Portrait

Valentin Alexandrovich Serov (1865-1911) is a key figure in Russian art of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The general public knows him first of all as a painter, although his graphic talent was appreciated even by his contemporaries. " Serov the graphic artist may be even more powerful than Serov the painter," wrote Igor Grabar. The exhibition "Valentin Serov. The Line of Life," on view at the Tretyakov Gallery from December 2011 until May 2012, traces the great artist's trajectory through his works held at the Tretyakov Gallery's graphic art department — many of which have not been publicly displayed before.

"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.

The age when Russia fought against Napoleon presented through artefacts from the Pushkin Museum and the collection of Alexander Vasiliev

The Pushkin Museum is one of the first museums to begin the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the war against Napoleon, this landmark event in Russian history — the Patriotic War of 1812 — with the museum's new project "TIME OF GLORY AND ELATION!". The developments in and around the year 1812 had a special importance for Pushkin both as an individual and as a writer. This age of huge upheaval became for the poet one of the main sources of inspiration and focused his reflection on the destinies of humankind, his motherland and the world. A whole series of his masterpieces in poetry and prose (from the youthful "Recollections about Tsarskoe Selo" to the philosophical "The Commander") directly or indirectly address the era that remains embedded in the memory of almost all citizens of Russia. The circle of his family and friends included many people who had participated in the heroic battles of the Great European War of 1812-1815.

The sculptor Anna Golubkina is an outstanding Russian artist of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Although her work has always been the subject of scholarly study, there still remains much to learn. An unexplored but distinctive and unexpected phenomenon in Golubkina's art — she generally gravitated towards monumental forms of sculpture — is represented by her cameos, made from seashell and ivory. Initial efforts to estimate the total number of these miniatures, which were created over many years, and understand their significance in Golubkina's work, led to the conclusion that carving cameos was a modest "parallel" occupation which existed alongside her more renowned and innovative work in sculpture.