The Four Arts

also: 4 Arts · Четыре искусства

school 1924-1931 Russia Soviet Union

The Four Arts (Chetyre Iskusstva) was an art society founded in Moscow and Leningrad in 1924 by artists who had previously belonged to the World of Art and Blue Rose circles. It brought together painters and graphic artists, sculptors, and architects - mostly an older generation of highly trained masters - around a shared devotion to craft and artistic form at a moment when Soviet cultural politics pressed for direct social utility. Its members' personal styles differed widely, and the society showed regularly in Moscow (1925, 1926, 1929) and Leningrad (1928) alongside rival bodies such as AKhRR and OST. Left-wing critics denounced the group in 1929 as aesthetes indifferent to class, and in 1931 the society joined AKhRR, closing one of the last strongholds of independent painterly modernism in early Soviet art.

Example work related to "The Four Arts".
Example work related to "The Four Arts".Public domain (credit: Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Painterly quality and carefully resolved image structure prized over political messaging
  • Lyrical, contemplative subjects - landscape, portrait, still life - handled with restraint
  • Modernist form tempered by academic craftsmanship and precise drawing
  • Continuity with pre-revolutionary Russian traditions of World of Art and Blue Rose
  • Graphic art, sculpture, and architecture practiced alongside painting, including work for the modernizing city

Key figures

  • Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1878-1939) — Painter of symbolist-tinged modernism and one of the society's leading exhibitors
  • Pavel Kuznetsov (1878-1968) — Blue Rose painter known for monumental Soviet-era cycle paintings
  • Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva (1871-1955) — Graphic artist who revived the color woodcut in Russia
  • Martiros Saryan (1880-1972) — Armenian painter of saturated color and a founder of modern Armenian painting
  • Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) — Sculptor of monumental Soviet works, including Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937)

Example works

  • Bathing of a Red Horse — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1912)
  • After the Battle — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (1923)

Sources

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