Russian Impressionism at the Museum of Fine Arts of Kuzbass

Russian Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Collection of the Russian Museum brings around 50 original paintings from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg to Kemerovo. The works come from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Russian painters took up loose brushwork, shifting light and the look of a passing moment, and made them their own.

Four names anchor the selection. Isaac Levitan advanced the “mood landscape”, a kind of painting in which a stretch of river, field or sky carries a feeling as much as a place. Konstantin Korovin is counted among the leading Russian Impressionist painters, and his presence gives the show its clearest link to the movement named in the title. Valentin Serov was active in St Petersburg and Moscow during the Belle Époque and is generally considered the primary portraitist of his generation.

Ilya Repin may be the most familiar name to visitors. He is the painter of Barge Haulers on the Volga and of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, and he also made portraits of leading writers, composers and patrons of his day, among them Leo Tolstoy, a longtime friend. Seeing him alongside Levitan, Korovin and Serov shows how artists with very different habits and subjects approached the same questions of light and colour.

For anyone who knows these painters only from reproductions, the exhibition offers a chance to stand in front of the originals. Canvases that normally hang in one of Russia’s great national collections travel as a single group, so a visitor can compare landscape, portrait and everyday scene across half a century of Russian painting in one visit.