Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Rooms 54-59: Repin & Sculpture
Room 54 features Repin's enormous rendition of the
Ceremonial Sitting of the State
Council on 7 May 1901, Marking the Centenary of Its Foundation.
Around the walls
are individual portraits of its members. Rooms 55 to 59 contain sculptures in storage,
but behind glass walls, so still visible. Most interesting here is Etienne Falconet's
model for his
Bronze Horseman.
Rooms 66-71: Early-20th-Century Art
Room 66 is the home of the father of modern Russian art, Mikhail Vrubel
(1856-1910). Some of his ground-breaking works include
Lady in Lilac, Epic Hero
(Bogatyr)
and
Demon in Flight
. Rooms 67 to 71 include works by an array of import-
ant early-20th-century painters including Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Nikolai Sapunin,
Mikhail Nesterov and Boris Kustodiev, whose
Merchant's Wife at Tea
is perhaps the
most well-known picture here.
Rooms 72-78: Russian Avant-Garde Painting
Between 1905 and 1917, the Russian art world experienced an explosion of creative
inspiration that defied the stylistic categorisation that had existed before. Room 72 is
home to Nathan Altman's gorgeous, semi-cubist
Portrait of the Poetess Anna Akh-
matova
(Room 72), painted in 1914, and it remains one of his most famous works
even though Akhmatova apparently didn't care for it herself. In the same room is Alt-
man's striking
Self Portrait
(1911). Room 74 contains primitivist paintings by artist
couple Natalya Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.
Futurism and suprematism, including Malevich's
Red Square, Head of a Peasant
and
Black Square,
can be found in Rooms 75 to 76, while Room 77 is devoted to con-
structivism and features works by Rodchenko and Vladimir Lebedev. Room 78 dis-
plays the bright, ethereal work of Pavel Filonov.
Room 79: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
Spanning two centuries and surviving the Russian Revolution, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin
(1878-1939) was a unique painter. His work conveys a dreamlike atmosphere, much
of it with homoerotic overtones. See
Mother of God
(1914-15) and another
Portrait
of Anna Akhmatova
(1922).
