Tretyakov Gallery offers visitors a puzzle

This year celebrates the 200th anniversary of the famous Russian painter Aleksandr Ivanov. Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery has opened a large exhibition of his works in connection with the event.

More than five hundred Aleksandr Ivanov's works from collections of Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg are now on show.

Aleksandr Ivanov is usually called “A Master of One Work”. It took him twenty years to complete his large canvas “The Appearance of Christ before the People”. But it is not displayed at the current exhibition life-size. It’s only shown on a screen, giving a “clue” to the visitors, as the organizers put it.

With this pattern in head, they are supposed to recognise its fragments in other Ivanov’s works.

“Ivanov once said that he had found a subject for his greatest work reading the Gospel of John,” explains exhibition curator Lyudmila Markina, “and that he understood no one had used this theme before. He was right.”

Aleksandr Ivanov is considered a reformer in fine arts of his time. He was the first to portray nude women in the 1830s, and drew landscapes true to nature in a way no one had done it before.

Very few of the painter's contemporaries appreciated his work, but the next generations did him full justice.