Our Twentieth: 20th Century Art, Krasnoyarsk Surikov Museum

Our Twentieth. Image of the Era. 20th Century fills the historic building of the Krasnoyarsk Surikov Art Museum with domestic painting of the 20th century. The show gives the era a face, and it does so through a run of names that covers the century’s long argument about what a picture should be.

At one end stand the pioneers of abstraction. Kazimir Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and theorist who introduced Suprematism in 1915, a system of pure geometric form on monochrome grounds. His Black Square, first shown that year in Petrograd, marked a decisive break with representational painting. Wassily Kandinsky, born in Moscow, settled in Munich in 1896, taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 until the Nazis closed it, and is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in Western art. Seen together, the two show how Russian painters pushed the picture away from the visible world.

Beside them hang canvases by Pyotr Konchalovsky, a Russian and Soviet painter who was a founding member and chairman of the Knave of Diamonds group, and by Sergei Gerasimov. Their work anchors the figurative side of the century, where the subject stays recognizable and the weight falls on color, composition and the look of a moment.

The wall list widens further with Igor Grabar, Vladimir Stozharov, Nikolai Romadin, Boris Ryauzov and Valerian Sergin. With these names added, the century reads through more than one language: radical geometry and spiritual abstraction in one room, painted portraits and views in the next. The museum’s own historic rooms give the pictures a setting of their own, a good place to compare how different artists answered the same decades.