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Merchandise Mart & Market Square: a new opening!
Esquifs à la Mer - Georges LAPCHINE
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Biography : André Charles VOILLEMOT
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Biography : Konstantin Andreevich Somov
1869-1939
Son of the Keeper of the Imperial Hermitage, Konstantin Somov was born, studied and lived in St. Petersburg, before events obliged him to move abroad. He studied first at the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, then at the Imperial Academy under Ilia Repin. He broke off his education there in 1897 after a disagreement with with his teacher about the direction of his work, so antipathetic to the worldview of the old Wanderer. Somov, along with his friends Sergei Diaghilev, Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst, was one of the founder members of the World of Art group, and of the journal of the same name. He was made a Professor of the Academy in 1918, but emigrated to Paris in 1924. Greatly influenced by his native city and the 18th century, Somov's art is precious, effeminately erotic and delicate to the point of being brittle. Of all the members of the World of Art group, it is perhaps Somov who best exemplifies what Alexander Benois meant when he talked of a generation who "knew too much, and believed too little".