The focus is on the still life and landscape of the late XIX – early XX centuries when the flower became a real hero of the artistic narrative.

The exposition includes some 150 pieces by famous masters: Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Alexander Golovin and many other, less renowned, yet outstanding painters – Mikhail Shemyakin, Nikolay Meshcherin, Alexey Isupov.

Sculpture and objects of decorative and applied art, such as porcelain and glass, are organically neighboring with paintings. The works are broken down to thematic sections and are accompanied by comments and citations made by the artists’ contemporaries.

Flowers in the art at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries became a symbol of the elegant epoch and rhyme to a woman’s image of the Silver Age. The flexible plastic pictorial language was changing surprisingly quickly: from impressionist vibrating reverence to the fluidity of Art Nouveau lines and mysterious color richness of symbolism. The Jack of Diamonds artists and other representatives of avant-garde used the flower to experiment with shape and color, opening the way to non-objective art.

Floral polyptyches by our contemporary Irina Starzhenetskaya served as an epilogue to this exhibition. In all her creative effort, she remains faithful to the magic of the flower, offering the viewer a look at the eternal theme through the eyes of an artist of the 21st century.