PARIS, FRANCE.-Musée d'Orsay presents A Quest for Identity: Russian Art in the Second Half of the 19th Century, on view through January 8, 2006. During the second half of the nineteenth century, many Russian artists, feeling moved to develop a national art, rejected or questioned the Western models taught in the Saint Petersburg and Moscow academies. The resurge in interest in Slavonic sources, myths, history and folk art, and the specifics of the contemporary social and political conditions, all lent themselves to the emergence of an identifiably "Russian" art. The movement attracted painters, notably Repin, Kramskoy and Savistsky, and photographers such as Boldirev, Dmitriev and Mazurin.

This quest for identity reached its peak in the Neo-Russian movement which drew-in all artistic disciplines and revolved around two centres of creativity: Abramtsevo near Moscow, and Talashkino near Smolensk. During the years 1905-1910, the Neo-Primitivist movement took up the baton with painters Goncharova, Larionov and Malevich and wood sculptors Golubkina and Konenkov. The effect of these artists was to assure that the emerging avant-garde movements were rooted in the fecund heritage of ancient and modern Russia.

The Russian Land - In the 1870s, with the emergence of a new generation of landscape painters, the land itself - "Mother Russia" - became one of the quintessential expressions of Russian culture in both the visual arts and literature. Rejecting the classical, idealised or Italianised landscapes of their predecessors, artists such as Kouindji, Nesterov and Levitan, turned to the geography and natural environment of the real Russia.

This interest in the land may be explained by the slow pace of urbanisation in Russia and the pull which rural life exerted on the intelligentsia. Russian landscape paintings of this period often included a human presence; Levitan's painting, Above Eternal Rest, symbolises the Russian people's closeness to their land with its small, isolated wooden church and churchyard, situated in an overwhelming landscape.

Although using a different approach, Kuznetsov's peasant folklore illustration, Celebration Day, equally reflects Russians' intimacy with nature.

The Russian subject started to become a serious issue from the early 1860s onwards. The new generation, influenced particularly by the writings of Chernyshevsky (Aesthetic Relations in Art and Reality, 1855) and Prakhov, called for a Russian revival that would break from the classical idealism upheld by the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts.