Exactly the female portraits display how Zverev in a mysterious way accumulated the whole history of world art — not only the Russian icon-painting tradition and the culture of a portrait of the 18th and 19th centuries, but also the entire variety of the European classics and modernism.

"Zverev was the only artist who worked all the way through Western painting, from early Picasso to the present day" — wrote Jean Cocteau about the artist. Zverev himself wrote in his "Treatise on Painting" (1960): "A happy painter is the painter, who outruns his time and races further like a madman, greedily devours with his eyes all forms, new or old, seen in a new way, then digests the forms, gives them back and races further."  

The exhibition was unfolded on three floors of the AZ Museum, narrating about female beauty and elegance — the, beauty seen and caught instantaneously and furtively — in a split of second. The beauty that was anticipated by the artist and predicted to living forever.  

"Sit down, detulya*, I'm immortalized!". With this phrase Zverev invited young ladies for being his portrait models. And exactly phrase served as a title of one of the exhibition rooms, where the portraits of women who still remember these fine-art-spectacles were displayed. The memories of these women we assembled in a book "Beauties of the Centuries". 


The premiere of this part took place on May 6 at 12:00. 
* Russian emotional form for "baby"

MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE EXHIBITION  "BEAUTIES OF THE CENTURIES"

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