A man and woman in their late thirties, dressed in artists’ clothing, hold in their hands a double portrait of themselves as Adam and Eve. Naked and slightly idealized, they are depicted in front of what looks like a magnolia tree. Adam stands with an apple in his hands. Eve is about to leave paradise: she steps out of the picture into the male artist’s hand, placed safely under her foot. This composition is executed in oil on wood and reminds one of the post-World War I “New Objectivity” paintings or of the figurative paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. It was done, however, in 1980 by Dmitri Dmitrevich Shilinskii, a Moscow artist. It is one of ninety-seven paintings shown recently in the Künstlerhaus in Vienna in an exhibition called “Aspects of Contemporary Soviet Art.”

 
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