Slideshow: Tennis Playing Czars and Chicken Wielding Rabbis in Russia’s Silver Age
Image by Yana Wernick
By Ezra Glinter July 7, 2011
When you’ve already had 10 solo exhibits by age 12 and been named the world’s youngest professional artist by the Guinness Book of World Records, where do you go from there? In the case of Stanislav “Stass” Shpanin, a 21-year-old artist from the Former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, you just keep painting.
Since arriving in the U.S. in 2005, Shpanin, now a student at the Hartford Art School at the University of Connecticut, has been building on an already impressive career in the Former Soviet Union and Israel. His latest exhibit, “Age of Empires,” is now on view until July 26 at the Waltuch Gallery in Tenafly, New Jersey. An opening reception for the exhibit will take place July 10.
In “Age of Empires” Shpanin depicts the world of turn-of-the-century Russia, which, despite the era’s political turmoil, was considered the country’s “Silver Age,” paralleling France’s Belle Époque. The series’ paintings evoke the era with a mixture of closeness and distance; the rough brushstrokes create the impression of faded sepia photographs, while the rich colors suggest a vivid and lively world.
Shpanin’s figures are portrayed intimately, from Nicholas II playing tennis, to a rabbi handling a couple of recently slaughtered chickens. The show also displays Shpanin’s range — the humorously named “The Golden Moustache,” features a man in an official, perhaps military outfit, seated as though for a formal portrait. But the name of the painting belies the solemnity of the setting, suggesting that the man’s status rests entirely on his facial hair. The fate of gold, perhaps, in a silver age.
View a slideshow from ‘Age of Empires’:
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
