The fine art of Leningrad is an important component of Russian Soviet art—in the opinion of the art historians Vladimir Gusev and Vladimir Leniashin, "one of its most powerful currents". This widely used term embraces the creative lives and the achievements of several generations of Leningrad painters, sculptors, graphic artists and creators of decorative and applied art from 1917 to the early 1990s.
1917–1923
The revolutionary events of 1917–1918 changed the course of artistic life in Petrograd. They affected the Academy of Arts, exhibition and creative life, the activities of artistic associations and questions of artistic practice and theory. At the Academy of Arts students’ lessons were interrupted for a year and resumed only in autumn 1918. By a decree of the Council of People's Commissars issue on 12 April 1918 the Academy of Arts in the sense of an assembly of academicians was abolished. By the same decree for the training of future artists instead of the Higher Artistic College (VKhU) the Petrograd State Free Artistic Workshops (PGSKhM) were established. The task of organizing them was entrusted to the Fine Arts department of the People's Commissariat for Education, which was headed by representatives of the "leftists". For 15 years the academy became the arena for an intense struggle over issues of the organization of artistic education and the development of Soviet art. On 12 April 1918 the Council of People's Commissars also adopted a decree "on the monuments of the republic" that has gone down in history as "Lenin’s decree on monumental propaganda". The decree called for the removal of memorials erected in honour of the tsars and their servants and the production of monuments to Russia's Socialist revolution.
Despite the complications caused by the change of regime, the civil war and foreign intervention, artistic groupings – Mir iskusstva, Peredvizhniki , the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society, the Commune of Artists, and the Society of Individualist Artists – continued to operate in Petrograd. In 1922 the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) was formed and the artist Nikolai Dormidontov became head of its Petrograd branch. Among the participants in exhibitions between 1917 and 1923 were such artists as Nathan Altman, Mikhail Avilov, Isaak Brodsky, Boris Grigoriev, Ilya Repin, Vladimir Makovsky, Nikolay Dubovskoy, Osip Braz, Konstantin Makovsky, Boris Kustodiev, Sergey Konenkov, George Savitsky, Mykola Samokysh, Arkady Rylov, Stanislav Zhukovsky, Vladimir Kuznetsov, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexandre Benois, Vladimir Baranov-Rossine, Pavel Filonov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Nicholas Roerich, Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Alexander Kiselyov, Ivan Bilibin, Zinaida Serebriakova, Piotr Buchkin, Yury Annenkov, Rudolf Frentz, Aleksander Golovin and some others. Between them, they represented the main directions and tendencies in contemporary art. Some of them, such as Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Marc Chagall and Nicholas Roerich were figures of world rank.
Among the most significant works from this period critics name In the Azure Expanse (1918) by Arkady Rylov, Celebration Marking the Opening of the 2nd Congress of the Comintern on Uritsky Square on 19 June 1920 (1921) by Boris Kustodiev, Victory over Eternity (1921) and Living Head (1923) by Pavel Filonov, Portrait of Miron Sherling (1918) by Yury Annenkov, Self-Portrait (1918), Morning Still Life (1918) and Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1922) by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, The Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, and Portrait of Nadezhda Dobychina (1920) by Aleksander Golovin. These works testify to the multi-directional development of Petrograd's fine art, in which various tendencies, styles, and directions were represented by striking leaders.
Among the art exhibitions, the largest were the "First State Free Exhibition of Works of Art", held in the Winter Palace in 1919 with 300 participants, and the "Exhibition of Paintings by Petrograd Artists of All Directions. 1918–1923", held at the Academy of Arts in 1923 with 263 participants. Exhibitions were staged of paintings by members of the Kuindzhi Society, the Commune of Artists, Peredvizhniki and Mir iskusstva, as well as the traditional autumn and spring exhibitions. The venues for them were the halls of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, the Academy of Arts, the Museum of the City (the former Anichkov Palace) and the Hermitage. The year 1920 saw one-man exhibitions of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.
In 1919 a Museum of Artistic Culture was formed in Petrograd and in 1923 the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) formed under its auspices, headed by Kazimir Malevich.