“The Russian [artist] should finally stand on his own feet in art. It’s time to throw away those foreign diapers—thank God, we’ve grown a beard already but we are still walking in an Italian toddler’s harness. It’s time to think about the creation of our own Russian school, about our own national art! ... Our art dwells in slavery to the Academy [of Arts], which is itself a slave of Western art. Our task now— the task of Russian artists—is to get free of this slavery”
Ilya Repin, Dalekoe blizkoe (Leningrad, 1982)
