Russian legends, folk tales and fairy tales [on the occasion of the Exhibition “Russian Legends, Folk Tales and Fairy Tales” at the Groninger Museum, Groningen, the Netherlands, held from 15 December 2007 to 6 April 2008] (review)

The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands has been showing a series of seminal exhibitions on Russian art of the nineteenth and early twentieth century since 2001. The exhibition Russian Legends, which was accompanied by this richly illustrated catalogue, featured book illustrations and paintings by the renowned artists Victor Vasnetsov, Ivan Bilibin, Nicholas Roerich, Mikhail Vrubel, and Wassily Kandinsky.

Russian artists’ interest in folk art was triggered by the documentation and publication of Russian folk tales by Alexander N. Afanasiev and, even earlier, by the fairy tales adapted into verse and illustrated by Alexander Pushkin. Fairy tales and legends thus became popular subjects for painters and illustrators, who developed a very specific style in their attempt to capture the spirit of these tales by using folkloristic techniques.

Bilibin’s art nouveau illustrations, for example, focus on individual scenes. But Bilibin was not only responsible for the illustrations, he designed his fairy-tale books from cover to cover. Wassily Kandinsky experimented with different perspectives, styles, and techniques to shed new light on familiar scenes in fairy tales. He thus created expressionistic scenes inspired by folklore in vibrant colours, woodcut prints in colour or black and white, figurative paintings reminiscent of the cover image of Der Blaue Reiter [The Blue Rider] as well as abstract images evoking fantastic scenes and scenery.

The large-format catalogue offers high-quality reproductions. Detailed texts written by experts in the field give ample information, not only on the artists and their work, but also on the relationship of painting and illustration to Russian folklore and history.