1846 -1920 · Moscow and realism of the Ambulants

Restrained conversations, small dramas and ordinary gestures make Vladimir Makovsky a keen observer of Russian society.

Vladimir Yegorovich Makovsky was born in Moscow in 1846 and died in Petrograd in 1920. He grew up in a family where music, literature and arts took center stage; his father participated in the founding of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Vladimir studied there with Sergei Zarianko and established himself very early on with his genre scenes. In 1872, he joined the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions, the Peredvizhniki, which took painting beyond academies and defended art attentive to real life. Makovsky observed modest interiors, streets, markets, offices, schools and prisons. He does not paint simple anecdotes: a look diverted, a hanging hand or a distance between two figures is enough to reveal inequality, embarrassment, compassion or conflict. Conversation belongs to this world of silently tense relationships, where decor and posture matter as much as imagined words. In other works, humor softens social criticism; children, employees, peasants and petty bourgeois are captured with warm, sometimes satirical, never indifferent precision. After the death of Vasily Perov, Makovsky taught at the Moscow School, then directed the genre painting workshop at the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg. His touch becomes freer and his color more vivid without abandoning the story. Witness to the transformations of Russia until the revolutions of the early 20th century, he leaves a human chronicle where major historical changes appear in the reactions of ordinary people. The "Vladimir Makovsky" selection notably compares Conversation. His reading favors space.

Makovsky listens to society with his eyes: an interrupted gesture or a chair incorrectly brought together tells what the conversation does not say.