Мальчик

April – July 1901

First trip abroad: Munich

Paid for by earnings from designing and modelling tiles at a pottery works near Moscow and from other commissions, his first trip abroad takes him to Munich, where he spends more than a month at Anton Ažbe’s private art school.

October 1905 – February 1906

Journey through Italy

He visits Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples and Genoa; among his favourite masters he later named Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael and Giorgione. Meeting the classics shows him that the training he received in St Petersburg and Moscow is not enough.

May 1906

Move to Paris: the Colarossi academy

Wanting to absorb classical European painting and reach the level of its latest achievements, he decides on a longer stay abroad: he moves to Paris and begins to study at Colarossi’s private academy.

November 1906

Meets Margarita Jovanović

At her mother’s boarding house near Paris he meets the twenty-year-old Margarita Jovanović, half Serbian and half Belgian, soon to become his wife, Maria Fyodorovna Petrova-Vodkina (“Mara”, as he called her). For the first years they live in a civil marriage.

November 1909

First solo exhibition in Russia

The first solo exhibition of his work in Russia is held at the editorial office of the newly launched magazine Apollon.

2 – 6 March 1910

Repin’s letter on “The Dream” and the defence by Benois and Bakst

On 2 March Ilya Repin’s letter appears in Birzhevye Vedomosti; seeing decadence in the picture, he calls its author an ignoramus who imitates Matisse and Gauguin. Alexandre Benois (5 March) and Léon Bakst (6 March) come to his defence, and the quarrel runs on for several months.