The Traveller’s Gaze: Russian Artists around the World

The exhibition is held at the Málaga branch. 

In Russia, the travel genre in art began its active development at the end of the 18th century. This was when the Academy of Arts, founded back in the mid-18th century, began sending not only historical painters but its best students of landscape art abroad on creative assignments (pensioners’ journeys). Semyon Shchedrin and Fyodor Matveyev were sent to Italy, the destination preferred over France and Germany in the first half of the 19th century, and were the first Russians to capture the architectural and scenic beauty of that country. Subsequent travellers to Italy were Orest Kiprensky, Sylvester Shchedrin, the Brullov brothers, Karl and Alexander, Alexander Ivanov, and other early 19th-century artists, who worked not only in the genre of landscape, but also in portraiture and the historical and everyday genres as well. They did not blindly imitate, however, but rather combined their own art with that of the Europeans, retaining their freedom of self-expression.

From the mid-19th century onwards, artists’ search for new creative impulses led them to prefer France, where art’s most innovative tendencies were then concentrating. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and other cutting-edge trends of the late 19th and early 20th centuries could be studied only in France. 

In the period from the 1920s through 1940s, few Russians travelled abroad. As a consequence, very few images of that period are known. However, one can admire remarkable American paintings by Alexander Deineka and Morocco paintings by Zinaida Serebryakova, which are included in the exhibition.

The travel scope of Russian artists, represented in the exhibition The Traveller’s Gaze,  includes Italy, France, Egypt, Palestine, Japan, China, Morocco, and the USA. Their travel impressions in paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the collection of the Russian Museum are now on display for the public in Malaga, Spain.