Reproductive and Unique in the Art Postcard of the Russian Empire
Keywords:
postcard, Community of St. Eugenia, edition, printing, reproduction, authenticity, artist’s tool, Russian art of the early 20th centuryAbstract
Recently, in the field of humanities studies, a new trend in the research of visual arts has emerged — the inclusion of reproduction into the sphere of interest of scientific knowledge. This tendency was laid as early as in the works of W. Benjamin, who considered reproducing as an inevitable stage in the development of culture, which has a negative impact on it due to the loss of the recipient’s sense of authenticity of a work of art. It is not surprising that until today, book, magazine and newspaper illustration, postal and applied graphics, including artist signed postcard, were on the periphery of scientific interest in classical history of art. Studying of art history it is possible to examine the problems of work of different artists in their co-operation with postcard publishers, the methods of their work on drawings and their reproducing, technical aspects of print. It is not always possible to establish whether a drawing was created specifically for a postcard or whether the artist gave it from ready-made drawings suitable in subject matter, size and difficulty of reproducing. The archive of the Community of St. Eugenia publishing house makes it possible to establish the exact history of the publication of individual postcards, to see the stages of the artist’s work, and to determine the degree of originality of certain works. Many artists opted to formalize the commission, refraining from creating special drawings. I. E. Repin, V. M Vasnetsov, and M. V. Nesterov offered a variant of postcards-reminders of their famous works independently of each other. The artists of the ‘World of Art’ association for the first time thought of the printing press as an artist’s tool and offered their own variants of working on prints, excluding the sketch drawing from the process. The latter was in line with the trend of expanding artists’ understanding of what can serve as a tool for them, testified in itself to the presence of an artistic aura in reproductions, and influenced the development of contemporary media art.
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