MY TEACHER LEONARDO

EXHIBITION

A large-scale exhibition “My Teacher Leonardo” will open at the AZ Museum - this is the museum's eleventh project dedicated to the legendary Moscow artist Anatoly Zverev. One of the main events of this exhibition will be the display of an archival collection of Zverev's treatises, digitized and presented to the public for the first time. After reading the treatises of the “universal man” of the Renaissance, Zverev wrote in his autobiography: “I chose Leonardo da Vinci as my teacher” - this metaphorical phrase became the semantic center of the exhibition. Zverev created dozens of his own treatises, in which he more than once entered into dialogue with the great Italian. Zverev admired Rembrandt and Goya, Malevich and Matisse, Raphael and Velazquez, but he had a special relationship with da Vinci. There were no disputes or direct imitation - they were united by kinship and consonance of thoughts about art and the artist's place in it. The exhibition “My Teacher Leonardo” will show more than 170 works Anatoly Zverev - masterpieces of painting and graphics in various genres from portraits and self-portraits to landscapes and animal paintings. A special place will be occupied by the artist's previously unpublished literary works - treatises and poems. Especially for the opening of the exhibition, the AZ Museum prepared a facsimile edition of the 1959 Treatise on Painting, dedicated to the great collector George Costakis. The treatise will be published with comments by the famous philologist and textual critic, translator and art critic Nikolai Kotrelev.

About the artist

Anatoly Zverev (1931 - 1986) is a Russian artist, a legend of the artistic life of Moscow in the second half of the 20th century. The famous collector George Costakis called Zverev “the Russian Van Gogh.” In 1960, Life magazine came out with reproductions of Zverev and a note by Alexander Marshak “The Art of Russia, which no one has seen.” This was clear evidence of the artist's global rise, while in Russia Zverev remained an underground figure. During his lifetime, the artist's exhibitions are held in Paris, his works are acquired for collection by the largest museums in the world, including MoMA in New York, but Zverev himself never travels abroad and does not attend his own opening days. In Moscow, Zverev's paintings were repeatedly included in apartment and collective exhibitions of nonconformists. The first and only personal - lifetime exhibition - was held shortly after his death in 1984 in the City Committee of Graphic Artists on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. One of its main organizers was Vladimir Nemukhin. Today, Zverev's legacy includes more than 30 thousand works. Works are in the collections of the AZ Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Historical Museum, MMOMA in Moscow, MoMA in New York, in private collections in Russia and abroad.