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The Dining Room and Hall
I should like to have my own sign.
So everyone would recognise me by it.
But what should it be? A compound
of all the arts that God has devised...
I scatter this compound all over the place...
Sviatoslav Richter
Sviatoslav Richter was not a collector in the ordinary
sense of the word, but he had an excellent know.
ledge and great love of painting. He organised displays of work by his favourite artists at his own home.
Some.times it was painters who were not recognised
in official circles. For example, he held two exhibitions of Dmitri Krasnopevets. And this was not so
much recognition of the artist’s talent, as support for
the young master, because writers, producers and
many other figures from the arts were invited to
these events. Richter’s large collection of pictures
consists mainly of gifts from the authors.
In 1978 the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts held
an exhibition entitled «The musician and his encounters in art». It consisted of portraits of people Richter
knew and loved. He compiled the catalogue himself.
His captions under the portraits prompted Irakly
Andronikov, and others too, to speak of Richter’s
literary talent. He was a master of the written word,
able to sum up a person’s character or work in a few
revealing strokes.
Here is one of his blitz.portraits of Picasso: «I shall
never forget this man with the red.hot eyes; he was
over eighty, but younger than all of us. He raced up the
stairs like a young boy, showing us his divinely untidy
rooms and rejoicing at the sight of a plant creeping
over the wall. I came away from this visit with a portrait
of Frederic Joliot-Curie, a drawing from a superbly
precise pen in a firm unfaltering hand.»
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