Famous Russian paintings are the best known works of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, and most of them hang in two museums: the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.
These 12 cover nearly five centuries, from church painting to the avant garde. Each has a moment when someone whose opinion counted, a buyer, a patron, a tsar, a censor or the Church, decided its fate.
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How These Were Chosen
Russian here means art made in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, and it settles no question of any painter's nationality. I kept a painting if at least one of these decided its fate at a moment we can date: a buyer, a patron, a tsar, a censor, the Church or an exhibition jury.
12. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Bathing of a Red Horse (1912)
A naked boy sits bareback on a scarlet horse as it wades into blue water. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin started from a real scene of boys bathing horses on the Volga.
He worked on it in the summer of 1912 at Mishkina Pristan, a farm in Saratov province.
He finished the final version in Saint Petersburg that autumn. The horse that posed for him was a bay, a brown animal nicknamed Malchik, Russian for Boy.
The red was his choice. The Tretyakov notes that he set colors against each other instead of blending them, taking his cue from early Russian icons that restorers had recently cleaned.
The first people to decide its place were the organizers of the World of Art, a society of artists whose exhibition opened in Moscow in November 1912. They kept the canvas out of the main hall and hung it above the entrance door.
I like knowing that a brown farm horse stood in front of the easel. Every inch of red on that body is Petrov-Vodkin's decision.
In the spring of 1914 the painting went to the Baltic Exhibition in Malmö, Sweden. The First World War broke out, and it stayed in Sweden until 1950, when the artist's widow, Maria Fyodorovna, managed to bring it back.
She offered it to the Russian Museum in Leningrad, which did not buy it. In 1953 she sold it to Kazimira Basevich, a private collector who worked as a schoolteacher, and Basevich gave it to the Tretyakov in 1961.
At a Glance
Artist: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878 to 1939)
Painted: 1912
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (inventory Zh 375)
About This Painting
How big is Bathing of a Red Horse? Bathing of a Red Horse measures 160 by 186 centimeters, about 63 by 73 inches.
Who posed for the rider? The Tretyakov names the artist's younger cousin, Alexander Trofimov. He was born in 1898, so he was thirteen or fourteen.
Is Bathing of a Red Horse the only version? No. Petrov-Vodkin later said he made three versions. The first two have not survived, and the second is known from a photograph.
11. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square (1915)
A black square sits on a white ground, and its edges are not quite straight. This is the first version, painted by Kazimir Malevich in 1915. The Tretyakov notes that he deliberately avoided true right angles.