ART - ANYTIME!
Nicholas Lochoff and his Paintings
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The
paintings in this cloister were made in the first decades of the twentieth
century, when color reproductions of artwork were not technically feasible.
The paintings here contains are scale reproductions, commissioned in 1911 from
Nicholas Lochoff by the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts (now the Pushkin Museum
of Fine Arts). He was to reproduce the media, processes and distinguishing
characteristics of Renaissance originals for exhibition to the Russian
public.
Lochoff worked so meticulously that he had
only sent a few paintings back to Russia by the time of the 1917
revolution. Stranded in Italy, he was forced to sell the paintings to
other buyers, including Harvard University, the
Portland (Ore.) Art Museum, and the Frick Art Reference Library in New
York. Miss Helen Clay Frick acquired the collection in this cloister after Lochoff's death with the help of Bernard Berenson, a connoisseur and art
critic. Mr.
Berenson felt that these were not ordinary copies, but the closest
imaginable to the creations of the original artists. He wrote of Nicholas Lochoff's painting, One glance around the studio was enough to show us that his copies were indeed very different from all other reconstructions.... Such faithful, such scrupulous recreation by one man of the genius-born achievements of other artists had, to our knowledge, which is not slight, never before happened in Europe at least. Down to the minutest speck of dirt which in the course of centuries had adhered to the picture, everything was them!
Go to the cloister in the Frick Fine Arts Building at the University of Pittsburgh. |