Light, steppe and Dnipro · 1841 -1910

In a red sunset of almost unreal intensity, Arkhyp Kuindzhi transforms the Dnipro and the sky into a pure experience of light.

Arkhyp Kuindzhi, also transcribed Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi, was born in Mariupol in 1841, then in the Russian Empire, and died in Saint Petersburg in 1910. Coming from a Pontic Greek family from Crimea, he grew up near the Black Sea before joining the imperial capital. He approached the Peredvizhniki, the Ambulants, but soon developed a very personal path based on spectacular lighting effects. Moonlight on the Dnipro, sunsets, steppes and mountains often reduce the landscape to a few simple bands: sky, horizon, water or terrain. This simplification gives the color an almost abstract power. Red sunset, painted between 1905 and 1908, counts among his last major works. The calm river, probably the Dnipro, reflects a fiery cloud which concentrates red, orange and purple. An influential professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kuindzhi transmits to his students a radical attention to the perception, memory and experience of light. The selection "Arkhyp Kuindzhi (Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi)" notably compares Red Sunset - Arkhyp Kuindzhi. His reading favors atmosphere.

Kuindzhi does not describe the sunset: he isolates its force until the red sky becomes the real subject of the painting.