An anniversary exhibition dedicated to the 140th anniversary of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878–1939) opens at the Russian Museum. 250 works of painting and graphics from 20 museums and private collections are collected here.

There is no need to imagine “The Bathing of the Red Horse” or “The Petrograd Madonna”, “Portrait of Akhmatova”, amazing still lifes with faceted glasses and coral apples scattered on the tablecloth - the creative heritage of Petrov-Vodkin is textbook known. His style has been studied far and wide, examined through a magnifying glass, awarded with dozens of epithets and precise definitions: “symbolist formalism”, “nirvana state of mind”, “chassis of plasticity, accentuated convention, artificiality of scale, clarity of plans”.

What always amazes me is the reaction to the artist from his contemporaries, those who could be called St. Petersburg intellectuals of the 1910–1930s. Their opinion was not just skeptical, but, on the contrary, enthusiastic and respectful. It was beyond rude. Somov called Petrov-Vodkin “a boring, stupid, pretentious fool,” Gorky - “a man who is illiterate in all aspects.” “He loved to broadcast and teach, to philosophize, and he did it ineptly and stupidly,” wrote critic Erich Hollerbach. “There are people who perceive all the phenomena of the surrounding world somehow in a completely different way,” recalled the artist and art critic Vladimir Konashevich. “Even those of these phenomena, the meaning of which has long been known to humanity, they understand in a completely unique way. These people seem to live in another world... they are... either mediocre and severely stupid, or, conversely, deeply gifted... I recently had an example of such ponderous genius before my eyes. I mean the artist Petrov-Vodkin... The impetus for such a unique, in the full sense of the word, independent work of thought was, of course, the lack of school education.”

And what is again surprising: Petrov-Vodkin cannot be suspected of lack of education. He devoted 12 years to his studies, studied in two capitals in Russia, Munich and Paris, and, as was then customary in aristocratic families, completed his education by traveling, visiting Italy and even Algeria and Morocco. In terms of the amount of time and effort spent on education, it is difficult to compare him with any contemporary artist. The inconsistency between his work and biography is fascinating and makes him a constantly relevant figure.

Vodkinism as a premonition

...Kuzma Sergeevich was born in 1878 into a peasant family in the town of Khvalynsk, Saratov province. The unusual surname came from his grandfather, a shoemaker, who loved to pawn his collar. After graduating from four classes of a city school, the teenage boy worked part-time in an icon painters' artel. A visiting metropolitan architect saw his student's studies and took the young man to St. Petersburg, assigned him to Baron Stieglitz's school for two years, and even secured a scholarship for him from the Khvalyn merchants. Petrov-Vodkin will spend another 7 years at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where Serov and Korovin taught. In 1901, he studied for a couple of months in Munich in the studio of Anton Ashbe, where he arrived from Moscow on a bicycle (at least he started on two wheels). In 1905, he went to Paris for 3 years, from where he made voyages to Italy and Africa.

In 1908, Petrov-Vodkin returned to St. Petersburg with two hundred finished paintings and his French wife, Maria Josephine Yovanovitch, who in Russia was called Maria Fedorovna. The next decade was incredibly intense: he painted churches, created theatrical sketches, tried himself as a writer, participated in exhibitions, and in 1910 he headed the art school of Elizaveta Zvantseva instead of Lev Bakst, who had left for Paris. In 1912, he painted the legendary painting “Bathing the Red Horse,” which would later be called a harbinger of the World War and Revolution. Today at the Tretyakov Gallery she opens an exhibition of Russian art of the 20th century.

The year 1917 comes, Petrov-Vodkin is 39 years old. He is invited as a professor at the reorganized Academy of Arts (VKHUTEMAS / VKHUTEIN), where he creates a protocol for higher art education. His methods were treated differently, some considered them strange, but at that time it was “the only educational methodology” (according to art critic Alexander Borovsky). And it worked: it turned yesterday’s schoolchildren into artists, as we could see in 2016, when the Russian Museum held the exhibition “Petrov-Vodkin Circle”, bringing together all its students and followers. The names of the authors belonged to the second and third ranks in the history of art, and the works were all excellent. In the 1920s, the term “Vodkinism” was in use without any irony: Kuzma Sergeevich’s influence on the younger generation could not be overestimated.

In Soviet art of the 1920s–1950s there were only three Teachers with a capital T - Malevich, Filonov and Petrov-Vodkin. The legacy of his students has long been the subject of passionate collecting.

...Despite his French wife and his trip to relatives in Paris in 1924–1925, Petrov-Vodkin was not repressed. He was arrested, but upon Lunacharsky’s call he was immediately released. His cousin Alexander Trofimov, who posed for the painting “The Bathing of the Red Horse,” ended up in Stalin’s camps in 1937. The reason for the arrest were letters written in French sent from Paris.

As for the painter himself, the authorities treated him very loyally: he was an artist for export, his works were exhibited non-stop in the USA and Western Europe. In 1924, he was among the chosen few entrusted with capturing Lenin on his deathbed. After 10 years, based on drawings made from life, he will paint a portrait of the leader, however, without the proper propaganda pathos: Petrov-Vodkin will depict him reading “Songs of the Western Slavs” by Pushkin. It was impossible to hang something like this in the capital; the painting, under the patronage of Saryan, was acquired by the Yerevan Art Museum.

In the 1930s, Kuzma Sergeevich received the title “Honored Artist of the RSFSR”, he was the first head of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists, and in 1936–1937 his last lifetime exhibitions were held in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In February 1939, he died of tuberculosis, which he had desperately fought for 10 years.

Bird's-eye

The artist enriched world art with an original way of constructing space: the background plans in his paintings do not decrease, but, on the contrary, increase and tilt towards the viewer. The space seems to be seen through a wide-format lens from a bird's eye view. This technique hypnotized not only Petrov-Vodkin’s students; in the 1960s it “hooked” many St. Petersburg painters, primarily Andrei Mylnikov and Yevsey Moiseenko, and in the 1970s–1980s it became widespread in Soviet art.

As for color, Petrov-Vodkin considered the combination of red, blue and yellow to be the basis of harmony, although his own paintings, of course, are far from such poster solutions and are full of the most complex transitions of lilac, emerald, violet tones.

The artist went through the difficult 1920–1930s, when basic moral and ethical standards collapsed in society (and he himself wrote about “terrible interpersonal relationships”), but his paintings contain an unconditional acceptance of the world, the joy of contemplating the flow of life - a still life with herring, teapot or cut glasses. If we judged the revolution only by his works, we would think that it was the Kingdom of God on earth, that all peasant women are innocent and pure, like Fra Angelico's angels, that the death of the commissar (in the painting of the same name) is not a terrible ending, but the high moment when the soul flies away to God.

Science of Spells

…This anniversary (and they are measured in decades) will be the first that we will celebrate without the artist’s daughter Elena Kuzminichna. She died in 2008. A year before her death, documentary director Sergei Tyutin recorded an interview with her for the film “Petrova-Vodkina’s Love.” Dramatic circumstances emerged.

It turned out that her parents had been unable to give birth to a child for 16 years; Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin was literally obsessed with this problem. When direct medical help did not help, he began to conjure the heavens with his art. His numerous Madonnas and nursing workers are nothing more than messages to the Cosmos.

The long-awaited pregnancy finally happened. “This year was absolutely special for us,” the artist later wrote a “report” for his daughter. “Upon my return from Samarkand, Natunya (Polish pianist Natalya Leonovna Kalvaits) moved in with us.” Her tender friendship with her mother, the lively, accommodating character of the new member of our family - everything helped to create a lively, cheerful life full of romanticism.

...There was love in the house. Mom was loved a lot, endlessly, like never before, and I felt a new attitude towards me in her - it was as if we were just getting to know each other. I was jealous of my mother for Natyuna (and at the same time valued her friendship), this jealousy of me for my mother is this interweaving of pure and good feelings (my baby, everything that is done out of love is justified, there is no malice or dirt in it). This binding provided so much vital material... It was in such circumstances that my mother and I had a new, long-awaited joy.”

However, at the end of the pregnancy, the mother's life was threatened. The artist begged the doctors to let the child live if something happened and “did not even consider it necessary to hide this conversation” from his wife. “I stated that it was not me who should be saved, but the child,” she recalled in her book, “and I formalized the decision in writing. My husband was shocked that I was ready to sacrifice my life for the sake of his cherished dream.” Fortunately, everyone survived.

Surprisingly, five months later another daughter, Maria, was born to the artist by his wife’s closest friend, the same pianist Natalya Kalvaits.

For some time everyone lived in the same apartment. “Mom was scared, she was very worried,” Elena Kuzminichna comments in the film. But she had no choice: a foreigner in Soviet Russia, with severe complications after childbirth, there was no way she could express her dissatisfaction. What Natalya Kalvayts thought about all this remained a mystery. Soon she went to her parents in Poland, and her traces were lost forever.

In his diaries of 1926, addressed to his daughter, Petrov-Vodkin wrote: “Bad phenomena are absurd in themselves - they are born by the command of our everyday (philistine) self-will over our physiology, they are signs of the participation of the race in birth and death, and they are led to a system (bad word, but, of course, this is not harmony, well, let there be a system) - they are the bark between the sleeve and the volume of the object of life, stages, intervals. I expressed the above in a tedious way, but it is possible that I wanted to express in words something non-verbal. Be able to decipher, my dear.”

Petrov-Vodkin was neither a bourgeois nor a cynic. He was a special person, with a peculiar empathy. Doesn't this explain such an angry reaction to him from his contemporaries? His uniqueness was mistaken for his lack of education, but most likely he was a person on the autistic spectrum, like Forrest Gump, very sensitive to art and at the same time unable to sense the nuances of human relationships.

...Maria Fedorovna outlived her husband by 18 years. She dedicated her life to preserving his legacy. Through her efforts, Petrov-Vodkin’s paintings were returned from abroad, including “The Bathing of the Red Horse” from Sweden in 1950. She donated family belongings to Khvalynsk and achieved the opening of a museum there. She even wrote a book, “My Great Russian Husband.”

Lyudmila Lunina

“Petrov-Vodkin will still surprise us”

Direct speech

Olga Musakova, curator of the exhibition “Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth", leading researcher in the department of painting of the second half of the 19th – 21st centuries of the Russian Museum

The Russian Museum has not had a personal exhibition of the master for more than 50 years, although we have a unique collection of the artist’s works. The previous exhibition “Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s Circle” presented the works of his students and prompted us to prepare a personal exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin himself. Visitors will see more than 250 works by the master, including masterpieces and lesser-known works.

We will show works from museums and private collections in Moscow and St. Petersburg, there will be works from Pskov, Saratov, Volgograd museums. We were greatly supported by the early works of Petrov-Vodkin from the Khvalynsky Art and Memorial Museum. We will bring the famous “Bathing of the Red Horse” from the Tretyakov Gallery.

Viewers will see not only paintings, but also easel drawings, sketches for paintings, portraits, and theatrical drawings. Petrov-Vodkin himself said that every picture is a whole life. This applies no less to the master’s graphics: each of his drawings is a finished work. The Russian Museum houses more than 700 graphic works by Petrov-Vodkin, alas, we simply cannot show them all. Not much, but Petrov-Vodkin worked as a theater artist. For example, he created scenery sketches for Schiller’s “The Maid of Orleans,” Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” and Andreev’s “Satan’s Diary.” Viewers will definitely see something from the master’s works; Unfortunately, it is technically impossible to show everything. There will also be his works for the painting of temples, for example, the Cathedral of St. Basil the Golden-Domed in Ovruch in Ukraine. Until recently, many of the master’s religious works were simply unknown. The exhibition will also include sketches of church paintings. A special place is given to the artist’s works on religious themes - many of them are unknown to viewers. We will show paintings and graphic compositions, works “Our Lady of Tenderness of Evil Hearts”, “Our Lady of Tenderness”, “Our Lady and Child” and others.

For the first time, the painting “The Crucifixion” (early 1920s), a watercolor sketch of the crucifixion of the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross, and the painting “Boys at Play” from 1916, which was considered missing or unrealized, will be exhibited. The painting will be brought from a private collection.

Petrov-Vodkin will surprise us more than once: he taught at Vsevolod Meyerhold’s stagecraft courses, worked at the Leningrad Porcelain Plant (viewers will see sketches for works on porcelain and a plate), and designed mass celebrations. He was a gifted writer, illustrating his own works and books by other authors. We will talk about this at the exhibition. Perhaps it will be possible to show the master's death mask.

Prepared by Maria Bashmakova

An exhibition of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin has opened at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. In honor of the artist’s 140th anniversary, museums, galleries and private collectors presented the most complete collection of works: from the textbook “Bathing of the Red Horse” to completely little-known ones. Some are being exhibited for the first time.

In Soviet times, Petrov-Vodkin’s paintings were in almost every self-respecting museum in the country. An author whose name is probably well-known to everyone. What is it worth just for the famous “Bathing of the Red Horse”! And suddenly a sensation: it turns out that the last time a personal exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin was held was more than half a century ago. The artist, who was considered the singer of the revolution, whose paintings were in Soviet textbooks, was far from clear-cut.

“Even today, many are confused about which camp to include him in: the right or the left? And he is neither right nor left. He's on his own! An artist who in his work accumulated all the main trends of the 20th century: in culture, in art, in painting,” says Olga Musakova, a leading researcher in the painting department of the Russian Museum.

The exhibition at the Russian Museum begins with student works. “Self-portrait” was brought from Khvalynsk, the artist’s homeland. In the parents' house in the Saratov region there is now a museum where 9 paintings are carefully preserved. The future genius is 25. There are only four classes at the parochial school. He learned to draw from icon painters. I remembered walking with the monk along the banks of the Volga, looking for ocher, grinding paints. The jars stood on the windowsill like colorful butterflies.

“When we explored the world as children, our grass was green, the sky was blue, the water was wetter. But we forget and do not see the world around us. We live in a dark room. We live based on our experience. So he wanted to return a person to that sunny room, flooded with light and sensations,” says Valentina Borodina, head of the K. S. Petrov-Vodkin Art and Memorial Museum in Khvalynsk.

The son of a shoemaker, he, as they say now, made himself. I was actually engaged in self-education. By chance, I entered the technical drawing school in St. Petersburg, and then went to Moscow for live painting. He studied at private academies in Paris.

His biography is full of legends. He said that he was kidnapped in Italy, and in Africa he had to fight with nomads. From Paris he brought his wife - a noblewoman, a Frenchwoman, Marie, whom he affectionately called Mara all his life. She is his muse, his model, and his secretary. When their daughter was born, Petrov-Vodkin painted an icon and consecrated it in one of the churches. The completely non-canonical face of the Mother of God has been erased. He placed his icon under Mara’s head to make the birth easier. But there was also a whole series: “The Crucifixion for the Khvalynsky Temple”, “Christ the Sower”.

He formulated his three-color method - painting only with red, blue and yellow - as a development of the icon painting school. Today at the exhibition, Petrov-Vodkin’s granddaughter asks the question: after this, is he really such a “red” artist?

“I admire still lifes the most. I cannot treat them as anything other than a laboratory, an experiment. There is a play of shape, color, material. Such interaction, such dynamics that I hung the entire wall of the house above the bed with these reproductions,” said Zinaida Barzilovich.

For the first time, the organizers managed to collect works from different collections and provide an opportunity to get acquainted with entire periods of Petrov-Vodkin’s work. One room, for example, is dedicated to the “Boys at Play” series. This painting was long considered lost or unfinished by the artist; it was only recently discovered in a private collection. And this seemingly direct quote: Matisse, “Dance”, the same red figures, blue and green background. But Petrov-Vodkin has a completely different meaning - at the last moment you notice a stone in the boy’s hand.

And this is no longer a “game” or “dance” theme. This is the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The artist reverses our first impression, deceives, shocks.

Here’s another legend - he claimed that he invented the theory of “spherical” perspective when he fell from a mountain as a child: the sky seemed like an inverted bowl, and the lines did not go into the distance, but connected in his heart. And I repeated: I wish the audience at each exhibition to immerse themselves in my space, so that many simple and sharp splinters remain in their souls.

In the photo: exhibition “Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth"

“Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth"

The main exhibition of the season at the Russian Museum is an unprecedented-scale retrospective of a Russian symbolist, myth-maker and God-seeker with a contradictory fate, like time itself. Coming from a peasant family, who received his first painting lessons in an artel of icon painters, Petrov-Vodkin studied in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Munich, managed to see the world (even visited Africa), painted churches and created majolica, and then enthusiastically accepted the revolution and participated in the reforms Academy of Arts, raised a galaxy of students and followers, was briefly arrested during the years of Stalinist repression (saved by Lunacharsky’s call), and shortly before his death he was awarded major personal exhibitions in Leningrad and Moscow. The exhibition in the Benois Wing is an opportunity to see a variety of Petrov-Vodkin; it includes about 250 works from several dozen museums: from the program “Bathing of the Red Horse” and “Petrograd Madonna” to drawings and sketches that were taken out of storage for the first time in almost half a century .

Michelle Sima

Directly from the Moscow House of Photographs, a collection of photographs by Michel Sima “Geniuses in the Studios” moved to St. Petersburg: here is Pablo Picasso posing in the company of his bronze goat, here is Jean Cocteau lying down on an ornamental carpet with images of naked boys and girls, here is Man Ray peeking out from behind something of a modernist mobile. Michel Sima, born Michal Zmajewski, had ambitions as a sculptor: to learn the craft, in 1929 he moved from a provincial Polish town to Paris, where he took lessons from Ossip Zadkine. During the war, he was arrested by French collaborators and extradited to the Germans, went through Auschwitz, and upon returning to Paris, he was almost unable to work. On the advice of Picasso, he took up photography, created a series of portraits of artists in their studios - and with it he went down in history. Among the photographs that can be seen at the exhibition: portraits of Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Derain, Le Corbusier, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro and many others.

In the photo: exhibition “Art Deco. Books from the collection of Mark Bashmakov"

“Art Deco. Books from the collection of Mark Bashmakov"

An exhibition dedicated to book art deco is opening in the Hermitage, based on the collection collected by the Russian mathematician, academician of the Russian Academy of Education Mark Bashmakov. The Hermitage showed the collection in parts several times, and last year it became the core of the permanent exhibition “The Artist’s Book Cabinet” that opened in the General Staff Building. At the new exhibition in the Twelve Column Hall of the New Hermitage, it will be possible to trace all the main stages of the development of Art Deco: from the previous Art Nouveau in the books of Eugene Grasset, Maurice Denis, Auguste Leper and magazines of the 1910s to the experimental works of Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Raoul Dufy and Anthony Clavet.

"VDNH"

Marina Gisich's gallery has not yet been noticed in purposeful work with novice authors, which, however, is understandable: it is not the right format. But here is a wonderful initiative. During the summer lull, the gallery invited the masters with whom it had been working for a long time to look for young talents themselves and exhibit works together. Necrorealist Vladimir Kustov, for example, liked the gloomy paintings of Sergei Tikhonov with monsters and demon-like creatures tormenting children, conceptual painter Vitaly Pushnitsky chose a member of the Sever-7 art group Nestor Enelke as his partner, and director and artist Boris Kazakov, author of the ironic series “Doctors and huts,” called the young artist Asya Marakulina, with whom they share a love for drawings and diagrams.

In the photo: the Panspermia exhibition and the Stardust project

"It's hard to be a god"

The background story is known: Alexey German conceived a film based on the Strugatskys’ story almost immediately after the book was published in 1963, a script was even written, but the project did not pass censorship. The director returned to work on what turned out to be his main and last film in 1999; preparation and filming took a total of 14 years. Herman did not live to see the premiere for six months, leaving behind a three-hour film, like a will written in some unknown language, which will probably take many years to decipher. All that is available so far is the testimony of witnesses: actors, cameramen, assistants, make-up artists, decorators and artists. At the exhibition at Erarta, only the most revealing things will be presented: sketches, archival photographs from filming and, most importantly, costumes and props - a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of things created for, perhaps, the last science fiction film in the history of cinema, shot without the use of computer graphics.

Panspermia and the Stardust Project

German sculptor of Ukrainian origin Alyosha is known for developing an experimental genre of modern art - biosism or biofuturism - creating works that resemble three-dimensional illustrations from an anatomy textbook, and asking questions that seem, to put it mildly, surprising to the average visitor to art exhibitions: “How did life appear on our planet?”, “Was it pure abiogenesis?”, “What is the place of particularity in the process of changing elementary forms in the universal flow of biological species?” and so on. The new exhibition at the Anna Nova gallery, as expected, does not provide answers to the questions posed, but unexpectedly reveals that Alyosha is not alone in his quests: 12 more authors have been invited to participate in the project, sharing the ideological and aesthetic principles of biofuturism.

In the photo: exhibition “Petersburg-2103”

"Petersburg-2103"

At the end of June, ITMO University will open a gigantic exhibition at Manege dedicated to the architecture and urbanism of St. Petersburg outside of traditional clichés. The first floor will be given over to projects telling about the history of the city - from exploring the issue of borders (for example, Catherine II sought to reduce St. Petersburg, but Alexander I, on the contrary, expanded it) to the multimedia installation “Twilight of St. Petersburg,” representing the modern development of the city as a new Middle Ages, devoid of rational foundations. The second floor will bring together various concepts of the future in the works of nine artists and architects, including the Dutch bureau The Why Factory, Sergei Choban and the art group Curiosity Media Lab.

"Imperial Gardens of Russia"

This year, for the first time, the Russian Museum festival “Imperial Gardens of Russia” will be held not in Mikhailovsky, but in the Summer Garden (note: entrance to the park for a week). And this is not the only innovation: instead of landscape compositions, garden architecture and sculpture, the main emphasis will be on the work of florists who will decorate alleys and bosquets with flower arrangements. In addition, a photo exhibition dedicated to European palace gardens, created with the support of the European Garden Heritage Association, will be displayed on the main alley as part of the festival.

In the photo: exhibition “Parts of Walls”

"Transformatio. Contemporary art of Dagestan"

Erarta continues an entertaining series of exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art of Russian regions. The new project - Transformatio - talks about current artists of Dagestan. The main characters here have long been known. Aladdin Garunov creates spectacular installations from carpets, shoes and rubber. Taus Makhacheva, who was educated in Moscow and London, explores modern life in the Caucasus in her videos and performances, sometimes poeticizing it and sometimes subtly criticizing it. Magomed Kazhlaev draws geometric ornamental compositions, the process of working on which he describes as a special form of meditation, and, for example, Natalia Mali, who once worked under Dmitry Prigov and created things in the spirit of Moscow conceptualism, over time became interested in aesthetic collages and performances that ironicize ethnic prejudices .

"Parts of Walls"

In August, the exhibition project “Parts of Walls”, which the museum is creating together with the Moscow RuArts Foundation, will open at the Manege. The idea is ambitious: the curator of the exhibition, Alexey Partola, will bring together on one site the works of more than 70 Russian street artists from 17 cities - from Kaliningrad to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky (no one has ever conducted such a fundamental study of Russian graffiti before). It is not yet known what all this will look like, but the exhibition will definitely be distinguished by diversity: the organizers do not impose any additional conditions on the artists, leaving complete freedom in choosing themes and techniques.

Photos: cover, 3 – Anna Nova, 1 – State Russian Museum, 2 – State Hermitage Museum, 4, 5 – Central Exhibition Hall “Manege”

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin painted one of his most famous paintings, “Fantasy,” in 1925. It can also be seen at an exhibition in the Benois Wing of the Russian Museum

The disillusioned singer of the revolution

The first personal exhibition of the great artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in forty years opened at the Russian Museum

05/24/18 exhibition

In the near future there will be queues along the Griboyedov Canal again. In the Benois building of the Russian Museum, where all the high-profile exhibitions usually take place, an exhibition has opened that no self-respecting art lover should miss. The 140th anniversary of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin is celebrated here with a display of more than two hundred of his works from Russian museums and private collections. The general sponsor of the exhibition was VTB Bank, with whose support many interesting projects have been implemented at the Russian Museum. Among them are exhibitions of Roerich, Bakst, Vereshchagin. “We are very glad that the exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin’s works takes place in the summer, when there are many tourists in the city. We hope that not only residents, but also numerous guests of St. Petersburg will enjoy it,” said Yuri Levchenko, Deputy Head of the Corporate Network Department - VTB Senior Vice President.

Don't lose face

Indeed, the current exhibition in the Benois building is a unique event, because the last time a personal exhibition, at which only Petrov-Vodkin’s graphics were presented, was held in the Russian Museum forty years ago - in 1978, and this despite the fact that a huge collection of his works - more than 70 paintings, 700 graphic drawings and the only work in the decorative and applied genre - the Seraphim plate.

In the post-war years, Petrov-Vodkin’s work was not so much relegated to the background, but somehow it was not particularly popularized. “Bathing the Red Horse” is perhaps the only picture that was heard. There were other idols in painting then. Therefore, before 1978, another exhibition was held in 1966, and before that - already in 1936, during the artist’s lifetime.

Such a modest interest in the painter, who today can safely be called a genius, is most likely explained by the fact that at the end of his life - Petrov-Vodkin died in Leningrad in 1939 and was buried on the Literatorskie Mostki - he became disillusioned with the revolution. Or rather, in her methods. And this disappointment began to show through in the paintings. But religious themes increasingly penetrated into the work of Kuzma Sergeevich.

“This is a great artist of the most difficult time in the political history of Russia, in the history of Russian culture, Russian art, who experienced a huge number of influences, but did not lose his face,” said Vladimir Gusev, director of the State Russian Museum, at the press preview of the exhibition.

Nugget from the Saratov province

Indeed, the biography of Petrov-Vodkin, born in 1878 in the town of Khvalynsk, Saratov province, is simply a historical series about the life of a nugget from the people. The father is a shoemaker, the mother is a maid, and the railway school is the best option for career growth for the son who graduated from the fourth grade. At the same time, from whom - and where does everything come from - various talents overlapped each other.

At first, young Kuzma spent a long time choosing what to do - painting or literature. The profession of a railway worker was not in his plans. But even having stopped at painting, he did not abandon writing. His creative baggage includes 30 literary works - from plays and poems to essays and diary entries. Some of them, dedicated to the creative process, can be seen at the exhibition.

Donated for a “scholarship”

But already in Khvalynsk he met icon painters and began to paint icons and paint in oils himself. And one day his drawings were seen by the architect Meltzer, who came to build a mansion for a local landowner. He saw, was inspired and took Kuzma to St. Petersburg, where he entered the Baron Stieglitz School. Meanwhile, the Khvalyn merchants chipped in and sent their talented fellow countryman 25 rubles every month. Which, it should be noted, Petrov-Vodkin did not appreciate, and even, on the contrary, was offended, saying that they were throwing some kind of handout, and then he would have to thank him all his life. Therefore, it is not surprising that he joyfully accepted the October Revolution and actively supported revolutionary sentiments. But - only in the first years.

Petrov-Vodkin began his career in the profession in 1904 - his majolica panel can still be seen on the house church of the Orthopedic Institute in St. Petersburg. And in 1909, his personal exhibition already took place. A year later, everyone recognized the name of Petrov-Vodkin: his painting “Dream” caused a great resonance, in which many saw excessive eroticism and the influence of European symbolism. All this confused classical painters in subsequent years. Until Kuzma Sergeevich himself became a classic.

It should be noted that Petrov-Vodkin was a very versatile artist. Not in the style of writing, but thematically. At the exhibition in the Benois building you can see still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and monumental paintings. The predominant colors on them are red, blue and yellow, which refer to icon painting. And Petrov-Vodkin’s know-how is “spherical perspective”, which brings sublimity and a sense of flight to the plot. “In the Line of Fire”, “Noon. Summer” - these paintings are examples of such “spherical” painting. From which the artist nevertheless repeatedly left.

From commissars to Pushkin

The exhibition organizers also tried not to focus attention on any one aspect of Petrov-Vodkin’s work. Here you can see his first drawings, sketches for paintings, theatrical works that the artist was engaged in in the last years of his life, and book illustrations. And although the exhibition presents only selected works, even they amaze with the variety of themes that interested the artist.

And they, these themes, have changed over the years. And now the bathing boys and mothers with babies are replaced by commissars and workers. Then, after Petrov-Vodkin became disillusioned with revolutionary ideals, the commanders of the Red Army and the workers gathering for a demonstration in his paintings give way to just spring and just girls, without ideological background. Petrov-Vodkin’s last major work was the painting “Housewarming” (“Workers’ Petrograd”), painted in 1937. And she has no enthusiasm for the working class moving into rich mansions. The “housewarming party” turned out to be very tragic.

Perhaps that is why, at the end of his life, Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin switched to the Pushkin theme - there could no longer be any disappointments here. But this work remained unfinished. Although there is a portrait of Pushkin at the exhibition, as well as a portrait of Akhmatova, hanging opposite the self-portrait of Petrov-Vodkin himself, who greatly appreciated her work, but did not like her as a person. But two geniuses, by the will of the exhibition creators, look at each other. And they clearly have something to say.

Anna VETLINSKAYA,

Internet magazine "Interestant"

Sotheby’s pre-auction exhibition “Russian avant-garde and Soviet contemporary art” in Sovintsentr, Moscow. July 2-7, 1988 Photo: Alexander Lavrentiev

The stakes for publicity. Sotheby's auction in Moscow, 1988

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

The first Sotheby’s auction in Moscow in 1988 is nothing short of legendary, and this title is well deserved. Thanks to the auction, which took place at the World Trade Center, Soviet unofficial artists were presented to foreign buyers along with the Russian avant-garde. “Garage” intends to reconstruct the events of 30 years ago. Spectators will be able to look at the auction, albeit virtually: there will be a VR installation at the exhibition. In addition to modern formats, there will also be quite traditional research materials (the project is positioned precisely as research): interviews with participants and organizers and archival documents. The top lot of that auction, “Fundamental Lexicon” (1986) by Grisha Bruskin, sold in 1988 to an unnamed collector from Munich for £242 thousand ($500 thousand), will also be exhibited at the Garage, along with the work “All About Him” (1971 ) Ilya Kabakov, which the then chairman of the board of directors of Sotheby's Alfred Taubman bought as a gift to the Soviet Ministry of Culture to create a museum of modern art of the USSR. They will be accompanied by the Russian avant-garde, including a drawing by Varvara Stepanova (circa 1924) and “Clown. Scene in the circus" (1935) by Alexander Rodchenko.

Fenxin hairpin. Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), China. Gold, stamp. Shanghai Art Museum. Photo: Moscow Kremlin Museums

Ming Dynasty: The Radiance of Learning

Moscow Kremlin Museums,exhibition hall of the Patriarchal Palace, exhibition hall of the Assumption Belfry

The era of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) became in China a time of rising education and at the same time nostalgia for antiquity - thinkers of that period tried to fill their everyday life with ancient objects, artists often imitated the best examples of works of the previous Tang and Song dynasties, and even a whole movement appeared in literature " adherents of ancient literature." The exhibition at the Kremlin Museums will show about 150 monuments of the era: porcelain, paintings, stone carvings and furniture. The Shanghai Art Museum, which will provide all the exhibits, is especially famous for its rich collection of the latter. An imaginary “office of an intellectual” from the Ming era will appear in the exhibition halls, along with its “treasures”—that’s what calligraphy items were called in China: ink pots, vessels for diluting ink, carved brush stands. The Kremlin Museums will also display picturesque scrolls, including the work “Peony, Banana Leaves and Stones” by one of the most famous artists of the era, Xu Wei, and precious porcelain, another indispensable attribute of the life of an intellectual. A special section of the exhibition will be dedicated to archaeological finds: there you will see jewelry and a set of porcelain figurines of an honorary escort from the tomb of relatives of the imperial dynasty.

Ilya Kabakov. "Footballer" 1964. Photo: ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV archive

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Not everyone will be taken into the future

State Hermitage, Main Headquarters

A retrospective of the most famous couple of conceptualists will move from Tate Modern to Russia this spring. An expanded and expanded version of the exhibition will be shown in St. Petersburg, and in September it will be hosted by the Tretyakov Gallery. In an interview with TANR, Emilia Kabakova said that for the exhibition they selected paintings, drawings, installations and models from the late 1960s, from Ilya Kabakov’s first conceptual painting “Football Player” (1964), which was long considered lost, to very recent things. According to the Kabakovs, this is the most complete display of their work. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Ilya Kabakov’s open letter, published in issue 5 of A-Z magazine, and the installation of the same name, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and first reconstructed at Tate Modern.

Exposition “Heritage of the Future / Futures Histories” by Arseny Zhilyaev and Mark Dion at Casa dei Tre Oci. Venice, 2015. Photo: Alex Maguire/V-A-C Foundation

dress rehearsal

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Petrovka, 25

To create a large theatrical project, the efforts and collections of three institutions combined: the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the V-A-C Foundation and the non-profit art organization KADIST, based in San Francisco and Paris. The exhibition was curated by the new artistic director of the V-A-C Foundation and former art director of Tate Liverpool, Francesco Manacorda. From the Russian side, the exhibition includes works by Arseny Zhilyaev, Mikhail Tolmachev and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, among foreign participants are British artist and director Phil Collins, his compatriot Lucy Mackenzie, Italian performance artist Chiara Fumai and others. The project will show how works of art live in storage and exhibition spaces and what they have in common with museum visitors. “The top floor of the building will act as a storage facility, where works collected in groups will wait in the wings,” the museum says. “Each of them will have to play many different roles in the time and space of the state rooms of an ancient Moscow mansion.”

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. "Workers." 1926. Photo: State Russian Museum

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth

State Russian Museum, Benois Wing

Spring

A year ago, the Russian Museum already hosted Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, along with his students and followers, but then the emphasis was on teaching and the artist’s circle - now the date will be celebrated with a full-fledged retrospective of one of the most important Russian and Soviet masters of the 20th century. With the help of sketches and drawings, the curators will reconstruct the process of creating the artist’s most famous paintings, which adorn the collections of the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery (things from its collection will also take part in the exhibition). In addition to famous masterpieces like “The Bathing of the Red Horse” (1912), which no retrospective can do without, viewers will be shown little-known and almost forgotten things from regional museums: works will be given by the Saratov Art Museum. A.N. Radishcheva, Khvalynsk Art Museum in the artist’s hometown and others. Petrov-Vodkin’s works for the theater will be provided by the St. Petersburg Museum of Theater and Musical Art, the Museum of the Bolshoi Drama Theater and the Theater Museum. A.A. Bakhrushin in Moscow.

Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin. Exhibition “Fine Art of the Edo Period”. Edo era map. 1840s. Photo: University of Texas Libraries

Fine art of the Edo period

State Museum of Fine Arts named after. A.S. Pushkin

“We have such exhibitions from Japan once every 10-20 years,” says curator Ainura Yusupova, leading researcher at the Pushkin Museum’s Graphics Department, about the exhibition. The central event of the cross Year of Russia and Japan, the exhibition “Fine Art of the Edo Period” promises to be unprecedented in scope and content. Most of the 120 works, covering the period from 1603 to 1868, will come to Moscow from Japan, which in itself is rare: in their homeland, some of the exhibits have the status of “national treasure”. This is also a unique opportunity to see Japanese painting, which is practically absent from Russian collections.

Mikhail Larionov. "Spring". From the series “Seasons”. 1912. Photo: State Tretyakov Gallery

Mikhail Larionov

State Tretyakov Gallery, New Tretyakov Gallery

About plans to unite with the Pompidou Center in order to at least temporarily collect the legacy of Mikhail Larionov in one place, Tretyakov Gallery back in 2015. Then it was exactly 100 years since Larionov, together with his like-minded wife Natalia Goncharova, left Russia - they never returned to their homeland. The collection of Goncharova and Larionov was divided after the death of the artist’s second wife, Alexandra Tomilina: most of the will was transferred to the Soviet government, but some share remained in France, and the division, according to Tretyakov Gallery director Zelfira Tregulova, also concerned individual series. In addition to the Pompidou Center, works for the exhibition - about 250 items in total - will be provided by domestic and foreign institutions, including the Russian Museum, the Ludwig Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert Museum and others. Works related to Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons”, paintings and graphics created in Russia and France will be exhibited on Krymsky Val. Viewers will see another aspect of Larionov - a collector. It is widely known that the artist was interested in folk and naive art, and much less that he collected Russian and oriental popular prints and children's drawings. Larionov also had an extensive archive related to the history of Russian ballet, which will also be on view in the fall.

Georgy Nissky. "On my way". 1958-1964. Photo: Institute of Russian Realistic Art

Retrospective of George of Nyssa

Institute of Russian Realistic Art

September

The Institute of Russian Realistic Art plans to show a large retrospective of the singer of industrialization and socialist construction, Georgy Nyssa. The artist carried his love for the industrial landscape throughout his life - the son of a station paramedic, Nyssky more than once told how the Belarusian fields and forests crossed by rails left a deep impression on a child’s heart. It is the railway that is dedicated to one of Nyssa’s most remarkable works in the IRRI collection, the large “On the Road” (late 1950s), which he wrote for five whole years, constantly correcting the composition. Despite the fact that the private museum has many worthy things of Nyssa, the matter is not limited to them: exhibits are collected from a variety of collections, from the Tretyakov Gallery to the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts. Nyssky's works will be accompanied by works by his friends, including Alexander Deineka, and inspirations, including the post-impressionist Albert Marquet. During a trip to Moscow in 1934, he highly appreciated the painting of the then young Nyssa “Autumn. Semaphores" (1932) - this is how a pun was born about the French artist having “Nice taste.”

Isaac Levitan. "Autumn landscape with a church." Photo: State Russian Museum

Landscapes of Isaac Levitan and cinema

Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center

Autumn

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center decided to draw a parallel between the “mood landscape” of Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) and cinema. Curator Ekaterina Krylova will compare Levitan’s lyrical and usually deserted paintings with shots of textbook examples of avant-garde cinema. The exhibition will feature fantastic perspectives on the intelligent ocean of the planet Solaris from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name, familiar views of the middle zone from Stanislav Rostotsky’s film “White Bim Black Ear” and “One Hundred Days After Childhood” by Sergei Solovyov and other examples of domestic arthouse.