Serov and Korovin at KGallery, St Petersburg

Serov and Korovin gathers more than a hundred works from private collections, the Russian Museum and the Museum of Theatre and Musical Art. Portraits hang beside landscapes, theatrical sketches and drawings made on journeys. Much of the material is on public view for the first time, which gives even well-known names a fresh footing.

The two painters at the centre of the show worked in the same Russian art world and approached it differently. Valentin Serov was active in St. Petersburg and Moscow during the Belle Époque and is generally considered the primary portraitist of his generation. Here his portraits and drawings can be read next to the work of Konstantin Korovin, a leading Russian Impressionist. Placing them together invites a direct comparison: the sitter studied face to face on one side, the scene caught in loose, quick touches on the other.

The theatrical sketches and travel drawings carry much of the show’s interest. Sketches made for the stage and pages filled on the road are working documents, closer to the artist’s hand than a finished canvas. Seen in quantity, and drawn from museum and private holdings, they show how both painters looked, tested ideas and moved between genres.

The exhibition also looks backward to the teachers and masters who shaped them. Works by Ilya Repin, Vasily Savrasov and Mikhail Vrubel complement the main display, along with Vasily Polenov, a landscape painter associated with the Peredvizhniki movement of realist artists, often described as the “Knight of Beauty.” Repin, whose major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga and Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, also made revealing portraits of leading literary and artistic figures, Leo Tolstoy among them. These pictures give the younger artists a context, so visitors can trace what was handed on and what was changed.

The show suits anyone who knows Serov and Korovin from reproductions and wants to meet the drawings, sketches and portraits behind them, many of them kept out of public sight until now.