|
The Room with Sviatoslav Richter’s
Pastel Drawings
Music is the main, but not the only
thing in my life. I am a creature of
many parts – not because I squander
my energy, but simply because I am
interested in lots of things.
Sviatoslav Richter
Sviatoslav Richter’s artistic interests and pastimes
were extremely diverse, like the gifts with which God
had endowed him. «As well as the Divine gift of
music» he not only loved and knew the fine arts
well, but was himself an artist.
His pastel works are now in the Museum of
Private Collections of the Pushkin State Museum
of Fine Arts. There are regular displays of them in
the Memorial Apartment.
Robert Falk detected «a remarkable sense of
light» in Richter’s pastels. His friend, the artist
Anna Ivanovna Troyanovskaya used to say:
«He drew exclusively from impressions and
from memory: he seemed to have fully formed ideas
about space, distance and perspective, and his feeling for tone and colour was quite remarkable. But
the most surprising thing about him was his
instinct for movement. This is probably what one
might expect from a musician. His memory was
quite phenomenal. And his imagination too.
Obviously without a vivid imagination he could not
have understood the mind of the composer whose
music he was playing.»
There were no pastel drawings or photographs
on the walls of the apartment in Richter’s lifetime.
Today they are kept in a special room, where they
are brought out for displays illustrating the musi.
cian’s life.
Back to contents
| 
