School & schoolkids in Russian art (PICS)

For the first time, Russian painters turned to depicting ordinary people in the 19th century. Peasant children and rural schools appeared in the paintings of realists and the Peredvizhniki artists. 

They tended to show not only idyllic images and students’ bright faces, but also dramatic genre scenes, such as failing exams. 

Artist Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky created a whole series of genre paintings of peasant education. He depicted not only children, but also adults in the classroom. There is an interesting contrast between the appearance of pupils (often in lapti bast shoes and tattered clothing) and the neat atmosphere of the school. 

During the Soviet era, education became one of the key subjects of Socialist Realism, the only official art in the USSR. In those paintings, we see happy (and athletic) pioneers, students in school uniforms and preparations for September 1, which, from the 1930s, became the unified first day of the school year throughout the USSR (and, from 1984, an official day known as ‘Knowledge Day’).

One of the most famous paintings about school is Fyodor Reshetnikov’s ‘Low Marks Again’ (which, in a way, repeats the plot from Dmitry Zhukov’s painting ‘Failed’, 1885, but already in a new reality and setting. We see a whole palette of emotions - the shame on the face of the schoolboy, the sadness of his mother, the mockery of his younger brother and the reproach of his excelling sister. Only the dog sympathizes with the boy. 

Reshetnikov has a whole trilogy about a schoolboy - the below artwork ‘Reexamination’ shows the same boy bored with his studies, while the other boys are enjoying the summer. 

And the painting ‘Arrived on Vacation’ depicts an exemplary Suvorov cadet saluting his grandfather, whom he came to visit on winter vacation. The boy is obviously proud of his status and his uniform. 

Sergei Grigoriev, a social realist artist, created a series of genre paintings about school. He pointedly showed the social side of school - admission to the Komsomol youth organization - as a whole exam, where the student appears before a commission of similar schoolchildren.

Or, for example, the frequent practice, in a special school assembly, of shaming a child for an F grade. Reproductions of this picture were widely circulated in Soviet schools.  

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