Great Russian Artists, from the Peredvizhniki to the Avant-Garde

In an American school's art class, names hang on the wall. Van Gogh with his bandaged ear, Monet with his water lilies, Picasso, Frida Kahlo. A child does projects about them, recognizes them at a glance, and argues about whose self-portrait is scarier. Now, if you ask the same child if they know any Russian artists, there will almost certainly be silence. No Repin, no Levitan, no Malevich. In the best-case scenario, something about the Black Square will be mentioned, because everyone has heard of it, but usually with a smirk, as if to say, there's nothing to it.

A parent who wants to correct this goes online and types "famous Russian painters." The search engine honestly provides a list of surnames: Repin, Surikov, Levitan, Kandinsky, Chagall. But the list of surnames means nothing to the child. They are names without faces, without stories, without any reason to remember them. Russian painting as a whole appears the same way to them: a distant, unfamiliar shelf that is incomprehensible to approach.

And behind each of these names stands a person who had their own obsession and their own paintings, which once made people faint or laugh out loud. If you show a child these people instead of a list, the shelf ceases to feel alien. Next is about how, over a hundred years Russian painting It has journeyed from the Volga barge haulers to the Black Square in the corner of an exhibition, and how can I tell this story so that a child will want to look?.

The Revolt of the Fourteen and the Birth of the Peredvizhniki

For a long time in Russia, art was dictated from above. The Imperial Academy of Arts decided what was worthy of the brush and what was not. It was expected to paint ancient gods, heroes of antiquity, beautiful scenes from mythology, everything elevated and far from real life. And then, in the autumn of 1863, a scandal occurred, which was later called the Revolt of the Fourteen. Fourteen of the best graduates of the Academy refused to paint the competition piece on the given subject of a feast of Norse gods and asked for permission to take on a free theme. The council refused. Then all fourteen demonstratively left, forfeiting awards and commissions. The artist Ivan Kramskoi led them.

A few years later, this rebellion grew into the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions, founded in 1870, and the first exhibition opened in 1871. Hence the nickname, "Peredvizhniki" (Itinerants or Wanderers). The word itself speaks to the deed. Previously, art resided in capital city halls, where ordinary people were barred from entry. The Peredvizhniki, however, took their paintings across the country, to Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, to people who had never seen living art. And they now painted not gods, but what was around them. Barge haulers, peasants, village funerals, a troika of tired children pulling a sled with water. Russian life as it was, unadorned.

It is here that the child encounters their first recognition. Among the Wanderers was Ivan Shishkin, and with him Konstantin Savitsky, and together they painted Morning in a Pine Forest, that very bears in a foggy spruce forest. Savitsky painted the bears, Shishkin the forest, and every child from a Russian-speaking family recognizes this painting because it looks at them from a chocolate wrapper. It's enough to say this out loud, and painting transforms from a boring school word into something familiar, homey, almost edible. These Russian artists are no longer strangers. One of them painted the bears from the candy.

Repin, whose paintings talk

If you had to choose just one of the Peredvizhniki to start with, it would be Ilya Repin, who lived from 1844 to 1930. He had a rare gift. His paintings don't hang silently; they talk, argue, and shout. A child doesn't need to be told what's depicted; they understand it themselves.

Let's take "Barge Haulers on the Volga," which Repin worked on from 1870 to 1873. Along the bank, harnessed to tow ropes, trudge eleven men, pulling a heavy barge. The young Repin saw such barge haulers on a walk and was shocked that people were harnessed instead of oxen. However, he didn't make a poster about injustice. He looked closely at each face, and it turned out not to be a crowd, but eleven different people, each with their own destiny, their own weariness, their own character. A child would be interested in examining them individually, seeing who has given up, who is still angry, and who, the youngest, is trying to adjust the tow rope and straighten up.

Another of his paintings is truly frightening. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, completed in 1885, depicts a terrible moment immediately after the Tsar, in a fit of rage, struck and mortally wounded his own son. The Terrible One embraces his dying son, his eyes are wild and full of realization, and there is blood everywhere. At the first exhibition, viewers cried out, and ladies fainted. Many still call this painting Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son, although the real title is calmer. Researchers believe that Repin conceived it under the impression of the bloody events of his time, the assassination of Emperor Alexander II and the execution of the conspirators. It is too early to show it to a small child, but it will be more deeply ingrained in a teenager's memory than any history textbook.

And so as not to leave the child in terror, immediately after it, you should show "The Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan," which Repin worked on for a long time, from 1880 to 1891. Here everything is the opposite; here there is laughter. The Cossacks are composing a bold, mocking letter to the Turkish Sultan and are rolling with laughter at every new line. Not a single face is the same; each one laughs in their own way, some with toothless mouths, some to the point of tears. The child examines this painting and involuntarily smiles himself, and at the same time, understands a simple thing. Painting can not only be about sadness and history. It can also laugh.

Levitan and the silence of the Russian landscape

Next to the noisy Repin, one should place his complete opposite. Isaac Levitan, who lived a very short life, from 1860 to 1900, painted landscapes. No tsars, no dramas, no plot, just Russian nature. But his nature is special; it conveys feeling. That's why his style is called "mood landscape.".

He has "Golden Autumn," and through it, you can almost hear that quiet, dry day when the leaves burn yellow, and the river turns a cold blue. And there's the painting "Over Eternal Peace," a vast gray sky, water, a tiny church on the cape, and from it all, it becomes a little eerie and very quiet, as if you've peered into a place where human bustle ends. Levitan studied under the Peredvizhniki artist Savrasov, was friends with the young Chekhov, and his paintings have the same understated, slightly melancholic tone as Chekhov's stories.

It's great to play with feelings using Levitan's paintings with a child. Don't ask what's painted, that's obvious, but ask what the mood is here. Is it sad or calm, anxious or cozy, what time of day is it, what's the weather like in your soul? This way, the child understands the main thing: that a landscape can be not just a beautiful picture, but a conversation without words. And that a quiet picture sometimes has a stronger effect than the loudest one.

When did artists stop painting realistically?

And now comes the most interesting part for a child. At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists suddenly stopped drawing realistically. Completely. And that's when a child usually perks up, because by this point they've accumulated questions about the Black Square.

Kazimir Malevich, who lived from 1879 to 1935, wrote it and displayed it in 1915 at an exhibition with the strange title "0.10". A black square on a white background, nothing more. Malevich hung it not like all the other paintings, but in the upper corner of the room, where an icon is hung in a Russian home. This was a challenge, a statement that a new art was beginning, one that didn't need old rules. Malevich called his movement Suprematism, from a word meaning "highest". The artist himself claimed the idea was born in 1913, although the square only appeared on canvas in 1915.

It's important to explain to a child not how it's painted, as there's really nothing complicated about that, but why. Malevich wasn't trying to depict an object; he wanted to get to the very foundation, to pure form and pure color, beyond which there is nothing. The Black Square is not lazy smearing but a period at the end of a long story, where paintings for centuries tried to resemble life. Malevich said that centuries of effort were enough and began anew from scratch. You can agree or disagree, but that's precisely why the little square still angers and attracts so much.

Vasily Kandinsky, born in 1866 and died in 1944, opened a similar door, just a little earlier and in his own unique way. By the early 1910s, he had reached canvases where absolutely nothing was recognizable, neither a person, nor a tree, nor a house, only colored spots and diverging lines. And this was not done for fun. Kandinsky held the belief that color and form directly affect a person, without the mediation of a plot, much like a single note or a key strike does. One should look at his works with a child, as one listens to music. Not asking what is depicted here, but asking what kind of painting it is: loud or quiet, cheerful or anxious, fast or slow. Children readily play such games and often perceive a canvas more accurately than adults.

Chagall and the love that defies gravity

Of all the Russian artists abroad, he is perhaps the most beloved. Marc Chagall, who lived from 1887 to 1985, grew up near Vitebsk, in a poor Jewish family, and his entire life, wherever he found himself—in Paris, New York, or the south of France—he painted his Vitebsk. The ramshackle houses, fences, a goat, a fiddler on the roof.

And also, everything flies for him. In the painting "Over the City," painted in the late teens, Chagall himself and his beloved wife Bella float in the air above the rooftops of their hometown, embracing, and it's not a trick or a dream, it's about how love literally lifts you off the ground. Chagall has his own laws of physics; with him, one can soar, goats can be green, and houses can stand upside down, and no one is bothered by it. Another of his famous works is called "I and the Village," on which the huge, gentle face of an animal looks into a person's eyes, and all village life swirls around at once.

Chagall's art is understandable to children without any translation, because he paints in a way that roughly mirrors how they themselves paint and feel. Where there is joy, we fly. Where there is love, there is the sky. If you show a child "Over the Town" and ask them if they've ever flown like that from happiness, the conversation about painting suddenly becomes a conversation about themselves.

Painting in the Service of the State

Here the story takes a turn that is honestly worth telling even to a teenager. After the revolution, artists had a brief taste of freedom, where they could paint black squares and flying goats. Shagal even managed to open an art school in Vitebsk, where Malevich himself came to teach. But this did not last long.

In the early thirties, the state closed all independent artists' unions, and by 1934, it had approved the only correct way to paint. It was called socialist realism. From then on, paintings were supposed to be understandable, realistic, and useful to the authorities. Happy collective farmers, mighty workers, leaders on tribunes, a cheerful bright future. Talented works were also created in this style, but the artist lost their choice; from now on, decisions were made for them about what and how to paint.

Those who did not fit into the new framework had a hard time. Malevich, with his squares, found himself out of favor and died in poverty in 1935. Chagall, with his flying lovers, had left the country forever even earlier. It is useful for a child to take away from this turn not a date, but a thought. Art is alive as long as the artist is free to choose what to paint. As soon as that choice is taken away, even a very skilled hand's paintings dry up.

How to start a conversation about paintings

It all seems huge, but you can enter it with one step. Not with a date, not with a direction, but with one painting that has a story.

The easiest way to start is with one where something is happening. Show a child "The Zaporozhian Cossacks" and together figure out what they're laughing so hard about. Find the youngest person in "Barge Haulers on the Volga" and invent what he's thinking. Examine Shishkin's bears and remember which wrapper they were on. Then add a painting without a plot and play with feelings, ask Levitan what mood his autumn has, and ask Kandinsky if his painting is loud or quiet. And with "Black Square," it's best not to get drawn into an argument about whether anyone can do that, but to ask the question differently: why did the artist undertake this at all? This is usually where the real conversation begins.

These things, of course, have a much.

A child acquires a taste for painting from their

The hardest part about raising a child outside of Russia isn't the language itself, but this cultural layer surrounding it. Familiarity with artists, knowledge of Russian painters, the feeling that Repin and Chagall aren't strangers to you. An English school won't teach this, it won't come from cartoons. A child only gets these things from their own people, from live conversations where an adult shows them where to find humor in Repin and quiet in Levitan.

At our school, Palme School, children from Russian-speaking families from four to seventeen years old they learn not only language, but also to the culture from which this language grew. To painting, history, music, everything that lies behind the words. Not dry lists of names, but a conversation in which the Black Square ceases to be a reason for a smirk and becomes part of a large and understandable story. To see how it works, you can attend two free classes. First, an introduction and diagnosis with a methodologist, where it's clear what the child is already good at and where support is needed. Then, a trial class in a group, together with other children. No obligations, just to understand if this format is for you or not.

The list of famous Russian painters will remain an alien shelf until someone shows a child the living people behind the surnames. And the artist who is shown is no longer a line in a search engine, but one of their own, familiar, with stories that one wants to retell further.

What You Should Know About Russian Painting

Over the past hundred years, Russian painting has come a long way, and you can tell its story to a child as an adventure. First, the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), led by Repin, broke away from the tutelage of the Academy and began to paint real life: barge haulers, Cossacks, and the quiet landscapes of Levitan. Then came the avant-garde, and Malevich, with his Black Square, and Kandinsky, with pure abstraction, overturned the very notion of what a painting is for. Chagall, at the same time, taught the whole world to fly over the rooftops of Vitebsk. And then the state curtailed this freedom, establishing the only correct style, socialist realism, by the mid-1930s. The best of the defiant found themselves either in poverty or in emigration. If you show a child the living person behind each name and at least one of their paintings with a story, a lifeless list of famous Russian painters turns into a gallery you'll want to visit again and again.