| PEOPLE
A GENERATION CRAVING FOR BEAUTY: ART DESTROYED BY THE REVOLUTION When “Gone with the Wind” was released in all the countries of the world, it was a story in which the orders and values of former times became a matter of the past. Russian art has its own socalled “gone with the wind” people. They lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, believed in aesthetics, freedom of art, and worshiped beauty.
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Anastasia Postrigay, art critic and founder of the OP-POP-ART School of Popular Art, tells Mover about the “World of Art” association, which united the brightest stars of the turn of the century. The “World of Art” is an outstanding creative association. Among the members were people of different talents, so the art that they created was truly amazing. This was an unusual mixture of classic, slightly old-fashioned beauty and aesthetics including boldness, innovation, the rebellion of the coming 20th century. They didn’t like both academicism and the acutely social art of the Itinerants. Members of “World of Art” stated: ”We’re definitely not preachers of lies, but we‘re not slaves of truth either... First of all, we’re a generation craving for beauty.“ Their history began with the “Pickwick Club” of St. Petersburg. In 1887, in the private school of Karl May, a “Nevsky Pikvikians” association was founded. Among the members were several famous art figures: Alexander Benois, Walter Nouvel, Dmitry Filosofov, and Konstantin Somov. Sergey Diaghilev and Leon Bakst joined “Nevsky Pikvikians” later. Of course, now all these people are well-known artists but then they were only seventeen or eighteen years old. At first, the association was a hobby club. Members just had fun and studied art together. However, Diaghilev’s vigorous energy gradually turned the regular club into a reputable “World of Art” association. The group was joined by Korovin, Serov, the Vasnetsov brothers, Vrubel, Nesterov, and many others. Of course, “World of Art” quickly became popular. The amount of creative energy and ideas generated per square meter of the club was just insane. Besides,
