The Gender Foundations of Artistry and the Artistic Personality in the Russian Culture of Transitional Eras

Abstract

The article presents materials from the author’s research for her doctoral dissertation devoted to analysis of the visual arts and the artistic personality in Russian culture of transitional periods: the turns of the 19th and 20th centuries and of the 20th and 21st centuries. These temporal periods have been defined as unstable, transitory and stipulating the intensification of the conflict between the tendency towards preserving the stability in art, on the one hand,
and the emergence of new artistic styles, on the other hand. Particularly these time periods have been characterized by a change of value-based semantic directions in the activities of artistic personalities, on the one hand, and the emergence of new artistic styles, on the other hand. The cultural chaos present at the turn of the examined centuries actualized the unstable character of artistic people of both genders, stipulated also by their sociocultural essences (the unity and the struggle of opposite elements — the male and the female), which in our opinion provided one of the sources of the artistic activities, the aspiration towards the artist’s self-expression. The obtained results made it possible to determine the artistic gender as a special cultural-anthropological essence which in the process of artistic activity overcomes the sociocultural opposition of “male vs. female” and obtaining in their cultural identity the mutually complementing gender characteristic features of masculinity-femininity, which are conducive to the formation of an androgynous cultural type of personality. The dynamics of the styles in the visual arts in the culture of the turn of the 19th and the 20th centuries demonstrates the specific features of gender self-realization of the subject of activities in the sphere of visual arts and the appearance in Russian art of a large number of women-artists inclined towards innovative art.