Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (born October 24 [November 5, New Style], 1878, Khvalynsk, Saratov oblast, Russian Empire—died February 15, 1939, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]) was a Russian painter who combined many traditions of world art in his work and created an original language in painting that was both deeply individual and national in spirit.

Petrov-Vodkin’s birthplace was a small town on the banks of the Volga River, where he was born into the family of an impoverished cobbler. He spent his youth there, living in harsh conditions reminiscent of those described by Maxim Gorky in My Universities. But his talent overcame his provincial surroundings, and his determination to be an artist led him first to art classes in Samara (1893–95) and then to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1897–1904), where he studied with painter Valentin Serov.

In the years between 1901 and 1907, Petrov-Vodkin traveled extensively in France, Italy, Greece, and North Africa. He was drawn to literature and philosophy and studied world art. During this period his allegorical compositions were derivative and permeated with the influence of European Symbolism, his originality overpowered by the aesthetics of Art Nouveau. Yet soon Petrov-Vodkin developed his own style, one that was harmoniously imbued with light. His monumental compositions were reminiscent of old Russian frescos, which were a source of inspiration to him. These are bright, rhythmically complete, and balanced. In 1912, at the exhibition of the World of Art Group, he presented his painting Bathing the Red Horse (1912), which immediately became famous. His peers saw it on one hand as being “a hymn to Apollo” and on the other as a presaging of a future cataclysm and renewal of the world. (World War I was to break out in two years, the Russian Revolution in five.)

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A belief in the importance of humanism, the power of the human spirit, and the triumph of good over evil fueled the enthusiasm with which Petrov-Vodkin greeted the October Revolution in 1917. In his celebrated painting The Year 1918 in Petrograd, also known as the Petrograd Madonna (1920), the events of the revolution are treated as bloodless and humanitarian, as if they were somehow abstract. This form of idealization was characteristic of the mature works of Petrov-Vodkin, and it is evident in his portrait of the noted poet Anna Akhmatova (1922) as well as in that of Vladimir Lenin (1934). One of the more unusual aspects of Petrov-Vodkin’s style was his use of spherical perspective (comparable to a fish-eye lens), a technique in which he was a preeminent master.