Exhibition "Wandering Stars:
Soviet Jewry in Pre-War Art"

The exhibition “Wandering Stars: Soviet Jewry in Pre-War Art” is opening at the Na Shabolovka Gallery of the Moscow Exhibition Halls Association, which won the Second Competition for Museum and Exhibition Grants of the Russian Jewish Congress.

The topic of Soviet nation-building is considered to be the territory of propaganda, which was initially revived by the experiments of the national vanguards. The Jewish avant-garde was one of the brightest among them: its main incarnation was the work of the Artistic Section of the League of Jewish Culture (Kultur-League). After its actual liquidation in the mid-1920s, the party gradually tightened control over the outline of the image of Soviet Jewry and related subjects, so that by the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Jewish theme in the USSR was in the shadow of "supranational" politics. combined with anti-religious pathos.

The exhibition combines fine arts (painting, graphics, photography), publications from 1910-1940, giving an idea of the evolution of Jewish social life in Russia, and objects of material culture, Jewish religious life and folk art. Among the authors presented at the exhibition are Pavel Zaltsman, Alexander Labas, Meer Axelrod, Robert Falk, Alexander Tyshler, El Lissitzky, Solomon Nikritin, Lydia Zholtkevich, Aron Traskunov, Lev Aronov, Mark Weinstein, Mendel Gorshman, Ilya Chashnik, Solomon Yudovin and others… Each of these artists understood their distance from Jewish culture in different ways, and the segments of the exhibition are built on the play of these distances, showing different phases of interaction between Soviet and Jewish narratives.

In the exposition you can see pictorial and graphic sketches for the performances of GOSET, sketches and panels based on business trips to Jewish collective farms and communes, landscapes and types of Soviet townships, footage from films and posters. But its central part is devoted to the chamber painting of the 1930s and early 40s, which replaced the agitation and propaganda art of the first post-revolutionary decades. It is these little-studied works created "on the table" that allow us to see the 1930s-1940s as an important stage in the history of Russian Jewish culture, which developed outside the Sovietizing facade. The upper border - the beginning of the forties - was chosen not only as the final point of the project for the modernization of Jewry in the USSR, but also as the end of the pre-war Leningrad culture, which maintained a lively connection with Russian modernity.

The exhibition presents works from the collection of the Museum of the History of Jews in Russia, the Multimedia Art Museum, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Public Historical Library of Russia, the A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theater Museum and the Municipal Art Gallery of the city of Krasnoarmeysk.

In 2020, the exhibition became one of the winners of the Second Grant Competition of the Russian Jewish Congress for the development of museum and exhibition projects in the field of Jewish culture. 64 projects from 36 cities were submitted for consideration by the expert council, and 20 projects were included in the short-list compiled by the experts, which was considered by the jury. In the near future, RJC will announce the acceptance of applications for its Third Competition for Museum and Exhibition Grants. Any non-profit, budgetary and public organizations will again be able to apply for the competition: museums, theaters, community centers, research institutes that have online or offline presentation sites.

Curator: Nadya Plungyan
Architect: Alexandra Selivanova