The Silver Age
Around the turn of the century Russian artists sought beauty, mood and myth. Vrubel, Serov and Levitan renewed painting, the World of Art brought Russian art to Europe, and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes astonished Paris.
The younger generation felt that realism had become predictable. Valentin Serov painted bright, airy portraits such as Girl with Peaches, and Mikhail Vrubel created a world of his own, of crystalline forms and fairy-tale demons. Levitan turned the landscape into an evocative image of time and eternity.
In 1898 Alexandre Benois and Sergei Diaghilev founded the magazine and association Mir iskusstva, the World of Art. They wanted art to be free of moral demands and looked back with nostalgia to 18th-century St Petersburg and Versailles. Artists such as Léon Bakst, Konstantin Somov and Ivan Bilibin produced illustrations, stage designs and prints.
In 1906 Diaghilev brought a large exhibition of Russian art to Paris, and in 1909 his Ballets Russes. The vividly coloured costumes and sets by Bakst and Benois made a great impression and influenced fashion and design throughout Europe. In Moscow the collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov bought the latest French paintings, by Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso.