YEAR OF RUSSIA IN FRANCE

A celebration and cultural exchange takes place between France and Russia this year. Among the wonderful events and displays are two art exhibition standouts:

HOLY RUSSIA: Russian Art from the Beginnings to Peter the Great
The stunning and monumental Russian art exhibition at the Louvre is closing at the end of this coming weekend (May 24). Unfolding chronologically, the exhibit focuses on the history of Christian Russia, from the 9th to the 18th centuries with icons, bejeweled crosses, triptychs, manuscripts, and paintings.

WOODEN SAINTS
Traveling all the way to Lyon from Perm, an ancient city in Russia’s Ural Mountains, is an amazing collection of wooden saints. The Perm Art Gallery is considered one of the largest and finest in all of Russia and its permanent collection of 400 religious sculptures has a Russian scholar to thank. In the 1920s, Nikolai Serebrenikov furiously began gathering the wooden images and sculptures as the Bolsheviks were shutting down most of the country’s churches and monasteries. The Lyon Museum of Fine Arts hosts this sublime exhibit in September 2010.