Russia

Art from Russia, from medieval icons and the Wanderers to the Suprematist and Constructivist avant-garde and Moscow Conceptualism.

193 works · 10 related artists

About

Russian painting grew from the Orthodox icon, and Andrei Rublev's Trinity (1420s) remains its most admired example. Peter the Great turned the country toward Western Europe, founding St. Petersburg in 1703. In the 1870s, the Wanderers rebelled with realist scenes of Russian life; Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–73) shows exhausted men dragging a ship upriver.

Around the Revolution, Russia led the avant-garde. Wassily Kandinsky moved toward abstraction, Kasimir Malevich exhibited Black Square in 1915, and Vladimir Tatlin designed a spiralling tower for the Third International. Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky put geometry to work in posters, photography and books, and Marc Chagall painted memories of Vitebsk. From the early 1930s, Socialist Realism became compulsory. Unofficial artists answered with irony, and Ilya Kabakov built installations such as The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1985) from the debris of Soviet life.