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| The Red Kremlin by Janet Q Treloar |
By
New Worker correspondent
THE
SACRIFICE of millions of Soviet citizens during the Second World War is
traditionally commemorated at the Soviet War Memorial in Lambeth on Remembrance
Sunday. But this year there was a more unusual tribute to their struggle at a
major art gallery on London’s Southbank.
Appropriately called “A Russian
Theme”, this exhibition consisted of a series of impressions of the heroic
cities of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, whose resistance broke the back of
the Wehrmacht..
Janet Q Treloar is one of Britain’s
leading water-colourists whose works have been exhibited all around the world,
including St Petersburg as well as the Russian Embassy and the Russian Cultural
Centre in London.
Last
week she joined forces with another master of the craft for this shared
exhibition at the Bankside Gallery, the home of the Royal Watercolour Society
in London. Dennis Roxby Bott treads a familiar path with his landscapes and
architectural scenes at home and abroad while Janet Treloar explores a more
unconventional road of colour and light to convey her vivid impressions of the
Russian scene.
Janet went to Russia in 2005 and her
paintings are based on sketches of Moscow, St Petersburg and Volgograd done at
the time and then reworked to illuminate what she describes as "the debt
we owe to the heroic and sacrificial resistance of the Russian people to the
Nazis".
Others are dedicated to the parallel
resistance to the "terror" represented by Anna Akhmatova, whose poems
– much admired in western artistic circles – were dismissed by Zhdanov at the
time as “the poetry of an overwrought,
upper-class lady" and the product of "eroticism, mysticism, and
political indifference”.
The
exhibition only ran for a week but the venue hosts new displays throughout the
year. The gallery is very near the Tate Modern at 48 Hopton Street, London, SE1
9JH Admission is free and the gallery
is open daily from 11.00 am to 6.00 pm.
