The exhibition includes works from the State Russian Museum, the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts, the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, and the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan. In addition, works from more than 10 private collections are on display.

In Russian art of the first half of the 20th century, at least three figures stand out not only as outstanding figures but also as unifying figures: Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov, and Konstantin Petrov-Vodkin. This exhibition aims to present Petrov-Vodkin in the uniqueness of his creative consciousness, which included a distinctive vision of community and mutual understanding, which he expected from his colleagues and students. Unlike the aforementioned great contemporaries, Petrov-Vodkin did not display life-building ambitions and did not demand that his students adhere to art as a doctrine. He was a teacher in a more traditional professional sense: he did not so much charge his followers with the energy of visual recoding of the world, as he shared the experience of consistent penetration into its essence — "the science of seeing."

The pedagogical approach (the theory of the trichromatic spectrum, the theory of spherical perspective, the "problem of movement") objectified the artist’s personal quest; this mutual adjustment of theory and practice gave Petrov-Vodkin's method a particular persuasiveness. The artist had been actively teaching since 1910 (at the School of E.N. Zvantseva). He came to a school where progressive artistic pedagogy already existed (in fact, L. Bakst brought him in as his successor). The exhibition presents the "Zvantseva group" for the first time as a coherent phenomenon, reflecting the stylistic interests of the era, primarily Symbolism and the beginnings of Expressionism. The very strong student body predetermined the nature of their relationship with Petrov-Vodkin: he was both a teacher and (this applies especially to N. Lermontova) a senior artistic comrade. It’s worth noting that the "Zvantsevites" (N. Lermontov, F. Shikhmanov, R. Kotovich-Borisyak) are presented so comprehensively for the first time.

From 1918 to 1932, Petrov-Vodkin taught at the Academy of Arts (throughout all its reorganizations and renamings). His system was, for a period, practically the only fully articulated and coherent teaching methodology, so over a hundred first-year students came into contact with Petrov-Vodkin during this time. It should be noted that even in subsequent years, students' assignments to professors were rather conditional; they were free (at least during the academic year) to work in neighboring studios (sometimes this was not reflected in their personal files). Thus, young artists sometimes acknowledged Petrov-Vodkin's role in their development and even left memoirs about their studies, without formally being listed as his students.

In connection with Petrov-Vodkin's teaching activities, an important question arises regarding the distinction between two concepts. Specifically, the relationship between the young artist and the school in a methodological sense (training "according to the objective method"), and Petrov-Vodkin's influence on the young artist’s work. Works of a teaching and staging nature, discovered, including during preparation for this exhibition (by A. Zernov, T. Kuperwasser, M. Lomakina, G. Efros, E. Blagoveshchenskaya, and others), provide clear insights into the "objective method" as a set of theoretical principles consistently implemented in a material sense. Being his student meant passing a certain professional test: "I did not breed amateurs," the artist testified. The fact that Petrov-Vodkin's stagings—primarily nudes—carry very specific figurative loads as their overarching goal also deserves separate study.

The representation of the "objective method" in the works of several young artists, shown for the first time or perhaps for the first time in this context, will hopefully be the exhibition’s revelation. The exhibition presents a large body of work by artists who transcended Petrov-Vodkin's "science of seeing" and developed into fully independent masters. In relation to them, the question arises of the concentration of the "Vodkin-esque" substance, the degree of kinship with their teacher. A number of artists, despite their powerful individuality, retained a direct dialogue with their teacher: this applies primarily to the young A. Lappo-Danilevsky, L. Chupyatov, P. Golubyatnikov, P. Sokolov, and V. Dmitriev, but not only to them.

There’s also a further level of Petrov-Vodkin's influence: the work of artists who have moved considerably away from the specific issues that preoccupied their teacher, yet who retained Petrov-Vodkin's appetite for structuring the optical—both in terms of the pictorial-spatial organization of the image and in terms of the organization of viewing, that is, the viewer’s navigation "within the painting." Thus, certain structural features of Petrov-Vodkin's figurative style are easily discernible in the works of A. Samokhvalov and A. Pakhomov, I. Lizak and V. Malagis, E. Evenbakh and A. Zernov. However, Petrov-Vodkin's influence doesn’t end there.

N. Adaskina rightly writes: "It is important to understand that Petrov-Vodkin was truly a man and artist of archetypal thinking; it was precisely in this way that he experienced and interpreted reality." Archetypality is understood as a combination of "narrative-semantic and situational motifs." The persistence of Petrov-Vodkin archetypes (for example, "motherhood"), rooted in the Russian tradition of art appreciation, made them constant components of Russian artistic life for many decades, including in the late 1920s and 1930s. Even artists who, due to the dynamics of their individual development, distanced themselves from Petrov-Vodkin stylistics, retained a connection with him on an archetypal level. And in the ongoing rethinking of the art of this period, identifying these connections could have significant historical and cultural implications. Specifically, it could change perceptions of the configuration of Symbolism in the post-avant-garde period. Not to mention elevating this issue to the level of debate about realism in European art between the two wars.

Thus, the concept of the "Petrov-Vodkin Circle" appears fluid and multifaceted, designed to accommodate new materials and interpretations.