Exhibition "Vanguard. On a cart in the XXI century" 6+

Yeltsin Center together with the "Encyclopedia of Russian Avant-garde" represent "Avangard. On a Cart in the XXI Century ”- the first exhibition in the history of the study of Russian art, revealing the history of the display of contemporary art, unprecedented for provincial cities. The project contains almost one and a half hundred works of the 51st artist, from the collections of the Vyatka Art Museum, the Yaransk Museum of Local Lore and the Sloboda Museum of Local Lore.

Exhibition “Vanguard. On a Cart in the XXI Century ”refers to the events of the turbulent post-revolutionary period in Soviet Russia, the new opportunities that opened up for art, and the difficult conditions in which it tried to pave the way for the viewer. In 1918-1921, avant-garde works were purchased in large quantities by the state commission to be sent to various regions of the country. More than 1,100 works were sent to 32 cities and towns, where state free art workshops were opened. On their basis, it was supposed to create a whole network of museums of modern art, which will show innovative art in the provinces and educate artists capable of making a cultural revolution. The devastation and hardships of the post-revolutionary time did not allow this utopian project to be realized.

An important, but little-known, episode turned out to be the fate of three exhibitions organized by the regional department of the Glavmuseum of the city of Sovetsk in the Vyatka province (Kirov region). Two successful exhibitions held in the district of Sovetsk by local educators and enthusiasts in 1920 inspired them to a large project. In October 1921, the Third Traveling Exhibition opened in Sovetsk. She was a blockbuster even by metropolitan standards. The works were brought from Vyatka, Moscow, Petrograd, Kazan. 55 artists participated, 322 works, including Kandinsky, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Udaltsova. For the province, this was an unprecedented scale. The exhibition stunned the audience with its novelty and uniqueness. Many works - especially the avant-garde ones - were not understood by visitors.

According to the plan of the organizers, the paintings were to travel through 7 cities of the province - Sovetsk, Yaransk, Tsarevo-Sanchursk, Malmyzh, Urzhum, Nolinsk, Vyatka. A month after the opening, the masterpieces on broken roads on carts were brought from Sovetsk to Yaransk, where, due to problems with financing and the beginning of off-road conditions, they remained forever. Several times they were going to be taken to Vyatka, but all attempts were unsuccessful. In 1965 alone, 77 out of 322 works were transferred to the Vyatka Art Museum.

The combined efforts of the Yeltsin Center and the team of the Encyclopedia of Russian Avant-garde made it possible to partially recreate these exhibitions. Dozens of works have been waiting for almost 100 years to be rediscovered and tell the viewer their story and the story of a difficult, but important time in which they were created. Unfortunately, not all works have survived to this day, and some of them are still awaiting restoration and improvement of storage conditions.

The exhibition will show for the first time a number of works, specially restored for this project. In total, the Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-garde and the Vyatka Art Museum. Vasnetsovs, restoration of ten paintings was carried out. Among them: "Lying Woman" by Georgy Lazarev, "Square. Set design for Khovanshchina by Fyodor Fedorovsky, Set design by Alexander Rodchenko.

Artists presented at the exhibition: Andreevskaya, Belyanin, Bubnova, Vshivtsev, Grentsevich, Grigoriev, Denshin, Demidov, Drevin, Kandinsky, Kachura-Falileeva, Klyun, Knyazev, Kolesnikov, Kravchenko, Kruglikova, Kudryashov, Lazarev, Malyutin, Malyutina, Malyutina, Medvedev, Merkushev, Miganadzhian, Mikhailovsky, Morgunov, Nikitin, Pain, Paltseva, Pestel, Pleschinsky, Popova, Radimov, Rodchenko, Rozanova, Sinezubov, Sokolov, Stepanova, Timofeev, Udaltsova, Falileev, Fedorov, Fedorova-Mashkova, Fedorova-Mashkova Chekrygin, Chernyshov, Shterenberg, Shcherbakov, Exter, Yakimchenko.

Mashkov Ilya Ivanovich, Landscape, 1911, oil on canvas, 53 x 71 cm

A representative of the Moscow school of painting, one of the founders of the "Jack of Diamonds" society, in 1908 Mashkov (1881-1944) traveled across Europe. This landscape showed his fascination with French art, a style of fauvism in which artists such as Matisse worked and which was distinguished by the use of bright and often unnatural colors and color combinations. It also reflected the elements of primitivism and the "unrestrained riot of the brush" characteristic of Mashkov’s works of this period. The piercing orange sky, in contrast to the deep blue sea and pink mountains, reflected the artist’s greed for paint, as if filling the entire environment.

Ekster Alexandra Alexandrovna, City landscape (Composition), c. 1916, oil on canvas

At the beginning of the 20th century, daring women artists became active members of the new society and zealous participants in the aesthetic revolution. The herald of the Russian avant-garde, Alexandra Exter (1882-1949), graduated from the Kiev Art School and married a successful lawyer, spent several years in Paris, where she studied at the Accademia de la Grand Chaumiere and was friends with Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso and Ardengo Soffichi. She soon moved from rather amateurish still lifes to more mature cubist experiments. Cityscape is one of Exter’s most iconic works, written in the cubo-futurism style - characteristic of the Russian artistic avant-garde of those years, and striving to combine the principles of cubism (decomposition of an object into its constituent structures) and futurism (development of an object in the “fourth dimension”, i.e.in time). Like the intricate ornamentation of a carpet, the entire space of the canvas is filled with geometric shapes of houses and factories. Exter looks at the cityscape from above and spreads it out on the surface of the canvas - dismembering buildings into composite forms and folding them again.

V.V. Kandinsky "Sketch for the composition" Red with black ", 1915, paper, watercolor, ink, varnish, 22.8x33.8.

The work belongs to the Moscow period of Wassily Kandinsky’s work (1866 - 1944), when the master did little because of his state duties. Small fantastic designs, similar to graphic signs-symbols, are wonderfully combined inside the entire composition of 1915, yellow, blue, red spots, colored clouds, soft, often outlined, form the most complex combinations. Among them, like lightning of different colors, lines flicker in zigzags. These spots are sometimes more, sometimes less. This is a chorus of colors bursting into the soul from nature, according to the artist himself.

The watercolor was glued back to the drawing by V. Chekrygin (1897 - 1922) "Scene in the Field" and in this form it arrived from Yaransk (Kirov Region) to the Kirov Art Museum in 1965. Watercolor is a sketch for the work “Composition. Red with Black "1920, located in the State Museum of Arts of the Uzbek SSR (Tashkent).

Feshin Nikolay Ivanovich “At the samovar. Portrait of O.M. Yaseneva ", 1913, oil on canvas, 80.6x98.4

In his declining years I.E. Repin (1844-1930) will name N.I. Feshin the best painter of Russia. In Kazan, Feshin created his most outstanding works of the Russian period. One of these is the portrait of O.M. Yaseneva, written during the period when she came from Ufa to Kazan to enter the Kazan Higher Courses for Women.

Yaseneva O.M. left memories of the creation of the portrait: “One day, in the spring of 1913… A short, modestly dressed young man approached us… Feshin (it was he)… A few days later… Feshin expressed a desire to paint my portrait… Feshin asked me to prepared for the session a morning dress - a bonnet or matinee… During the sessions, he talked about his trips to Europe… Feshin was very demanding about his work. He was upset that he could not express what he intended, and often washed off or smeared part of the canvas and started again.

The sessions did not last very long. My exams began, and Nikolai Ivanovich said that he would take a break from his work, and did not finish the portrait a little. "

Lyubov Popova. Picturesque architectonics. 1918. SCM

Lyubov Popova called her geometric compositions written in 1916-1918 "Picturesque Architectonists". It was her own version of non-objective painting associated with the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich.

The term “architectonics” used by Popova indicates that she considered the principle of architectonicity, which came from architecture, to be an important source for the works of this cycle. The cycle of non-objective works, shown by her in 1916 at the exhibition "Jack of Diamonds", was called "Shah-Zinda". This emphasized the source of the creation of non-objective compositions - the famous architectural monument of medieval Samarkand, which Popova saw during a trip to Central Asia in 1916.

Throughout 1917, the evolution of "pictorial architectonics" followed the path of compositional complication: there is an intersection and interpenetration of color planes. During this time, Popova creates about a hundred works. In her note “Analysis of things from photographs” she writes: “The picturesque space is built by the curtain relationship of planes. The line is introduced regardless of the volume in its pure form, as a graphic outline. Color plays a textured role and [its] tension determines the construction of space. "

"Picturesque architectonics", executed in 1918 (there are more than twenty of them), bring the principles of combining color planes to perfection. Further in the work of Popova follows a new breakthrough into space - the cycle of "Picturesque constructions" (1920).

Alexey Kravchenko. Rainbow. 1913. VKhM

Alexei Kravchenko’s painting "Rainbow" was written in 1913, when his individual painting style was already taking shape. By this time, Kravchenko completed his art education. First, he graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he attended the school of painting skills of Sergei Ivanov, Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov. Then he received graphic arts lessons from the famous draftsman Shimon Holloshi in Munich.

In the early 1910s, Kravchenko made a creative journey across Italy and Greece, where he studied classical art.

At the same time, he was carried away by contemporary French art, and Paul Cezanne became for him a kind of guiding star in painting.

All these varied tendencies are concentrated in the painting "Rainbow". The landscape is built on the classical model - the wings (trees) are in the foreground, behind them a landscape opens up, leading the gaze into the depths. But at the same time, the landscape looks rather arbitrary, since it is painted with bright colors in the style of Moscow Sezannism.

The painting "Rainbow" deserves attention as the final work of early Kravchenko.

Exhibition curators

Andrey Sarabyanov (Moscow) - art critic, curator, publisher, researcher of the Russian avant-garde, editor of the "Encyclopedia of the Russian avant-garde".

Natalia Murray (London) - art critic, curator, lecturer at the Courtauld Institute in London.

Anna Shakina (Kirov) - art critic, candidate of art history, director of the Vyatka Art Museum. Vasnetsov.

With the participation of the cultural and publishing project "Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-garde".