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23 June - 12 September 2004
Sainsbury Wing
Supported by BP
Admission: £7 full price / £6 senior and concessions / £3 students and unemployed. Family ticket £14, Under 16s free, Weds from 6pm all tickets half price
A major loan exhibition of 19th-century Russian landscape painting comes to the National Gallery this summer. The exhibition includes 70 of Russia's best known and loved paintings, many of which have never left their homeland and are largely unknown in this country. When they were painted, these breathtaking works - many are epic in scale - played a critical role, along with music and literature, in defining Russia's national identity.
The exhibition includes works by fifteen artists dating from 1820 to the early years of the 20th century. Three rooms are devoted to the giant figures of the age, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi and Isaak Ilich Levitan; allowing viewers to make a concentrated monographic assessment of their achievements. One gallery space contains 15 paintings, mostly panoramic in conception and scale, by Shishkin (1832 - 1898), the master of monumental woodland scenes. Another shows works by Kuindzhi (1842 - 1910) whose eerie sense of colour and vertiginous play with near and distant space are instantly recognisable. The final room is devoted to the innovator and close friend of Anton Chekhov, Levitan (1860 - 1900). It culminates with his bleak and enigmatic masterpiece, 'The Vladimirka Road', the infamous, muddy pathway that led to Siberia and exile.
The exhibition opens with the founder of Russian landscape painting, Aleksei Gavrilovich Venetsianov (1780 - 1847) who, leaving St Petersburg to paint the peasants who worked his own estate, introduced realism to Russian painting. Also included are works by his contemporaries, Silvestr Fedosievich Shchedrin (1791 - 1830) and Mikhail Lebedev (1811 - 1837), both of whom travelled to Italy, where they learned 'plein-air' painting in the brilliant light of the South, influencing later generations of landscapists in Russia. Other remarkable figures include the short-lived Fedor Aleksandrovich Vasilev (1850 - 1873), and the mystic Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov (1862 - 1942) for whom the Russian countryside was imbued with a divine presence.
By the 1860s, landscape had established itself as perhaps the most important genre of painting in Russia: a subtle vehicle for the exploration of the political, social and moral issues with which Russians grappled. The National Gallery's Curator of 19th-Century Paintings, Christopher Riopelle, says: 'Landscape plays a central role in the Russian imagination. The emptiness of the country's vast reaches, the rigours of its climate, the difficulties of transportation, and the intense isolation that long winter months impose, all contribute to a specifically Russian sense of nature, different from - perhaps more fatalistic than - that found elsewhere. In the age of Tolstoy the landscape simply dominated the lives of most Russians.'
This exhibition is organised by the Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, in collaboration with the National Gallery, London. The National Gallery is extremely grateful for the support BP have provided for this exhibition. A fully-illustrated catalogue written by leading British, Dutch and Russian scholars is available.
Advance tickets: First Call 0870 906 3891 (booking fee) or online www.nationalgallery.org.uk (booking fee) or in person at the Gallery
Late-night opening: Wednesdays - all tickets half price from 6pm, includes music, bar and guided tours of the exhibition
National Gallery Information: Tel 020 7747 2885
Press enquiries Josephine Gaffikin Tel: 020 7747 2512 josephine.gaffikin@ng-london.org.uk
Press Images Tel: 020 7747 2596 images@ng-london.org.uk
June 2004
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