Lake of Fairies, Martiros Saryan

Blue Rose was a well-known and influential Symbolist art association, which was named after the remarkable exhibition. Its core team consisted of participants of the Scarlet Rose exhibition of 1904.
The Blue Rose exhibition financed by the amateur artist, patron and publisher of the Golden Fleece magazine Nikolay Ryabushinsky was opened in Moscow on March 18, 1907 .
The exhibition halls decorated with silver-gray and gentle-blue fabrics housed paintings and graphic art works by fourteen artists, such as Pavel Kuznetsov, Pyotr Utkin, Nikolay Sapunov, Martiros Saryan, Sergey Sudeykin, Nikolay Krymov, Anatoly Arapov, Arthur Fonvizin, Nicholas and Vassily Milioti, Nikolay Feofilaktov, Vladimir Drittenpreice, Ivan Knabe and Nikolay Ryabushinsky. Sculptures by A. Matveev and P. Bromirsky were also exhibited there. The exhibition was accompanied with Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov reciting their own poems and the best musicians performing Russian composers' works.
The name of the exhibition and art group The Blue Rose, as well as its stylistics were closely connected with the aethetics of Symbolism. Blue color, being the color of the sky, water, and infinite space, represented poetic dream and reality, melancholy and hope.
The Blue Rose was a group exhibition rallied by a uniform aesthetic program. Thanks to its coming up the earlier art associations, The World of Art among them, receded into the background. Having taken over the job of the World of Art association, the Blue Rose at the same time, resisted to the former's stylism and literariness and contributed decisively into the artistic consciousness of the Silver Age. It was the first step of the Russian art beyond the limits of teh 19th century.
The Blue Rose turned pre-eminent due to the fact that its artists managed to figuratively convey the non-material categories of emotions, moods, and deep heartfelt experiences. Having made Neo-Primitivism its part and parcel, The Blue Rose came to be the forerunner of the Russian Avant-garde. Its concepts and ideas were picked up and developed by Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Kazimir Malevich in their own ways.
The exhibition was attended by more than five thousand people. The Blue Rose association ceased to exist in 1910. Its members gathered once again at the exhibition Masters of the Blue Rose in the Tretyakov Gallery in 1925.