Russian Painters: The Classic Years TV Listings

• 2000
• 0 hr 50 mins
• Documentary

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As a serious artistic activity, Russian painting really dates only from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok put it, Russian culture is a combination of cultures, we are a new country. Blok's new country was actually synthetic and coldly calculated created at the beginning of the eighteenth century with Peter the Great¹s westernization of Old Russia. This had often been carried out with great brutality. And in some ways so too had Peter¹s introduction of western culture, art and architecture. Russian society was originally tribal and backward; its art was either primitive and decorative or religious. This episode presents numerous examples of paintings from this unique period in Russian history.