Images of Military Life in Russian Art from the 16th to the 20th Centuries

Armed conflicts have accompanied humanity through hundreds and thousands of years of its history. Wars have destroyed and created empires, caused nations to rise, mix, and disappear. Although never desired or welcomed, war was nevertheless accepted as a customary part of historic existence – a jousting ground where nations and states fought it out to win themselves a better place under the sun. War generals and heroes were immortalised in monuments, and some were even canonised as saints.

In Russia, as everywhere else in Europe, paintings of battle scenes, historic events, genre scenes, sculpture, and applied artworks on military subjects were in most cases commissioned by the state. First the customers would have been the emperor and members of his court, and then in the Soviet Union the Ministry of Culture, the Artists’ Union, and the Art Fund. In Soviet times, pre-1917 battle scene paintings deemed to possess no exceptional aesthetic merits by the then-current standards were largely confined to history museums. Russian battle artwork among permanent exhibits in art museums was limited to pieces by outstanding masters such as Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Vereshchagin. Battle paintings by other notable artists of the academic or realistic persuasion (Grigory Gagarin, Pyotr Gruzinsky, Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky, Alexei Kivshenko, Ivan Kovshenkov, Alexander von Kotzebue, Nikolai Karazin and others) were usually relegated to back rooms. A similar selection process was practiced by the Russian Museum post-1917, as its collection continued to be augmented by battle pieces and historical paintings created by Soviet masters: Mikhail Avilov, Alexander Deineka, Gely Korzhev, Evsei Moiseyenko, Andrei Mylnikov, Vladimir Serov, Valentin Sidorov, Pavel Sokolov-Skalya and others.

Images of Military Life is an extensive exhibition featuring icons, paintings, sculptures, and applied and decorative artworks from the 16th through 20th centuries, most of them extracted from the museum’s repositories. It continues the Russian Museum’s time-honoured tradition of offering the public, from time to time, a broader perspective on its treasures and the magnitude of its collections.