The State Tretyakov Gallery

This guide to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow centers on January 1913, when a young icon painter walked up to Ilya Repin's painting of Ivan the Terrible and his dying son, pulled a gardening knife from his coat, and struck the canvas three times. It follows Abram Balashov, the twenty-eight-year-old attacker, through his arrest, and reaches forward to a second attack on the same painting more than a century later, in 2018. Look closely at the frame as you approach the canvas — the old knife marks are still part of the story.