Boarded items

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

The exhibition 25 paintings by Petrov-Vodkin from the collection of the State Russian Museum continues the program “Russian Museum in Moscow” and was prepared specifically for the Moscow Center for Arts. The harmonious and classic Petrovovodkin, a fan of ancient Russian icon painting and painting of the revival, demanded “expose the subject” in order to “reveal the laws of his life.” His paintings are cleared of all the superfluous, despite their persistent everyday specifics. Before the viewer are not people and objects, but abstract, licked entities of people and objects, their “ideas -aldos”, as the ancient Greek Plato would say. And the Aidos habitat is invisible higher spheres. From somewhere on top, Petrov-Vodkin looks at the earthly world: this is the secret of his famous “spherical perspective”, some kind of mowed and falling on the spectator of the space of the picture. “I defeated the gravity,” the artist wrote in the memoirs, recalling the feeling from his first infant steps.

But the main children's shock was for Kuzma Sergeyevich his salvation on the waters: born in Volzhsky Khvalynsk, he almost drowned in the river. Or maybe he drowned and ended up in heaven? Then his hot devotion of the victorious Soviet power, which was felt in his communist idyll of the 30s (in the photo “Spring” of 1935), is clear. This is also a world outside of history, outside the earthly time and space, the abode of not angels, probably, but also immortal ghouls-vurdalaks. Bare objects that defeated gravity.

The Moscow Center for Arts Porcelain project Grisha Bruskin Zvezda Sotheby's, 1988, Grisha Bruskin, shows the Porcelain Project in the historical homeland. (For more details, see pages 58-60.) The State Russian Museum (Halls of the Marble Palace), until January 6