 |
Balazovsky by The Balazovsky Student Group ARTSHIPpublishing
book review by Elizabeth Loveland
"His paintings, richly saturated with color, sing with music and open a world of fantasy."
Balazovsky, a beautiful book written in both English and Russian, is the Balazovsky Students Groups attempt to introduce Russian artist Abram Balazovsky (1908-1979) to a worldwide audience. According to the text, Balazovsky, a painter and collage artist who also designed scenography (a Russian term for set designs), is little known outside of Russia. The main text takes up a small proportion of the total book, and the majority of the pages are devoted to an extensive number of reproductions of Balazovsky's artwork, which are grouped into loose sections. The captions are also in English and Russian. A brief timeline of Balazovsky's life and exhibitions is included at the end to help the reader better understand the artist.
The text, focusing on a brief narrative of Balazovsky's life and artistic development, is geared towards those that have at least an intermediate knowledge of art history, but the novice will be able to follow the narrative as well. The star of this book, however, is the much larger section featuring his art. Anyone will likely find his richly symbolic paintings mesmerizing, and readers will likely spend much more time closely studying the colorful, intricate paintings than they do reading the preceding text. This book is an excellent introduction to a complex artist, with paintings that are likely to fascinate anyone interested in symbolist art, integration of Jewish culture into artwork, or the way that the theater has influenced the fine arts and vice versa.