Ilya Guintzbourg

A sculptor, a representative of the Russian art school of the last third of the 19^th, the first third of the 20^th centuries, was born in the small Belarusian town of Grodno in a large Jewish family, with deep religious traditions. Soon after the early death of the sole breadwinner, the family moved to Vilnius. The main city of the Lithuanian province played a fateful role in the life of the young Eliash Ginsburg, who spent his childhood here in the large house of his grandfather, the famous benefactor Girsh Lapidus. It was his maternal grandfather who introduced the growing grandson to his famous countryman Mark Matveyevich Antokolsky, thus practically defining a teenager with fairly obvious artistic abilities as a pupil to the best sculptor of the province, country and Europe. Despite the sixteen-year age difference, a profound and sincere understanding was established between them for the long twenty-two years.
Ilya Guinzbourg, long before the completion of a full course of professional training and academic education, attracted the inner world and spiritual impulses of the person, overt and latent manifestations of his emotions and trials. He was observant and was able to achieve a delicate sense and sensual interpretation of the system of images of his heroes.
The sculpture “V. V. Stasov” from the Museum of Russian Art in Yerevan is one of forty works of the cycle of portrait statuettes made in a new form of small plastic and depicting in plaster or bronze the late representatives of artistic intelligentsia and his contemporaries, scientists and cultural figures, interpreted in everyday creative activities. The portrait, chamber or monumental, has always dominated the works of the Master, attracting the possibility of analysis and careful observation, delicate penetration into the hidden corners of the personality’s consciousness, as the author himself admitted, “delicate psychology of sincere and true soul.” He is freed from the everyday earthiness and, at the same time, completely renounces pomposity and external effects in order to fully focus the audience’s attention and, of course, sympathy for the extremely saturated and meaningful inner world of his vision. In trying to understand it, the sculptor speaks without embellishment and pathos, simply and truthfully, which gives the image an invisible deep inner power and additional expressiveness.
There is no music without melody, just as there is no poet without thought. I. Ya. Guinzbourg at the Museum of Russian Art (Prof. A. Abramyan’s collection):
V. Stasov   1889    (cast in 1896)