A VOYAGE THROUGH TRADITIONAL RUSSIA

Saint-Petersburg, 3 May 1909: Sergueï Mikhaïlovitch Prokoudine-Gorsky (1863-1944), a physician who invented a new photographic process that reproduced colours with a startling precision, met Tsar Nicolas II at the Imperial Palace for a private projection. The Tsar, who was enchanted by photography, was enthralled by the images that appeared on the big piece of white cloth stretched out on the wall for the occasion, and decided to grant the photography pioneer a letter authorising him to travel across the empire to perform his ambitious documentary work. Prokoudine-Gorsky set off on a specially designed carriage and spent four years taking thousands of photographs of the Urals, the Volga, Turkestan and Afghanistan. In 1918, two thousand of these photos were stuffed into trunks and sent out of Russia. Purchased by the Congress Library in Washington DC in 1948, they have never been displayed in France. Five hundred of these images will be shown at the Zadkine Museum: visions of a Russia thought to have disappeared forever, a Russia before the Revolution experienced by Zadkine – who was born in Smolensk in 1890 – and that, over the passage of time, may have passed through the artist’s mind.

Commissioner :
Véronique Koehler, deputy to the director of the Bourdelle and Zadkine Museums