The Russian Museum

The film is a travel around the display rooms of the Russian Museum, the world's largest collection of Russian fine arts.

Today the State Russian Museum is a unique artistic architectural complex. It includes for magnificent buildings, situated right in the center of St. Petersburg, that all together represent the development of Russian architecture from baroque to the style of empire: Mikhailovsky, Stroganov and Marble palaces and Engineers (Mikhailovsky) Castle. Each of them has its own interesting and saturated history.

This film is devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Museum, the world's largest collection of Russian fine art. It features prominent figures in Russian cultural life - Academician Dmitry Likhachev, the writer Daniil Granin, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and others - talking about their view of the Russian Museum and Russian art.

This film is about the history of the World of Art (or Mir Iskusstva) association whose 100th anniversary was widely celebrated in 1998. The film is based on the reminiscences and artistic works of some of the greatest artists active in the early twentieth century: Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Valentin Serov, Alexander Benois, Konstantin Somov, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva and others.

In the mighty Russian Empire the Stroganov clan was one of the wealthiest. "It's impossible to be richer than the Stroganovs!" But who exactly were the Stroganovs? For the length of their lineage, their degree of influence on Russian history and closeness to the imperial family no other Russian family can equal them. The history of the clan and the history of Russia became so closely intertwined that it is impossible to separate the one from the other. Works from the Stroganovs' art collection are currently kept in a number of museums in Russia, including the Russian Museum and the Hermitage.

This film describes the fate of four prominent figures in the Russian Avant-Garde: the art historian and ideologist of the Avan-Garde Nikolai Punin and the artists Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and Vladimir Tatlin. The film is about art hidden for fifty long years behind the iron door of a museum stockroom in the time when Stalin ruled supreme.

Kazimir Malevich was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, an innovator and reformer whose aesthetic ideas became an element in the artistic culture of our time. Malevich was one of the founders of the Avant-Garde, the creator of a new method in the fine arts called Suprematism and is known to the world as the creator of the famous Black Square. This film is an attempt to penetrate the distinctive world of an artist whose creative ideas demolished accustomed conceptions of fine art.

Contemporaries spoke of him as "the Great Karl". His most famous work is The Last Day of Pompeii. This film features works by the artist from various Russian collections, including the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, both well known paintings and a whole series of his portrait sketches and studies, watercolours and drawings. The film marks the 200th anniversary of the great artist's birth.

Ivan Aivazovsky is the great Russian painter of seascapes. The sea was his life and the chief subject of his art. No-one else painted the sea the way that he did. This film was made on the basis of material featured in the Russian Museum exhibition organized jointly with the Peterhof Museum Preserve, the Tsarskoye Selo Museum Preserve, the Central Naval Museum and the St Petersburg Naval Institute.

This film is based on the reminiscences of Konstantin Korovin, one of the outstanding Russian artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Korovin's work had a tremendous influence on the art of that period. The artist, a gifted teller of tales, recalls his friends and teachers: Alexei Savrasov, Vasily Polenov, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Vrubel and Valentin Serov.

This film represents a sort of Gospel in paints. Collected in the Russian Museum are unique works that reflect the thousand-year history of Christianity in Russia. That history found expression in icons, works of folk art, sculpture and paintings by outstanding Russian artists.