Four Seasons. Landscape in Russia. 19th - 20th Centuries

Love to the national nature found the expression on the canvases of 181 Russian painters. The landscape painting emerged as a genre in Russia at the end of the 18th century. Large-scale exposition of the Seasons exhibition covers the main periods of the development of the Russian landscape painting. Spring, summer, autumn and winter are presented in the oeuvre of the well-known Russian artists of the 18th-20th centuries including Repin, Shiskin, Kramskoi, Grisbar, Serov, Surikov, Savrasov, Perov and Ge.

Repin - On the Turf Bench

The Exhibition organizers claim that “the exhibition traces the development of Russian landscape painting.” Theoretically, the show traces an engaging and controversial story of the genre that emerged in the last decades of the 18th century, by degrees enlarging its following, before becoming dominant at the end of the 19th century. To begin, with landscape painting in Russia predominantly consisted of Italian imitations, but in the middle of the century painters turned to native surroundings and decades later conducted plein air, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist experiments, mirroring the European course of events.

Shiskin - Mast Grove (grove of trees suitable for ship's masts)

There are dozens of prominent Russian names on show: the idealistic Grigory Soroka, the decorative Arkhip Kuindgi, the experimental Valentin Serov, the lyrical Isaak Levitan, the juicy Boris Kustodiyev, the symbolic Viktor Borisov-Musatov, the avant-garde Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Kazimir Malevich and such socialist realist icons as Arkady Plastov, along with a range of such masterpieces as Natalya Goncharova’s “Hoar Frost” (1910-11) and Mikhail Larionov’s “Acacias in Spring” (1904), among others.

Shiskin - Brook in Birch Forest, 1883

But the show doesn’t trace the promised “development” of the genre, from, say, the realistic Alexei Savrasov to the almost abstract Konstantin Korovin.

Igor Grabar - Image name unknown