Roerich. The exhibition will feature an extensive collection of Buddhist paintings collected by an art critic.
Russian Russian orientalist, linguist, traveler, specialist in the language and culture of Tibet, the eldest son of the famous Russian artist Nicholas Roerich. Throughout his life, Roerich actively traveled and studied various cultures, especially Asian countries. Thanks to his travels and keen interest in foreign civilizations, the artist has collected a large collection of paintings of the tank – the national Tibetan type of painting, which will be included in the exhibition.
Tank canvases are painted on a fabric of religious, in particular, Buddhist orientation. The tank can also be called a “portable icon”: some art historians agree that the first tanks were created by Buddhist nomads for convenient and regular performance of rituals in their travels. Tank’s canvases mainly depict Buddha and Bodhisattvas, but sometimes the inspiration for the canvases are writings from the field of medicine and astrology, as well as scenes from the lives of ordinary people.
The tank was created on various fabrics: cotton, linen, brocade and hemp served as the basis for it. Then the future canvas was covered with a primer created from chalk, limestone and clay. Tanks were painted with paints of natural origin, which were made of malachite, marble, ochre, lapis lazuli and soot. Creating tanks has always required a lot of time and careful, painstaking work. That is why this type of painting arouses cultural and research interest and carries high artistic value.
The main part of the exhibition of Yuri Roerich will consist of exhibits from the funds of the Roerich Family Museum-Institute: unique documents, rare publications, personal belongings of different years. The exhibition will also include paintings by Nikolai and Svyatoslav Roerich, photographs from the Tretyakov Gallery fund, as well as tanks and other products from India and Tibet, brought by Roerich to his homeland in 1957.
The exhibition continues from December, but will end on March 19. We advise you to have time to visit it if you are interested in foreign culture and national talents.
You can find out the schedule of the museum and register for the event on the website.
The author of the article Savina Alina Denisovna
