Executed in ink on paper, “Petrograd in 1920” contrasts sharply with the bright and cheerful works of Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, which brought the artist world-wide acclaim.
Boris Kustodiev lived in St. Petersburg from 1896. Since Peter the Great founded it, the city has played an important role in the history and culture of the Russian state. Many famous artists were educated at the Imperial Academy of Arts. Many became leaders of the artistic associations that existed at various times in the city: the Union of Russian Artists, the World of Art, the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society, the Association of Traveling Art Exhibitions, and others. Many have glorified the city in their works. In St. Petersburg Boris Kustodiev received a higher art education, gained fame, and gathered a circle of friends and admirers, and it was there that the master lived through the most difficult periods of the country’s history.
Boris Kustodiev is known to have been one of the artists who resonated actively with the revolutionary events. Despite the fact that the romance of the revolution soon gave up on Boris Mikhailovich, time has preserved the works of those years. The sketch depicts the post-revolutionary Petrograd, as the artist saw it from the windows of his studio on Vvedenskaya Street. Three Russian revolutions and the First World War, devastation and shortage of food, cold and lack of firewood — all this was reflected in Kustodiev’s works.
Kustodiev’s correspondence with Nikolai Protasov (a
family friend, fellow student at Pavel Vlasov’s studio, and director of the
Astrakhan Art Gallery) reveals that the artist’s family had a hard time living
— as cold and hungry as many. A long line at the bakery, women carrying
firewood with great difficulty on sledges, a half-dismantled fence, the ruins
of a house, disabled people on crutches — Kustodiev remembered all this even in
1925, when life in the young Soviet state had already begun to settle down and
the artist had new commissions. However, the memories of the ordeal would not
leave the master for a long time.
