The Imperial Academy of Arts trained Russia’s painters in St Petersburg from 1757. See its classes, gold medals, famous graduates and the 1863 rebellion.
Composed Vibration traces Wassily Kandinsky from Munich to Paris in five chapters, drawn entirely from collections across Japan, at Nagano Prefectural Art Museum.
Fourteen works from the Robertson collection at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, trace painting from Monet’s Seine to Kandinsky’s abstraction and Picasso.
Over a hundred works by Serov and Korovin at KGallery, St Petersburg: portraits, landscapes, stage sketches and travel drawings, many never shown before.
Abramtsevo artists colony near Moscow, bought by Savva Mamontov in 1870, shaped Russian Revival art through the work of Vasnetsov, Polenova, Vrubel and Serov.
Mir iskusstva (World of Art) was the St Petersburg magazine of Diaghilev, Benois, Bakst and Somov. How it changed Russian taste and led to the Ballets Russes.
Imaginary Cosmos in Samara pairs Malevich’s Black Square (1929 version) with Vasnetsov, Kuindzhi, Goncharova and Kandinsky in four sections, from starry sky to UFOs.
Nicholas Roerich painted Himalayan peaks and drafted the 1935 Roerich Pact, a treaty placing cultural protection above military necessity. See the art.
Fifty paintings from the State Russian Museum come to Kemerovo, with works by Levitan, Repin, Korovin and Serov. See Russian Impressionism at close range.
Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse (1912) explained: why the horse is red, how spherical perspective works, and how it was read after 1917.