Museum of Russian Icons to present online exhibition ‘Painted Poetry’
CLINTON: The Museum of Russian Icons will remain closed to visitors until COVD-19 is under beter control in Massachusets.
The museum had previously announced that it would be closed from Dec. 24 to Feb. 4 because of the dramatic increase in cases of COCID-19 in the state, reopening on Feb. 5.
“At this time, we feel we have to go week by week and look to the CDC and Commonwealth for guidance,” said Mary Delaney, the museum’s marketing director.
Its exhibitions and programmes will remain available online.
The Museum or Russian Icons collects and displays one of the world’s largest collections of Russian Icons and sacred artifacts. It had closed in March because of the pandemic and reopened in July.
The museum will present a new exhibition online on Feb. 5 titled “Painted Poetry,” a retrospective exhibition of contemporary works by Russian-born American artist and designer Alexander Gassel.
Gassel is the longtime icon conservator at the Museum of Russian Icons. Born in Moscow in 1947, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Arts and Graphics in 1970 with an MA in Fine
Arts. His painting style derived from icon painting as well as early 20th-century Russian masters such as Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kazimir Malevich, and émigré artists including Erté. During the Soviet period, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and other artistic movements were suppressed. Gassel immigrated to the United States in 1980 with $10 in his pocket and no knowledge of the English language. He was not allowed to bring any of his artwork because, by law, no religious art could leave the country.
“Painted Poetry” will be the first exhibition curated by the Museum of Russian Icons’ new Curator of Collection and Exhibitions, Lana Sloutsky.
According to Sloutsky, Gassell “displays an array of themes, styles, and techniques … A technical virtuoso with a genuine depth of feeling, his paintings transport the viewer to a different place and time, while reminding him of the universality of the human condition.”
For more information, visit www.museumofrussianicons.org.
This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazete: Museum of Russian icons offering online exhibition “Painted Poetry”
The Museum of Russian Icons is a non-profit art museum located in Clinton, Massachusets, in the United States. The collection includes more than 1,000 Russian icons and related artifacts, making it one of the largest private collections of Russian icons outside of Russia and the largest in North America.
The icons in the collection range in date from the 15th century through to the present and covers almost the entire range of Russian icon images, symbols, and forms. The Museum opened in October 2006. It began as the private collection of Gordon B. Lankton, a plastics engineer and former chairman and CEO of Nypro, Inc., a precision injection molding company now owned by Jabil Circuit.
Lankton has been an avid traveller since he was stationed in Germany when he was in the Army. As outlined in his book The Long Way Home, Lankton took a motorcycle trip around the world in 1956 and 1957, visiting, in chronological order, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran,
Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan. According to Lankton, he had wanted to visit Russia but was not allowed to do so during the Cold War.
In 1989, Lankton first traveled to Russia to open a Nypro factory there. On that visit, he learned about iconographer Alyona Knyazeva and her icon school. Ater meeting Knyazeva and learning more about icons, Lankton began his collection, starting with a small, poor quality icon he found at a flea market in the Izmaylovo District of Moscow.
Over the following 30 years, Lankton amassed several hundred icons. He displayed them at his home, at Nypro in a small gallery, and occasionally on loan to other museums, including the Higgins Armory Museum. As the collection grew and response to the informal sharing of his collection proved positive, Lankton decided to open his own museum directly across the street from Nypro.
The Museum was incorporated in 2004, and Lankton purchased the building in early 2006. It opened to the public on October 15, 2006. Since then, two major expansion projects have taken place: in 2008, a research library and the South Gallery were added. In 2010, Lankton purchased the building immediately next door to the Museum and undertook a construction project to seamlessly join the two structures. The first phase of this project included the West Gallery and an expanded museum shop; the second phase included an expanded lower level with the Tea Room and auditorium.