Exhibition of Fedot Sychkov, the 'Artist of Joy'

About exhibition

One of the largest and most unique parts of the museum collection is a holdings of works (about 600 paintings and graphic works, studies, sketches) by the People's Artist of Mordovia, Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR and the MASSR, Fedot Vasilievich Sychkov (1870–1958), a talented, original painter of everyday life in the Russian village who stood at the origins of Mordovian professional visual art. Visitors encounter cheerful, masterfully executed works whose protagonists were the artist's fellow villagers. The exhibition is a kind of chronicle of life in his native region. It includes: scenes of everyday and festive rural life; open, spirited, smiling images of peasant girls and children; the familiar, unpretentious landscape of the native village and bright sights of Italy and France filled with southern sunlight; and an unusually beautiful landscape-style still life. F. V. Sychkov saw his purpose in art as revealing the uniqueness of village existence, which he felt and understood more deeply than many other masters, because he came from that environment and never broke his ties with it. In a turbulent era of social upheaval and complex ideological and aesthetic searching, F. V. Sychkov remained a faithful continuer of the best traditions of the 19th-century Russian realist school of painting.