Pushkin Museum announces exhibition plans for 2020

The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has announced exhibition plans for 2020. In the new season, viewers will see a unique collection of graphics from the museum’s collection, which covers five centuries of European drawing and includes works by prominent artists - from Albrecht Durer to Henri Matisse. The Pushkin Museum will present two significant exhibitions of Italian art - it will show the collection of the Capodimonte Neapolitan Museum, which includes world masterpieces of two major periods in art - the Renaissance and Baroque, and will bring the works of the 16th century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo to Russia for the first time. In addition, the plans include a large-scale personal exhibition of one of the most influential contemporary masters of video installations Bill Viola; a joint project with the Parisian Museum on the Branly embankment, the Tattoo project, dedicated to the art of tattooing; showing a collection of modern graphics of the Guerlain family. The traditional music festival “December Evenings”, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2020, will be accompanied by an exposition dedicated to the great pianist and founder of the festival, Svyatoslav Richter.

The main building

The first exhibition of 2020 - “From Dürer to Matisse. Five centuries of European drawing from the collection of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin ”- will open in the Main Building on March 24. In 2019, the project was successfully held in Paris at the Custodia Foundation. For the first time, the exhibition will present to the Russian audience all the diversity and richness of the collection of drawings stored in the Pushkin Museum. The exposition will include about 170 sheets of the period from the end of the XV to the middle of the XX century. Among the authors are such great masters as Dürer, Carpaccio, Veronese, Bernini, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, Boucher, Tiepolo, David, Renoir, Picasso, Chagall, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Malevich, Bryullov, Vrubel and many others. Exhibits will occupy the entire central exhibition axis of the museum.

A large project within the framework of the Pushkin XXI direction will be the first solo exhibition in Russia by the artist Bill Viola, one of the most influential contemporary masters of video installations, which will open on July 14. The exposition will cover 14 years of the work of Bill Viola (from 2000 to 2014). The artist’s works will enter into dialogue with classical art, which will be simultaneously presented at the exhibition “Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples”.

The exhibition “Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples” will become one of the most important projects of 2020 (previously the Pushkin Museum presented the exhibition “Guests from Naples. Artemisia Gentileschi and Contemporaries”). It will be held in July in the main building of the museum. The exhibition features 50 unique paintings and objects of applied art from the rich collection of the Museum and the Royal Park of Capodimonte in Naples. The main idea of the exhibition is to tell and show the history of the Capodimonte Museum, which stores the world masterpieces of the two most important periods in art - the Renaissance and the Baroque. The basis of the collection is works from the collection of Farnese (Titian, Rafael, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and many others), as well as the acquisition of the Bourbon dynasty, who ruled in Naples in the XVIII and XIX centuries. The culmination of the exhibition is a “dialogue” of works by two innovators of the Baroque era - Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, who influenced the subsequent development of European art.

Following the exhibition of Neapolitan art in December, another project dedicated to Italian art will open - "Giuseppe Arcimboldo and his time." The artist’s works will come to Russia for the first time. The main objective of the exhibition is to show the works of Archimboldo (1526–1593) in the broad context of European culture of the late mannerism of the turn of the 16th – 17th centuries. The exhibition will feature the work of Archimboldo and his contemporaries, about 80 works of painting, drawing (drawing and engraving) and objects of applied art, of which 8 are the famous “heads” that will be provided by museums in Italy, Sweden, Germany, Japan and other countries.

The exhibition "XX Century Svyatoslav Richter" will mark the 40th anniversary of the International Music Festival "December Evenings", founded by Svyatoslav Theofilovich Richter and Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova. The project is a reflection on the era in which the great Russian musician lived. The choice of works of domestic and foreign musical art will not only reflect Richter’s artistic preferences, but rather in an associative way to reveal his experiences, drama and complexity of the time.

Art Gallery of Europe and America of the 19th – 20th Centuries

One of the main exhibitions of the Gallery in 2020 will be the project “Tattoo” (“Tattoo”) together with the Paris Museum on the Branly embankment. The exhibition dedicated to the art of tattooing will open on March 3. About 150 works of large-scale chronological and geographical coverage, telling the history of this phenomenon will be shown. The exhibition will present the stages of tattoo development in different regions of the world on various materials: from objects of traditional art to the works of modern artists who comprehend the theme of tattoo in their work; from engravings of the early New Age to art photographs. The tattoos themselves will be shown in an unusual way: specially for this project, voluminous silicone models were created, casts from parts of the body on which drawings were made by leading tattoo artists from around the world.

Another major project, “An Exhibition of Contemporary Graphics from the Collection of the Pompidou Center (Collection of the Guerlain Family)”, will open in the Gallery on October 27. The exhibition will include about 200 works of graphics collected by Daniel and Florence Guerlain. Among the artists represented at the exhibition are Marc Dion, Kiki Smith, Giuseppe Penone, Benoit Fougerol, Silvia Bashli, as well as Pavel Pepperstein, Sergey Anufriev, Alexander Ponomarev.

Also, two chamber exhibitions will be held at the Pushkin Museum. In the fall of 2020, it is planned to hold the exhibition "Buddhist sculpture of Korea" (works from the National Museum of Korea), dedicated to the year of cultural exchanges between Russia and Korea, namely the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the countries. The Pushkin Museum will present the best examples of Buddhist sculpture; some of them have the status of "national treasure of Korea."

In the winter of 2020, the exhibition "Keepers. The Brotherhood of the Key ”to the 75th anniversary of the numismatics department of the Pushkin Museum im. A.S. Pushkin (1945–2020), which will show the treasures of the numismatic collection since the creation of the department.