Banu Babayeva Russian and European Fine Art presents, for the first time, The Russian Painters of the Early 20th Century exhibition. The exposition comprises over sixty works, most of which were painted by artists of the Mir Iskusstva (World of Art) movement established in 1898 in St. Petersburg by a group of young painters and graphic artists. The purpose of this movement was to study the history of art, past and present, and the main criterion for selecting works for the Mir Iskusstva exhibitions was “mastery and creativity.” The artists supported artistic individualism and free unveiling by an artist of their talent. They denied academism as a system which deprived artists of their right to self-expression. The main achievements of miriskusniki, as they were called, were the development of new principles of scenic and decorative painting, book graphics and illustration. The movement included Léon Bakst, Alexandre Benois, Sergei Diaghilev, Konstantin Somov, Boris Kustodiev, Nicholas Roerich, Valentin Serov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexandre Jacovleff and Dmitry Bouchene. Other artists also took part in the exhibitions of Mir Iskusstva, including Konstantin Korovin, Marc Chagall, Robert Falk and Isaak Brodsky, among others. The last exhibition of Mir Iskusstva took place in Paris in 1927.