FALK, MASHKOV, KUZNETSOV ... THE CIRCLE OF POSTAVANGUARD’S ARTISTS OF THE 1920-1960s Automatic translate

January 23, 2020 at 17.00 in the Gallery of Modern Art of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan (Kazan, Karl Marx St., 57) will open the exhibition of post-avant-garde graphics from the collection of the Pushkin Museum

The art of the post-avant-garde, that is, the art of the 1920-1930s, as well as of the following decades, when the creators of the avant-garde and their circle of followers were alive, a bright, significant and eventful phenomenon in Russian history, the environment from which the alternative art of Russia of the past emerged centuries.

The largest names of innovators of Russian art at the beginning of the 20th century are Ilya Mashkov, Robert Falk, Pavel Kuznetsov. Each of them either continued its main line from the 1920s. and further, like R. Falk, either found new internal resources, continuing his magnificent work, like I. Mashkov and P. Kuznetsov.

This exhibition is parallel to the project “Pavel Filonov and his students. Seeing eye, knowing eye ”from the collection of the Russian Museum, which is now taking place within the walls of the Gallery of Modern Art of the Pushkin Museum. The Kazan Museum also has works by Filonov’s students - Valentin Kurdov (1940s) and Eugene Kibrik, a famous book illustrator. Their work was first presented at the exhibition.

Also interesting is the plot connected with Vera Sholpo, an artist who, by the will of life circumstances, ended up in Kazan in 1937 and lived here all her life. It was she, the beginning Leningrad artist in 1928, who was addressed to the famous letter of Pavel Filonov, in which he explained his program of analytical art related to the dualism of the concepts “seeing eye” - “knowing eye”. The letter was kept in Kazan for a long time in the family of Vera Sholpo and her son Andrei Wiesel. For the first time, the text of this letter can be read at the exhibition.

The art of the post-avant-garde of the Soviet era incorporated elements of "world art", avant-garde, academic and folk art, realism of the period of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, the emerging socialist realism. Being at the crossroads between the avant-garde and socialist realism, the artists were looking for their personal “third” path. This art turned out to be outside of politics and deep concepts, it did not seek to rebuild the world, but possessed a much more sensual, aesthetic principle, close and understandable to a simple person.

In total, the exhibition features about seventy rarely shown works of post-avant-garde graphics.

The exhibition runs through February 23, 2020.

Dina Akhmetova, art critic.