Konstantin Somov: A lady shooting a mask

The problem of representing the body, gender, sexuality is one of the key to the modernist project, including for Russian art of the line of the XIX -XX centuries. For a number of artists, poets and intellectuals of the FIN de SieCle era, the body was the space of conflict and experiment, the starting point for reflection on the boundaries of the norm and the depicted. Despite the fact that these topics were central to the artist, illustrator and member of the art of arts of Konstantin Somov, they were practically not studied by art historians. Using numerous, including little -known and unpublished sources, the author builds a holistic interpretation of erotic (including homosexual) motives in the artist’s painting and shows how they were built into the artistic and intellectual context of the beginning of the century. The book first publishes letters from the artist Elizabeth Martynova, who posed Somova for the painting "Lady in Blue"