ABSTRACT
In the 1890s, historiography of the Russian school of painting made two bold and yet contradictory claims on its relationship with the rest of Europe. The first saw Russian art squarely within the European tradition, as was presented by young Russian scholar Alexandre Benois in his chapter for Richard Muther’s influential survey, Geschichte der Malerei im XIX. Jahrhundert (1893–94). Almost simultaneously, the entire collection of Russian paintings was moved from the Hermitage Museum, where it had enjoyed the company of other major European schools, to its new home: the Russian Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg, founded in 1895 and inaugurated three years later. The Russian school of painting was in this way cut off from its original European context. To explain this supposed collision, this chapter explores the development of historiography and periodization of the Russian school, a process that involved art writers and institutions. For sure, the collision reflected the changing European patterns in fine art museums’ specializations. But it also underlined the decades-long debate about the national and European identities of the Russian school. At the turn of the twentieth century, this debate ended in an elegant solution: the eventual introduction of style-based periodization, which embraced both identities in academic and public museums’ narratives.
