Excellent students Automatic translate

From February to May, the Museum of Russian Impressionism will present the exhibition "Excellent Students" about the European travels of young Russian masters - the best graduates of the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Aspiring ambitious artists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries refused to imitate foreign masters and, rethinking the experience gained abroad, laid the foundation for a new round in the development of Russian art. This turning point can be traced in the works of participants in retirement trips: from the academic works of Henryk Semiradsky to the pictorial experiments of Ilya Repin, Vasily Polenov and their followers.

Mention of foreign travel "for improvement in art" is often found in the biographies of famous artists. The exhibition will be one of the first major studies dedicated to the retirement trips of the 1870s-1910s, their influence on the formation of the style of individual painters and on the evolution of the traditions of the Russian art school.

The diversity of modernist trends in Europe at the end of the 19th century gave young artists new guidelines. So the academic subjects of Heinrich Semiradsky and Ivan Aivazovsky with ancient ruins and sea views are replaced by the plein air painting of Vasily Polenov and Ilya Repin. After the reform of the Academy of Arts in 1893, which greatly simplified the reporting on pensioner trips, the new generation of painters - Efim Cheptsov and Mikhail Demyanov - capture the everyday life of ordinary Europeans, referring both to the experience of the Wanderers and to the bold manner of Vincent van Gogh.

For many pensioners, educational tours become a period of active creative exploration. For example, Boris Kustodiev will appear before visitors with non-trivial plots - on the way to forming his recognizable manner, the master spends a lot of time in the Louvre in Paris, copies in the Prado in Madrid, makes sketches in city cabarets and writes sketches in the Bois de Boulogne.

The exposition will feature both famous masters and artists, for whom the time spent abroad has become the brightest stage in their work. Visitors will see paintings by Nikolai Ge, Konstantin Gorbatov, Isaac Brodsky, Mikhail Demyanov, Alexander Yakovlev, Vasily Shukhaev and other painters from federal and regional museums, including the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Krasnodar Regional Art Museum named after F. A. Kovalenko, as well as private collections.

The exhibition will be the first art project in Russia to be adapted to such a large scale for visually impaired and blind guests. Traditionally, selected works will be presented with tactile copies. Seven models, created with the support of the partner of the inclusive program of the Charitable Foundation Alisher Usmanov "Arts, Science and Sports" within the framework of the "Un Certain Regard" program, upon completion of the project, will complement the permanent exhibitions of regional museums. Fragrances-states from the blind perfumers of Pure Sense will help to make a full impression of the works.

The exhibition catalog will include articles by curator Olga Yurkina about the history of Russian artists’ retirement trips and by Anna Poznanskaya, candidate of art criticism, about European culture of the 19th century.

A special project on the third floor of the museum will show the works of European masters, whose names are found in letters and academic reports of Russian painters on foreign trips. The exposition will feature works by Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Carrière, Franz von Stuck and other artists from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

The works of some of them, for example, the landscapes of Charles Francois Daubigny, delighted and inspired Russian artists, while others did not make a strong impression or left them completely indifferent. However, the canvases of Barbizon, naturalists, realists and symbolists brought together will make it possible to understand the aesthetic environment in which retired artists worked at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Abandoning the academic tradition, European artists plunged into the world of new themes and images. Modest landscape motifs and interest in the borderline natural states of the representatives of the Barbizon school in many respects anticipated the search for the Impressionists. And the stories from the life of the common people and the heroes captured in their daily activities were in tune with the work of the Wanderers.

The curator of the exhibition is Olga Yurkina, a specialist in the exhibition department of the Museum of Russian Impressionism.