Nikolai Kulbin
The year 2018 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Kulbin (1868–1917), an artist, theoretician, and organizer of numerous art groups and significant exhibitions. Kulbin, in fact, was one of the central figures in Russian avant-garde, and yet his own artworks are not widely known.
The Russian Museum is lucky to hold the most extensive and important collection of painting and graphic works by N. I. Kulbin, as well as illustrated books, manuscripts, and photographs. The exhibition also includes objects from other museums, such as St. Petersburg State Museum of Music and Theater, Tretyakov Gallery, Vladimir Dahl State Literary Museum, Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, Ludwig Museum, and A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Central State Film and Photo Archive of St. Petersburg, and private collections.
The first retrospective exhibition of works by Kulbin discovers the artist as a landscape painter with an analytical mind and yet an unspoiled vision, a prominent graphic artist who left many portraits of his contemporaries (D. Burliuk, M. Kuzmin, S. Sudeikin, A. Kuprin, V. Khlebnikov, etc.), a talented theatrical artist and book illustrator. The exhibition shows almost 120 works, including a futurist book “Vzorval” by A. Kruchenykh illustrated by Nikolai Kulbin.
The exhibition is dedicated to Evgeny Kovtun (1928–1996), art historian, who was the first in Russia to study N. I. Kulbin’s creative oeuvre.
