There are phenomena in the great book of nature, which collect like in the focus its most mysterious and beautiful secrets. They include both the undiscoverable mystery of woman`s beauty and of depicting it in art , one of the main sources of which (irrespective of what the critics of Freud speak) is the libido of the creator. The creative activity of almost all great masters of the past confirms this thought and lies between ascetism and sensuality with sublimation of erotic energy in creativity. The spectator is grateful to the artists conveying in their pictures the idea that aside from the grey day-to-day routine life, full of prohibitions, there is the world of freedom and light, and there is a naked woman - the heroine of such world. While in youth painters help us to put into visual images our vague craving to be possessed of the female body, in a mature age they present us with a scale of values for the beautiful and do not allow to develop low consuming attitude to the woman.. . That is why we come to museums and picture galleries time and time again to experience the feeling of release which as in youth grips us while contemplating and merging mentally into the beautiful female nature. Being an invariable attribute of the world arrangement, the female virtues, as the Orient wisdom says, should not conflict but dance with the male virtues, creating the world completeness in the whimsical pattern of this dance. And who has said that life and art by their nature are so serious, instead of being only the game and dance of divine forces? They require from us cheerful and furious ecstasy, and sometimes light and bacchanal gaiety. Don`t we become contemplators and possessors of the most beautiful women in the world in our sweet dreams?

And they appear before us in visual images on the canvases of artists of all times and peoples: in the timid, but monumental images by Masaccio, in the antique reminiscenes by Piero de Cosimo, in delightful, full of spring charm, Venuses by Botticelli, in the powerful female images by Michelangello, in the chastily naked models of Rafael, in the magnificent, dissoving in the light-producing surroundings beauties by Tizian. For all these artists born under the Italian sky, where the nature itself is impregnated with sensual fluids, the beauty of a female body is as natural and free, as breathing.. Influenced by the Italian masters, the artists creating their works under the cold northern sky, -such as Van Eyck and Memling whose image realism shows through the canonical pictures; the sensual and heady Cranach; Rembrandt and Jordaens depicting the earthly, carnal beauty of their models and, at last, Rubens with the magnificent blooming of female flesh on his pictures, - demonstrate to us quite other side of the female charm.. The cult of love reigning in France, seasoned by acute Gallic sense, gave birth to the classic images by Poussin, and to the frivolous, theatrical and sensing pictures by Fragonard, Watteau, Boucher, Greuze... Having become the center of artistic life in the XIXth century, Paris dictated to artists the academically salon taste in treatment of a naked model.. The revolution made by the masters of impressionism was necessary to return life, light and colour on pictures.. The restrained approach to treatment of a naked nature was characteristic for Russian art due to the tradition, and only some masters who had got in touch with Western art (e.g. K.Bruillov) took the liberty to enjoy openly the image of a naked female body. By the beginning the XXth century, because of the internationalization of art process, the treatment of a naked body in Russian art becomes more free and does not differ any more from Parisian or Munich ways. The deep changes in the world outlook which have taken place in the XXth century, seem to have deprived the image of a female body of its central role characteristic to the art of the previous epoch.. Studies of a naked female model remained a part of the academic art education, but they seldom developed from the etude into a picture, where the female image was determining.. The tradition to image a female body in the XXth century proceeded in the creative work of such different masters as Gauguin, Modigliani, Picasso, Zorn, Somov, Serebryakova.. In the USSR, alongside with the official socialist realism treatment, there always existed individual, sensual, latent currents in imaging of a female body in the creative work of Falk, Fonvizin, Deineka. This sensation often outbursted into chamber activities, etudes, as it was in the charming nudes illuminated by sunlight spots on the picture by G.Gorelov. The bright artistic impression is conveyed by the works of I.Brodsky and K.Lebedev. Due to the brilliant painting techniques of Brodsky, Repin`s favourite - model studies raise to the level of a portrait-picture.. The pictures by K.Lebedev produce a magic impression - it seems the model is going to start breathing and to leave the canvas.

Museum - gallery "The New Hermitage " is known in Moscow artistic circles by the high standards of its exhibitions, and when the Moscow winter is coming to its closing, when the soul is craving for spring, love and joy, this exhibition will please the lovers and collectors of the beautiful in life and in art.

G.Piggot