Государственный Русский музей. Альманах, №59, 2003. Boris Kustodiev

📓 Perusing the exhibition and leafing through the pages of this album, the viewer and the reader will make many exciting new discoveries, accompanied by the joy of rediscovering something which had previously seemed familiar, unremarkable or perhaps lost.
The first discovery is an artist whose name is undoubtedly familiar to many, as are many of his works, which are now classics of Russian art. Never before has his oeuvre been presented so fully, so vividly and from so many different angles. Extremely Russian and extremely traditional, Boris Kustodiev is, at the same time, completely unlike anyone else - just as the Russia seen through his eyes is unlike any other nation.
The land unfolding before your eyes also promises exciting discoveries - festive, unofficial, provincial, cosy, dissolute, harmonious, ungainly, intelligent, educated, naive, simplistic, cunning, elegant and motley. As Kustodiev himself wrote: "I believe motliness and brightness to be extremely typical of Russian life." Perhaps this is the Russia we so badly lack today? Yet why is it only in the past?
Having visited the exhibition and looked at the album, go out into the street and look around you. Greatly changed yet invariably the same, this country is all around us, with us, inside us -inside our minds, characters, actions, faces and movements.
Very little is needed to make possibly the most important discovery of all. One need only look at the world, beyond its imperfections and sufferings, with delight and gentle irony, just as Kustodiev once did.
I would like to thank all those who have contributed to the album, helping us to make these discoveries for ourselves, including the staff of the Rubin Central Bureau of Naval Engineering and its general director Igor Spassky, a long and valued friend of the Russian Museum.