15: Russian Painting of the Second Half of the 19th Century

On the Bank

Mid-1920s

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin

81 x 65.3 cm

Oil on canvas

Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin has gone down in the history of Russian painting as the creator of his own original theory of artistic creativity, which he himself termed "the science of seeing". At its heart lies a striving to make the figure of the viewer an actively perceiving one. Important devices in Petrov-Vodkin's art were “inclined perspective” and the succession of movements by the main personages that became transformed into a series of interconnected sequential moments, sort of "freeze-frames". This theory manifested itself particularly clearly in a number of paintings from the mid-1920s, among them the Hermitage's On the Bank.