Thursday, May 10, 2007

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva

In my search through art catalogs and monographs I ran across an interesting Russian artist, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955). Little is known about her: she was born in 1871 in St. Petersburg, and died in Leningrad in 1955. She studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, and later at James Whistler's studio in Paris (1898-99), before returning to Russia to become a master printmaker.



These images are color woodcuts, for which I have a keen interest. (I'm experimenting with monochrome woodcuts and will display the results here if I'm ever satisfied with the finished product.) Of course, because she worked in Russia, her works were not as well known in the West. She seems to have survived the ideological shift from Czarist to Soviet control, which can't be said of many artists in that period. But looking at her works, they don't appear to exhibit any ideological undertones.

Enjoy!





1 comment:

One Wink at a Time said...

Thanks for this. She's got some quite interesting work. The second pic put me in mind of an artist I enjoy, Michael Parkes, just a bit.
Isn't it amazing the amount of art out there, some which we will never appreciate because we just don't know it's there? Sinful.