Казанская художественная школа и её наследие в собрании Государственного музея изобразительных искусств Республики Татарстан

Abstract

Kazan Art School is a famous Russian educational institution that became an art educational center in the Volga-Kama Region and the Trans-Urals. In 2020, the school represented by N.I. Feshin Kazan Art College celebrates its 125th anniversary. It was opened under the direct tutelage of the Imperial Academy of Arts (1895) on the initiative of the Academy graduates, natives of the Kazan Region N.N. Belkovich, G.A. Medvedev, H.N. Skornyakov, I.A. Denisov, and Yu.I. Thyssen with the assistance of the city authorities. The historical walls of the school are marked by the teaching and pedagogical contribution of such legendary personalities as N.I. Feshin, P.P. Benkov and B.I. Urmanche, A.M. Rodchenko, P.A. Radimov, P.M. Dulsky, D.D. Burliuk, V.K. Timofeyev and other famous masters of the Russian art. The collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan contains the main artistic heritage of the school of the pre-revolutionary period and the first years of Soviet history (1895–1920s), which is considered in the given article. Conventionally, this legacy consists of three main parts. The main part includes works by the founders, teachers and students of the Kazan Art School. It is a fairly extensive collection of several hundred paintings and graphic works, as well as a small number of sculptural exhibits. The collection gives an opportunity to get acquainted with typical examples of the creative manner of the main representatives of the school. All of them are characterized by a special individuality of the visual language, but a diverse visual range is united by a common culture of vision. The collection is also particularly valuable due to the fact that it presents rare famous examples of the work of such artists as Yu.I. Thyssen, L.F. Ovsyannikov, F.P. Gavrilov, N.I. Mikhailov and others. An art museum operated at the Kazan school, which was created with the active involvement of the Academy of Arts.The museum operates at the school in a transformed form up to the present day. The collection of the Fine Arts Museum of the republic contains the bulk of the works of this collection, which gives an idea of the scale of the Academy of Arts activities to support the school with donated works. There are about 80 of them in total. The names of many are well known in the history of Russian art: I.E. Repin, I.I. Shishkin, A.P. Bogolyubov, K.E. Makovsky, V.V. Mate, A.F. Gausch, F.S. Zhuravlev, A.A. Kiselev, R.F. Franz and others. The museum collection also contains works by the most famous student of the Kazan Art School – Nikolai Ivanovich Feshin (1881–1955), who later was an equally famous school teacher (since 1909). The largest collection of Feshin's works in Russia, including painting, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied art of the master (over 180 works) is kept in Kazan.