Exhibition-Installation "Anatomy of Cubism"

Venue: Main building (hall №31)

August 30 at the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin exhibition-installation "Anatomy of Cubism" will open. It will provide an opportunity for the general public to get acquainted for the first time with the history of the birth of one of the main artistic movements of the twentieth century - Cubism (1907–1923) - “apparently the most important and, of course, the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance,” wrote in her monograph “ Cubism”British historian John Golding.

The core of the exposition is a notebook with sketches by Pablo Picasso for "Avignon Maidens" (1907) - a picture that changed the course of world art history. Today, a large-scale canvas is part of the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and does not leave the permanent exhibition. At the Moscow exhibition for the first time more than 60 drawings from a notebook created by the artist in May - June 1907 and stored in the collection of the Museo Casa Natal Museum in Malaga will be shown.

Avignon Maidens is a work that has opened a new era in the history of art. This is “voluntarily unfinished” (as Picasso himself characterized it) a research picture, a search picture, working on which the artist was looking for a different approach to portraying space and perspective, using new expressive means, trying to find answers to questions about the origins of the universe.

Picasso worked on the painting "Avignon Maidens" in two stages, for nine months, and during this time he created 809 sketches and sketches. Most of them were kept by the artist for a long time, and, as the author of the catalog-reason “Cubism Picasso” and one of the main biographers of the artist Pierre Dex wrote, “it seems that Picasso tried to avoid public display of preparatory sketches for his huge canvas, maybe out of fear to be drawn into a discussion that annoyed him to the core about the origins of his plan. ” A small student notebook with priceless sketches was for many years in the collection of Picasso’s heirs, and in 2006 was acquired by the Picasso House Museum in Malaga.

“For me, art has neither past nor future <…> The art of the Greeks, Egyptians and great artists of other times is not the art of the past; today it can be more vital than ever, ”said Pablo Picasso in a 1923 interview. In support of this statement of the artist, in addition to drawings from the collection of the Spanish museum, the exposition will feature masterpieces of Ancient Egypt, antique ceramics, decorative and applied art of the Hellenistic era - about 20 works from the permanent exhibition and storage of the Pushkin Museum to them. A.S. Pushkin. And, of course, this exhibition would not have been possible without African figurines and Picasso gouache from the world famous collection of Sergei Schukin. With the help of a huge installation table, the architects of the exhibition will create “a deliberate and organized mess that Picasso creates everywhere,” as Ilya Ehrenburg wrote in memoirs of his friend. Taken together, these masterpieces will retrospectively recreate the train of thoughts and associations of Pablo Picasso.

The exhibition will open with a painting by Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) “Bathing” (1890–1894) from the collection of the Pushkin Museum. “Cezanne! He is our common father, ”exclaimed Picasso, and our contemporary, French writer Philippe Sollers, called this picture“ the Gospel of modernity. ” “Bathing” is a plot that Cezanne worked on for two decades and created more than forty options, is rightfully considered a work that laid the foundation for the search for new forms in painting and the gradual abandonment of objectivity.

This unique exhibition will allow the Russian public to see in a new perspective the early works of Pablo Picasso, to understand the origins of the greatest avant-garde artist of the twentieth century of Spanish origin.

Marina Loshak, Director of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin:

This year we are opening three very important exhibitions related to the name of Pablo Picasso. The first of them is “The Anatomy of Cubism”. We will show the very beginning of the search, the first experimental steps of the great artist in the field of cubism. This small, but unusually interesting, diverse and voluminous exposition will become the prologue of our big “French” autumn. Following it, we will present to the audience an exhibition dedicated to the Parisian salon of Baroness Helen Ettingen and the artistic life of Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as a large-scale project about the love story of Picasso and his wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova.

The exhibition was created jointly by the Picasso House Museum in Malaga, the curatorial team of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin, which included Suria Sadekova, Anna Klochkova, Nikolai Molok, and architects Nadezhda Korbut and Cyril Ass.