K. Korovin

“Painting, like music, like a poet’s verses, should always inspire enjoyment in the viewer. Beauty alone is what artists gift their viewers.” This phrase belongs to Konstantin Korovin, but many artists working at the turn of the 20th century would have been willing to put their names to it, and none more so than his friend, Mikhail Vrubel, bewitched as he was by the music of an “entire person”, by that national, intimate note which he strove to “capture on canvas and in ornament.”

The title of chapter six of "My Life in Paris" from the memoir of Ivan Mozalevsky, a well-known artist and draughtsman (the original is kept in the Manuscript Department of the Tretyakov Gallery) tells the story of the complicated relationship between Korovin and Ivan Kreitor. The excerpt published here describes dramatic events in the life of the outstanding Russian artist Konstantin Korovin, including the loss of his works that he had specifically selected for a personal exhibition at a time when his life in immigration was difficult both financially and emotionally.

“This poor opera by Rimsky-Korsakov has been through so many ordeals! It turned out that it was not easier for the cockerel to go through theatre censorship than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. It has lost so many feathers and so many colours...” That is how a contemporary in 1909 commented on the difficult staging of the opera “The Golden Cockerel” by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

"We all come from our childhood," believed Fyodor Dostoevsky, and his statement is very applicable to the life story of Konstantin Korovin. The artist was born into a merchant family, once prosperous but completely ruined after his grandfather's death and therefore downgraded to the middle class. As a child, he did not immediately realise this and felt the family's tragedy, and was very glad when his parents had to move from a comfortable town house to a Moscow suburb where his father had found a job. Left to his own devices, he would spend the whole day hunting with his new friend Dubinin, his favourite dog Druzhok and a shot-gun offered to him by his father. Later, after returning to Moscow and joining his brother Sergei at the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, Korovin would continue to remember his life in the countryside, wishing to return there one day.

November 23 (December 5, in the "New Style") 2011 was the 150th anniversary of the outstanding Russian painter of the late 19th-early 20th centuries Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin (1861-1939). In anticipation of this momentous anniversary, the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg agreed to team up for a project in which each party organised a Korovin exhibition so that the two shows would share essential elements but vary in details: the two museums, the main keepers of the great artist's legacy, exchange his best works but each presents its own version of the exhibition and prepares its own publications to accompany it.