The epoch of Art Nouveau was an epoch of a new "cultural renaissance" which spanned the period from the 1890s to the 1910s (it is conventionally considered to have come to an end by 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War). Whereas Art Nouveau, as a dominant style of the turn of the 19th century, served as a backdrop for the emergence of a sense of modernity – its iconography and visual language at times encompassing contradictory understandings of such grand themes as the past, time and space – as a style in its own right it became a culminating embodiment of the romantic idealism of the past centuries.
The range of aesthetic and formal references as well as artistic trends related to them is particularly broad in the art of the 1890s-1910s. However it is the same integrated environment that has given rise to these mutually remote artistic endeavors. In Russia an interest in the newest French movements and western discoveries was characteristic of the Romantic-Symbolists of Mir Iskusstva and Blue Rose, the Russian Impressionists of Union of Russian Artists and the Futurists and Neo-Primitivists of Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail. The effects of a common starting point – an alluring dream of mythopoeia, that is to say of creating a self-sufficient artistic reality – in one way or another can be sensed in all the creatively vibrant quests of the early 20th century.
With that being said the Art Nouveau – on the Way to Modernism hall aims to reveal the environment, marked by a greater appreciation of the decorative arts, and the lyrically subjective mindset that were characteristic of the first stage of the penetration of innovative tendencies from abroad into Russian art in the late 19th century. These tendencies, concurrent with the flourishing of Art Nouveau, are related to both Symbolism and Russian Impressionism. Presented in this hall are these styles' successors. The work of these artists resonates, in one way or another, with artistic tendencies of two major movements of the Art Nouveau epoch – Mir Iskusstva (1898–1904; 1906; 1910–1924) and Union of Russian Artists (Soyuz Russkikh Khudozhnikov, SRKh, 1903–1924). Initially conceived as a successor to pioneering artistic ideals in St Petersburg's Mir Iskusstva, Moscow's SRKh differed in its aesthetic approach from the sophisticated culture of "Nevsky Pickwickers", as A. Benois dubbed Mir Iskusstva. In comparison with the manner inherent to the Mir Iskusstva members – with its graphic tendency toward stylization and its visual poetics imbued by the nostalgia for an imagined reality – the art of the SRKh plein air artists was predicated on and inspired by realistic landscape painting, which endowed it with a more painterly aspect but at the same more conservatism in terms of verisimilitude.
Encompassing both tendencies of the development of Russian Art Nouveau, works from Roman Babichev's collection allow a less conflicting outlook on the harmonious artistic climate of the turn of the 20th century, where a Romantic Realistic air was not in opposition to a formal decorative search that was intensive in its expressiveness. The art of Art Nouveau epoch, which has raised the poetics of visual language to new heights of suggestiveness, can be justly called, using Andrey Bely's words, "the years of new dawns", a "nodal point" on the artistic biography of the 20th century – a source of the inner, emotional, and plastic oscillations that prefigured the "epoch of new perceptions" of the early avant-garde. Olga Davydova