Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910, Oil on canvas, 260 x 391 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St Peterburg, Photo Archives Matisse, Paris.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, The Bath of the Horse, 1912, Oil on canvas, 160 x 186 cm, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow,© State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, c. 1923, Oil on canvas, 106 x 106 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Photo © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Marc Chagall (French, b. Russia, 1887-1985). The Walk, 1917. Oil on canvas. 170 x 164 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2007.

Paul Gauguin, Her Name was Vairaumati, 1892, Oil on canvas, 91 x 68 cm, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Photo © Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House
Piccadilly
020 7300 8000
London
From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925
from Moscow and St. Petersburg
January 26-April 28, 2008

From Russia presents modern masterpieces from Russia’s principal collections: Pushkin Museum and Tretyakov Museum in Moscow and Hermitage Museum and Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. Over 120 paintings by Russian and French artists working between 1870 and 1925 are displayed in an exhibition surveying primary directions of modern art from Realism and Impressionism to Non-Objective painting. Artists include Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Kandinsky, Tatlin, and Malevich. The exhibition explores the exchange that existed between French and Russian art during a crucial period that was witness to upheaval and revolution.

Selected from Russia’s premier museums, From Russia testifies to the history of Russian collecting and Russia’s influence in the development of modern art. The groundbreaking yet individual tastes of collectors Pavel Tretyakov, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov are illustrated in the collections they bequeathed to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The exhibition is designed around four themes starting with a presentation of works by Russian realists, namely the Wanderers, an important group who broke away from the St. Petersburg Academy and focused on landscape, contemporary social issues, scenes from peasant life and Russian history. Works by Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Isaak Levitan, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Nesterov and others are shown with paintings by French artists of the Barbizon school such as Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny and Jean-François Millet as well as Salon painters Jules Bastien-Lepage and Albert Besnard.

The second section of the exhibition displays not only masterpieces from the two great Moscow collections, those of Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, but also demonstrate their differing points of emphasis. These two Moscow textile merchants were, without doubt, the most brilliant and daring Russian collectors of their day. They scoured Paris for paintings by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and accumulated works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. Shchukin became Matisse’s greatest patron, commissioning the celebrated The Dance as part of an astonishingly bold scheme to decorate the grand staircase of his Moscow mansion. The Dance may be the most sensational highlight of the exhibition.

The third section of the exhibition is devoted to the famous theatrical impresario and exhibition-maker Sergei Diaghilev, who was at the forefront of the World of Art movement. He played a vital role not only in presenting modern French art in Russia but also in taking Russian art to the West, particularly in Paris. Vasily Kandinsky drew on the imagery of Russian fairy tales and combined it with Fauvist colour as a starting point for his daring steps towards abstraction, and Marc Chagall adapted elements of French Cubism to his highly individual and poetic distillation of Russian-Jewish folklore. Artists presented in this section of the exhibition will also include Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst, Boris Kustodiev, Nochiolas Roerich, Alexander Golovinund Valentin Serov as well as a selection of impressive portraits of great figures of Russian cultural life such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Feodor Chaliapin and Anna Akhmatova.

Crosscurrents between Russian and French art were particularly fertile in the early 20th century. The final section of the exhibition will encompass the exhilarating kaleidoscope of rapidly succeeding artistic developments. Mikahail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova responded to the French Post-Impressionists, particularly Cézanne and Gauguin, and the vigour of Russian folk art in their unique Neo-Primitive style. Bold reinterpretations of Cubism, as well as Italian Futurism, resulted in the brilliant Cubo-Futurist works by Jean Pougny, Pavel Filonov and a remarkable group of experimental women artists including Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova and Alexandra Exter. Included are Vladimir Tatlin’s groundbreaking three-dimensional constructions that heralded the advent of Constructivism and Kazimir Malevich’s celebrated triptych Black Square, Black Circle, and Black Cross rejecting all forms of pictorial tradition and an icon of the purely abstract style of Suprematism.

Valentin Serov (Russian, 1865-1911). Portrait of Sofia Botkina, 1899. Oil on canvas. 189 x 139.5 cm. Photo © State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, © State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Pablo Picasso, Dryad, 1908, Oil on canvas, 185 x 108 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Photo The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Ilya Repin, Manifesto of October 17th, 1905, 1911, Oil on canvas, 184 x 323 cm, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Photo © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.