15.02.2010  The Christian Brinton Collection of Russian Art

• In 1941 the noted art critic and curator Christian Brinton (American, 1870-1942) donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art an important collection of modern art from Eastern Europe, some of which is on view at the museum now. Over the course of his thirty-five-year career, Brinton wrote more than two hundred articles and organized numerous exhibitions that introduced American audiences to prominent Russian artists, such as David Burliuk, Boris Grigoriev, John Graham (born in Ukraine, Ivan Dabrowsky), and Viktor Palmov. By 1932, when Brinton curated a large exhibition of modern Russian art in Wilmington, Delaware, many progressive artists from the Soviet Union had been forced into exile in the United States for their opposition to Joseph Stalin’s ruthless totalitarian regime. In the exhibition catalogue Brinton claimed that the work of these émigré Russian artists “seldom disassociates itself from nature and from life,” which they sought to “intensify” and “magnify” through their dreamlike paintings. Brinton was attracted to brightly colored, folkloric compositions, which explain why he also championed the work of the Hungarian painter Bela Kadar, the German Expressionist Heinrich Campendonk, and the African American artist Horace Pippin, who painted Brinton’s portrait in 1940.