Page 24 - (DK Eyewitness) Top 10 Travel Guide - St. Petersburg

22 ❯❯ Top 10 St Petersburg Highlights

Russian Museum

While the Hermitage is home to art collected from all over the
world, the Russian Museum is an exclusively Russian affair, its
exhibits ranging from priceless 12th-century icons to the avant-
garde paintings of Kandinsky and Malevich. Opened to the public
for the first time in 1898, the museum was nationalized after the
1917 Revolution and its collection swelled by works confiscated
from palaces and churches. From the 1930s until Gorbachev’s
restructuring (see p38), it exhibited mainly Socialist Realism art.
The museum is housed in the 19th-century Mikhaylovskiy Palace,
one of the finest Neo-Classical creations of Carlo Rossi, the Italian
architect also responsible for Palace Square (see p14).
Perfected
5
Portrait of
Ivan Kliun
A distorted portrait by
leading avant-garde
painter Kazmir Malevich
(1878–1935), which
shows his obsession with
simple geometric shapes.
Portrait of the
6
Poetess Anna
Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova’s (see
p41) portrait, by Russian
Cubist painter Nathan
Altman (1889–1970), was
The Last Day of Pompeii
1 completed in 1914, when
One of the first Russian paintings to attract
Akhmatova was 25.
attention abroad, Karl Bryullov’s (1799–1852)
Old Russian
magnificent creation (above) was the result of 7
his visit to Pompeii immediately after an Decorative
eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1828. and Applied Art
This section of the
Wrestlers
Pine Grove
2 4 museum has a collection
Natalia Goncha rova
Ivan Shishkin
of porcelain, furni ture,
(1881–1962), who had (1832–98), a con temporary glass and fasci nating
links to the Pushkin of the Wanderers (see artifacts (below) that has
family (see p40), was p90), was renowned for been built up since 1895.
deeply inspired by the his soothing forest
primitivism of Russian landscapes. The serene
folk art. Wrestlers (1908– Pine Grove is a classic
09) is an example of her example of his desire
welding of Cubism and to depict the beauty of
pre-revolutionary nature in its pure,
Russian avant-garde. unadorn ed state.
The Zaporozhye Cossacks Writing a
3
Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan
Ilya Repin’s colo ssal piece is based on the Ukrainian
Cossacks’ fight with Turkey in the 17th century.
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