Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Fantasy. 1925. Fragment. Canvas, oil. State Russian Museum

The last major exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin took place ten years ago - in 2008, the artist’s 130th anniversary was celebrated by the Radishchev Museum in Saratov, a city that can be considered close to the artist, who was born in Khvalynsk on the Volga in 1878. The State Russian Museum is celebrating a new anniversary—140 years.

Petrov-Vodkin did not stop working, despite tuberculosis, until his death in 1939, and his creative legacy is very large: the Russian Museum alone houses more than 70 paintings and 700 pieces of graphics, and in total the exhibition contains works from 20 museums and private collections. In addition, the catalog contains important paintings from the National Gallery of Armenia that the Tretyakov Gallery was unable to bring, but which are well known from reproductions, including “Portrait of Andrei Bely” from 1932 and “Portrait of Lenin” from 1934. Important works “In the Line of Fire” (1916), “Our Lady of the Tenderness of Evil Hearts” (1914-1915), “Fantasy” (1925) and “Workers” (1926) were shown at the Bolognese Museum of Modern Art MAMbo in the project “Revolution!” and took place in the last two halls of the exhibition only a week after the opening day. It is also known that the Tretyakov Gallery expects to get its “Bathing of the Red Horse” (1911) back without waiting for the exhibition to end.

All these circumstances, indicating that Petrov-Vodkin is important for various museums as a figure of global scale, of course, influenced the appearance and perception of the exhibition located in the right enfilade of the first floor of the Benois building. The exhibition was prepared by the department of painting of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries, headed by Vladimir Lenyashin, its leading employee Olga Shikhireva and the curator of the drawing department Natalya Kozyreva. Unfortunately, there is no need to talk about the concept of the exhibition - if the first two of the five halls of the exhibition are arranged strictly according to years, then the chronological order gets confused and is replaced by a plot one, so that the last two halls were crammed with works from different periods indiscriminately, and the famous still life of 1917 with five yellow-green apples on a red drapery, he ended up hanging on the stairs leading to the second floor of the museum.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Apples. 1917. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum

Petrov-Vodkin is in every history of Russian art, so paintings memorized by heart signal color in every room. But it is difficult to get a complete impression from the beginning to the end of the exhibition: apparently, the exhibition is addressed primarily to the summer visitor, a guest who does not ask questions and simply prayerfully bows to the art of Petrov-Vodkin - this is also noticeable in the style of the catalog article spread throughout the halls in explications, and in the tinting of the main exhibition stands in a sharp bright blue color.

Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth. Fragment of the exhibition. Courtesy State Russian Museum

However, if the modern mass viewer looks (through the smartphone screen) only at popular things, then the connoisseur needs immersion in the context. And in this case, creating this context for yourself by laying out a through route through these five halls is only possible if you focus on works that are not very well known - those that rarely leave the storerooms of the Russian Museum, brought from other museums or obtained from private collections.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. View from the window. 1920. Paper, ink, pen. Collection of the Romadin family. Courtesy State Russian Museum

Petrov-Vodkin is the uniqueness of vision turned into a method. The system of “spherical perspective”, developed in detail and enshrined in the artist’s texts, included a lot of practical observations, starting with a childhood impression of falling from the Volga cliff. At the same time, it is somewhat akin to the panorama seen from an airplane in the futuristic “aerial painting” of Tullio Crali and Osvaldo Peruzzi, and in general to the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the most constant quantities shifted and began to move. Petrov-Vodkin put synthesis above the decomposition of form and did not value cubism, but the desire to master “expanded vision” and achieve “planetary vision” directly unites him with such avant-garde figures as Mikhail Matyushin and Kazimir Malevich. In terms of the number of students and their devotion to the teacher in Petrograd-Leningrad in the 1920s, the Petrov-Vodkin school stood on a par with the “masters of analytical art” of Pavel Filonov, representing a completely different, but equally clear artistic method. Kuzma Sergeevich was created to teach and disseminate his ideas (which was well demonstrated by the exhibitions “” at the Russian Museum and “” at the Moscow Galeev Gallery in 2016).

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Seated woman. Sketch for the painting “The Shore”. 1907-1908. Paper, charcoal pencil, watercolor. State Russian Museum

The first hall provides an opportunity to see the formation of these ideas. It opens with eight drawings - these are sketches of male and female figures made around 1910, both for paintings that have not survived and are known only by names, and for the first large symbolist works - “The Shore” (1908) and “Dream” (1910). A separate segment of the hall is occupied by the student works of Petrov-Vodkin, who graduated in 1905 under the leadership of Valentin Serov from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Here, the all-Russian passion for painting by Anders Zorn of those years is shown by the large canvas of 1902 “Family”.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Family. 1902. Oil on canvas. Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg

In the center of the second hall is the famous “Bathing of the Red Horse” (1912), but the adjacent “Boys at Play” from 1916 from a private collection is much more interesting. Before us is an almost heraldic composition: a green field is diagonally divided by a blue ribbon. In the foreground are a trio of boys - the star-shaped outline formed by their bodies is correlated with small figures of angels playing in a field on the other side of the river. The shadows cast by all the heroes are painted with the same emerald green, the same pure color as the meadow - and this is undoubtedly the “Spiritual Meadow”. The canvas is three times smaller than the textbook painting with the same plot (1911, State Russian Museum) and is not much inferior to it in terms of its fullness of images - the whole life from teenage initiation to the posthumous existence of the soul is clearly readable.

The next room begins with religious painting, which continues with the works of the revolutionary 1918-1920s. The large and detailed graphic sheet, entitled "Retrospective" and dated 1920, is designed entirely in the spirit of medieval cosmology: in the center of the sheet are Golgotha ​​and the crucifix, surrounded by successive scenes of human activities, from animals in the stable, through the cultivation of the land and the construction of the city to an astronomer on a tower, a ship under sail in the waves and a hermit's cell.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Retrospective. 1920. Paper, ink, pen.KGallery, St. Petersburg

It is worth remembering that the painting “1918 in Petrograd,” also known as the “Petrograd Madonna,” was created by Petrov-Vodkin at the same time when the artist (in 1919) wrote to his mother: “How can God give strength to us, the hungry, here?” : You can’t always find horse meat, oats, and they eat dogs and cats. There’s nothing to say about prices.”

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. 1918 in Petrograd. 1920. Oil on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery

The fourth room contains works from the second half of the 1920s. Like many of his contemporaries, it is difficult for Petrov-Vodkin to develop his attitude to what is happening - the introduction of the NEP, the internal party struggle of factions, cultural policy. In 1927, he left a note: “Even the destruction of the school that is happening before my eyes (we are talking about teaching at Vkhutein - P.G.), to which a lot of strength and hope was given, is not the main reason. Of course, the days of '26 pecked at me at all the seams with little things and all sorts of things. People are incompatible with each other. Mistrust and selfishness are internecine... Specially intriguing types emerge, whom the revolution somehow restrained and who are now akimbo, like wolves sensing carrion. The anger on all sides is unreasonable. Hyper-partisan, confused anger." His art focuses on life with his family, he paints his wife, his long-awaited daughter, and city views. The graphics presented here are impressions from the Parisian trip of 1925-1926. The works of this time form artistic parallels with the paintings of Boris Grigoriev, but the surface of any Petrov-Vodkin canvas is much more complexly intonated. In contrast to Grigoriev’s “stuffing”, the compositional and semantic balance of his works is not indifferent, but always intense, as in “Earthquake in the Crimea” (1927-1928), which concludes the exhibition in the hall.

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. Earthquake in Crimea. 1927-1928. Canvas, oil. State Russian Museum

The paintings in the next room are about “an artist in the process of creative reforging,” whose attempts to accept a new reality became a failure. Although outwardly everything is successful and Petrov-Vodkin is one of the status of Soviet authors: in 1930 he received the title of Honored Artist, in 1932 he was elected the first chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists and a deputy of the Leningrad City Council, in 1936 he moved into an apartment in cooperative house RABIS - Association of Artists on Kirovsky (Kamennoostrovsky) Avenue.

One can only guess what tragic contradictions the terminally ill artist in Leningrad during the Kirov Stream was torn apart by. A small canvas from 1936, “On a Tram,” and Petrov-Vodkin’s last large-format work, the painting “Housing House,” painted for the 1937 exhibition “Industry of Socialism,” are evidence of this. The task is to show “the Leningrad proletariat at the moment of transition to peaceful construction,” and the artist’s article about this in the Pravda newspaper in 1936 is titled “Work well and joyfully.” The descriptive composition, reminiscent of the late Itinerants (20 figures, including a newborn baby and a parrot), lacks the air and breadth of space that became the hallmark of all Petrov-Vodkin’s art. The work, rejected by the exhibition committee despite the author's verbose explanations, put a social diagnosis on the time that had come and turned into an involuntary satire. “Thus, an anecdote, a story begins to develop in order to be able to continue the event that happened here,” with these words the artist concludes a speech at the Leningrad Union of Artists about the plot of “Housewarming” less than a year before his death.

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 basis of harmony to be a combination of red, blue and yellow, 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 1920s–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 the 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 “Circle of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin” 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

There are few select people in the history of art about whom contemporaries would say: he created the symbol of his era. This is exactly what they said about the Russian artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.

Self-portrait. 1918
Canvas, oil. 71 x 58 cm

“What makes this artist interesting,” says art critic Natalya Adaskina, “is that he united the traditions of Russian art of the West and East, and was at the core of these relations. He himself comes from provincial Russia. In a small town on the Volga, near Saratov, under the influence of a patriarchal environment, his worldview. Then he ended up in St. Petersburg, studied at the art school of Baron Stieglitz, the riches of art of this most European of Russian cities were revealed to him. Then he studied in Moscow, at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, and became familiar with Moscow artistic traditions. At the age of 28, Petrov. “Vodkin came to Paris, worked for 2 years next to such masters as Matisse and Cezanne. Perhaps he did not fully appreciate them then, but he deeply absorbed the impressions of the exhibitions.”

Cafe. 1907
Canvas, oil. 130 x 98 cm
, Saint Petersburg

View of the Cluny Museum in Paris. 1908
Canvas, oil. 65 x 49 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Paris. Notre Dame. 1924
Canvas, oil. 60 x 50 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

From Paris, the artist traveled to North Africa for several months - to Tunisia and Algeria. These trips, especially the African one, helped him feel his own country more acutely. He wrote in a letter that he “entered someone else’s life and saw better the advantages and disadvantages of his own.”

Biribi. Africa. 1907
Canvas, oil. 38 x 48 cm
Private collection

Negro village. 1907
Canvas, oil. 37 x 49 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

African boy. 1907
Canvas, oil. 48 x 36 cm
Private collection

Black woman. 1907
Canvas, oil. 48 x 37 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

City of Constantine. Algeria. 1907
Canvas, oil. 37 x 48 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

A lot can be said about Petrov-Vodkin’s travels, about his desire to see the world with his own eyes and understand it. One day he went to Germany, to Munich... on a bicycle. The funds of the 23-year-old student were meager, and Munich beckoned, seemed like “a trench that delayed the influence of French painting seeping into Eastern Europe,” as Petrov-Vodkin later recalled this city.

And four years later he stayed in Italy twice as long. And no wonder. After all, his artistic idols - Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini - once lived and worked here. Here, on the soil of Italy, he saw with his own eyes the object of his burning curiosity - the volcano Vesuvius. He even made an ascent to the crater of Vesuvius just during the period of its volcanic activity, and then Petrov-Vodkin maintained throughout his life that this event awakened his artistic consciousness.

Petrov-Vodkin was generally inclined towards a planetary scale. This is how he perceived space - the Volga expanses, the sandy deserts of Africa and Central Asia, he depicted them not as flat, but as spherically convex, as if this were a view of the Earth from space.

View of Samarkand. 1921
Canvas, oil. 39 x 54 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Samarkand. Rukhabad. 1921
Canvas, oil. 40 x 55 cm
Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn

He felt color as a powerful radiation of bright tones: red, yellow, blue. Birth and death, love, motherhood - these are the few but eternal themes that the artist addressed. And he developed his own theory of painting precisely on the basis of this vision. “The form and color that embraces this form are painting,” Petrov-Vodkin simply formulated his principle.

Youth (Kiss). 1913
Canvas, oil. 120 x 154 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Mother. 1915
Variant of the painting of the same name from 1913, located in the State Tretyakov Gallery
Canvas, oil. 107 x 98 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Motherhood. 1925
Canvas, oil. 64 x 80 cm
Private collection

First steps. 1925
Canvas, oil. 82 x 65 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

In the nursery. 1925
Canvas, oil. 45 x 65 cm
Private collection

The best paintings by Petrov-Vodkin are now divided between St. Petersburg and Moscow. In St. Petersburg, where the artist began his education, the Russian Museum houses the canvas from which his fame began - “Dream”, 1910. A deserted, almost surreal landscape. An allegorical painting, but how in tune it was with its era!
After the revolution of 1905, Russia experienced “a state of sleep, political and moral paralysis,” wrote Petrov-Vodkin.

Dream. 1910
Canvas, oil. 161 x 187 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Boys (Boys Playing). 1911
Canvas, oil. 123 x 157 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow owns Petrov-Vodkin's main masterpiece - "The Bathing of the Red Horse", 1912. There is a powerful figure of a horse throughout the entire canvas. It covers almost the entire space of the canvas.

"Bathing the Red Horse"
Fragment
1912
Oil on canvas 160 x 186
State Tretyakov Gallery
Moscow

“For me, “The Red Horse” is a vivid example of symbolist painting,” says Natalya Adaskina, “it is a very capacious image that represents an era, speaking on its behalf. The main thing in the picture is a premonition: something has happened and they are waiting for something. something grandiose, radically changing destinies. The numbness before the beginning of something new is so clearly expressed in the picture that it has become a symbol of the era - the beginning of the 20th century.

This was understood already, in 1912, when the painting was first shown at an exhibition. It was hung as an epigraph above the entrance door to the hall. The symbolism of the “Red Horse” surprisingly resonated with the symbolism of Russian icon painting. In 1914, the “Red Horse” went to an international exhibition in the Swedish city of Malmo. The First World War began. The picture disappeared. Its fate remained unknown until 1950, when Petrov-Vodkin’s masterpiece was found by his widow and, at the cost of great effort, returned to her homeland.

"Earthquake in Crimea"
1927
Oil on canvas 95.5 x 10
State Russian Museum
Saint Petersburg

Spring in the village. 1929
Sketch for the cover of the magazine "Red Panorama"
Paper, watercolor, graphite pencil. 31 x 28 cm
National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan

The artist’s paintings were exported abroad during the artist’s lifetime, from the late 20s. They were exhibited in Europe, America, and some of the master’s works were purchased abroad. Petrov-Vodkin is an artist of great interest to collectors.

"In Shuvalovo"
1926
Oil on canvas 44.5 x 60
State Russian Museum
Saint Petersburg

"1919. Anxiety"
1934
Oil on canvas 138 x 169
State Russian Museum
Saint Petersburg

"Spring"
1935
Oil on canvas 186 x 159
State Russian Museum
Saint Petersburg

Petrov-Vodkin loved not only painting, but also theater and literature. He played the violin, wrote plays, autobiographical stories, decorated interiors and streets for holidays, and taught. He was a generous, large-scale, universal talent.

Sketch of Satan's makeup for the dramatization of "Satan's Diary" (based on L. Andreev). 1922
Sketch
Paper, watercolor, pastel. 31 x 32 cm
State Central Theater Museum named after. A.A.Bakhrushina, Moscow

Self-portrait. 1929
Canvas, oil. 47 x 37 cm
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Olga Bobrova
To the 120th anniversary of the birth of the artist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Ekaterina Volgareva

A large-scale exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin opened at the Russian Museum

The exhibition “Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin. To the 140th anniversary of his birth." The exhibition presents about 250 different works of the brilliant artist.

Modern Russia has never seen such a large-scale exhibition of Petrov-Vodkin. Paintings, graphic works, illustrations, sketches, theatrical scenery and a painted plate - a one-of-a-kind example of the artist's decorative and applied creativity - works collected throughout Russia were exhibited at the Russian Museum.

For the first time, works by Petrov-Vodkin were brought to the exhibition from the Tretyakov Gallery, Saratov Art Museum. A. N. Radishchev, Khvalynsk Art Museum, St. Petersburg Theater Museum, Museum of Theater Arts. A. A. Bakhrushin in Moscow, the State Hermitage, regional art museums and private collections in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The last time a Petrov-Vodkin exhibition was held at the Russian Museum was in 1966. At the same time, it is here that the most complete archive of his creations is collected: the museum houses 70 paintings and more than 700 graphic drawings by the artist, a significant part of which can also be seen on display.

Guests of the exhibition will be able to comprehend the entire difficult, varied, uneven creative path of the genius. His early student works and his last paintings, which Petrov-Vodkin painted when he was already a very sick man, suffering from progressive tuberculosis, are presented. Some of his canvases are filled with love, for example, portraits of his little daughter Lenochka, others are black, post-revolutionary works full of disappointment.

A special place is given to his religious quests, reflected in painting. In Soviet times, paintings depicting biblical scenes were, of course, not exhibited. And later they were not remembered; I rather associate the artist with the avant-garde revolutionary “Bathing of the Red Horse” (by the way, this painting was also delivered to St. Petersburg from the Tretyakov Gallery).
The variety of approaches used by the artist reveals his eternal search and movement. At the exhibition, guests will see realistic still lifes and landscapes, portraits of Pushkin and Akhmatova, executed in a unique manner, and late avant-garde quests. His different works are difficult to connect with each other stylistically, but if you look closely at each painting, the unique symbolism and plasticity of images characteristic of the artist’s brush become obvious.

Art critic and leading researcher at the Russian Museum Olga Nikolaevna Musakova, under whose leadership the exhibition was organized, spoke about the artist:

“It’s difficult to divide an artist by direction. Petrov-Vodkin said that it is not plastic techniques that dictate the form, but the design, ideas and feelings that overwhelm. He is a thinking, introspective artist. Therefore, I think it is hardly possible to talk about the purity of stylistic features. Each picture is a whole world.”

Olga Nikolaevna added that there are certain ideas and cliches about Petrov-Vodkin, like about Malevich with his “Black Square” or Picasso, but this is not the true face of the artist. The most recognizable paintings of any genius are only the stages to which the artist moved, and after that he continued the search for new meanings and forms.

“Petrov-Vodkin said that an artist is not an artist if he does not change throughout his life. If he doesn’t develop and doesn’t look for new ways,” says Olga Musakova.

It is the development, the constant change of form that is striking in the paintings of Petrov-Vodkin. In addition to the obvious artistic gift, he had an amazing desire for something new. Agree, few people know that Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin left not only an outstanding artistic legacy. He was also an excellent writer. He has written dramatic plays, stories, short stories, poems and much more. And one of the key goals of the large-scale exhibition is to introduce people to the multifaceted personality of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, which the Russian Museum managed to achieve.

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“Despite the numerous influences that accompanied Petrov-Vodkin’s creative life,” emphasizes museum director Vladimir Gusev, “he was an artist who never lost his face.”

Is this why he painted self-portraits so often - he sought to compare his inner self with the demands that time placed on him? In addition to the textbook self-portrait of 1918, the exhibition includes self-portraits from 1924, 1927 and others, as well as numerous pencil sketches. There are generally a lot of graphics, sketches and sketches here, allowing you to see how the artist’s thoughts worked in search of the ideal image.

It’s amazing how, while remaining a “very Soviet” artist in the 20s and 30s, Petrov-Vodkin managed to maintain deep religiosity, preserve it and convey it to the viewer. After all, all of his best films, even the most revolutionary ones, such as “Death of a Commissar” or “After the Battle,” are, in fact, paraphrases of biblical stories. And how could it be otherwise for an artist who began his journey in art as a student of an icon painter? It is not surprising that Petrov-Vodkin’s work has more than once provoked fierce criticism from both the right and the left. For example, Alexander Benois and Ilya Repin clashed over the painting “The Dream”: the former defended the painting, and the latter criticized it for its eroticism. In general, nudity really worried the author. An excellent draftsman, as is clear from his full-scale sketches, he nevertheless tried to give the people in his canvases a special generalized image. That is why the faces in his female portraits are so “iconic” and recognizable. The male characters are so expressive, sometimes almost grotesque.

Petrov-Vodkin’s work is constantly being rethought and reevaluated, notes one of the curators of the exhibition, Olga Musakova. - In 1978, when his last personal exhibition took place at the Russian Museum, we could not even mention Orthodox motifs in his works, but today this topic is perhaps the most interesting.

The exhibition features a rarely exhibited painting, “Housewarming Party. Workers’ Petrograd. 1922,” painted two years before the author’s death, in the sadly memorable year of 1937. Multi-figured, depicting the life of the new masters of life, it, in fact, addresses us to the Last Supper. But what bitter irony, what terrible sarcasm every detail plays here! It is clear that the new residents have just moved into someone’s “bourgeois” apartment and have already managed to leave their mark on it. This is evidenced by the pipe of a tin stove, cutting right through the room with giant windows and a mirror in the wall, and the landscape of Peter and Paul Fortress outside the window, and an empty frame with a dried twig tucked behind it. And of course - the faces of those gathered. Bared in inhuman grins, pitiful and out of place in these alien interiors, they are clearly happy, but to what? The death of the old world? To your short-lived triumph?

This work was considered a failure of Petrov-Vodkin for a long time, says Olga Musakova. - However, in fact, the author said everything he wanted here.

If not for painting, Petrov-Vodkin could have become a writer. He wrote plays, poems, stories, stories. And the anniversary exhibition, presenting fragments of these documents, convincingly confirms this.