Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Collaboration of two powerful artists.

The exhibition that took place in Pushkin Museum was devoted to works by the brightests artists of their time : Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. For the first look it was rather logical to exhibit them under the same roof: both of them have much in common in the area of interests in their works.
Exhibition itself was located in four  rather big rooms, each one of them  was strongly emotionally connected to the previous one and helped you to dive in the atmosphere of England of that time.
So talking about the exhibition itself I was really impressed of the quality of the space, the artworks were hanged. As Beardsley mostly worked with ink and his illustrations are rather minimalistic in terms of colour, wall were painted white and pictures had a thin framing, which even looked better with illustrations, drawn on dark cream paper. 

But of cause there were some not really interesting moments like collums with the biography of this two artists, which hardly had something alike and mostly,  and in my personal opinion, was like reading wikipedia. But other textes, which were more detailed were really interesting. There was a text with  Oscar WIlde's biography with handwrited editions of his plays behind the window  and, on the other wall the biography of Aubrey Beardsley.

The second hall became the center of the exhibition and from this point on i understood the significance of exhibiting this artists together. The whole room was about Salome by Wilde and the way it was performed in the theatre. How illustrations to Salome by Beardsley , that also were located in that room, affected the design of dresses and decorations of the performance.Even the photo of the actrees chosen for the main role was placed there.

The whole exhibition was about the atmosphere. About how the work by one artist, working in complitely different area can strongly affect another one and how this collaboration(if it really can be called so) can create something complitely brand new and beautiful.

IAD
Level 4
Polina Veydenbakh