You are a woman and that`s why you are right

The Russian Art Academy and Moscow Gallery «ARS LONGA» represent an exhibition “The Fifth Season” in Tsereteli Art Gallery (Prechistenka, 19). It combines painting and graphic arts of Ekaterina Yastrebova with sculpture and photography of Maxim Aksenov.
The following words of A. Pushkin can be referred just to both of them:
 “So, verse and prose, they came together.
     No ice and flame, no stormy weather
     and granite, were so far apart.”
However, opposite sides form one unity quite often. There is something which units these two children of Stroganovka (Stroganov Moscow State university of Art and Industry). It is an adherence not even to the realistic method in its classical view, but to reflection of surroundings as far as possible without man-handling, so to say, and also evident unwillingness to use doubtful “winnings” of the XXth century which allowed artists to break down the whole world und put its dust together of their own will. Especially the women body suffered in the art due to those experiments: it was tortured, mutilated, crippled by everyone and his brother, beginning maestro Picasso. Nowadays the artist is required to have fidelity to principles and creative courage to refuse from representation of cubistic and other deformed freaks instead of normal women. These two exhibitors are jointed with its theme: The Woman. At this point their community is over and they treat this theme from opposite sides.
… In accordance with the ancient Apocrypha the first wife of Adam was not Eve, but Lilith made of clay just as Adam himself. She was a perfidious, self-affected, cruel being who refused to respect the Creator as well as her husband. That`s why she was driven out from the Eden and she is still wandering over the world and carrying subversive activities against the womenfolk of the mankind with spreading seeds of different vices into unripe minds.
Maxim Aksenov is interested in effects of her activity these days.
He looks upon the woman purely in a masculine way. In the West feminists calls such art as “male-pig” chauvinism. First of all he is interested in the sexist matter of the woman. “Female characters” of Maxim are in countless hypostasises, in various materials, super modern: beautiful, fit, full of energy, single-minded and without any sentimentality. They know what they want and uppermost the power. They have abilities to get their own way. They are able to do as in the verse of poet Nekrasov:
“A run-away horse she will master,
Walk straight to a hut that's aflame” But they won’t do it, just send others, first of all, men who have lost the power over the world and become shallow ghostly. The author found out the untrite way adding special spice to his female images: after uncovering his pretty girls he stays on them only slippers with double-edged heels. Being unstable at first sight and making to balance their owners in practice they are something like a support of fighting machines which are ready to bring down fire on an enemy, in the first place, on men.
While at the same time female characters of paintings and drawings of Ekaterina Yastrebova, incredibly popular in Russia and abroad, are no doubt heiresses of the foremother Eve. They inspire the world around with their spiritual and body beauty. Ekaterina Yastrebova revives the cult of women’s beauty from the masters of the early Renaissance – Quattrocento, who painted the Woman just like the Maker had created Eve. The similarity with Quattrocento artists is in the painting of E. Yastrebova rather consecutively. She draws the details of every blade of grass, every flower which decorate the fresh and just created world. And she paints the main beauty of this world – the beauty of the woman with the same efforts and love. Types of her pictures are openly slavic and recall sweetheart Volga beauties beloved of Boris Kustodiev. Being a woman she knows the female nature better than any men. Her characters are wonderful, kind, agreeable, cheerful. They do not need to fight a war against men who readily go to their captivity themselves. And also her characters` weaknesses mocked by the painter with love are only the continuous of their merits. Nudes of Ekaterina Yastrebova are the cult revival of the female beauty which is left for us by ancestors and misspent uselessly. Perhaps therefore people of the present unkind time like her pictures so much. The painter has begun to cover corpulent amenities of her images with refined clothes without belittling their charm in recent years.
As a matter of fact, as one nun said in a stale joke: “It doesn`t matter because they are naked under cloths”
So who are right in this artistic duel – Ekaterina or Maxim? Who rules in the modern woman – Lilith or Eve?
Perhaps both are right. Valeriy Brusov known as judge of the woman beauty and sophisticated torturer of his numerous admirers gave the answer one century ago.

O. Torchinsky