Exhibition "Tamara Kafengauz. Green-eyed Space Calls Me ..."

From February 17 to March 12, 2017, the exhibition “Tamara Kafengauz. The space is green-eyed calling me… ". For the first time, more than 140 works by the artist from the private collection of A. G. Egorov will be presented at the exhibition.

The name of Tamara Kafengauz is not new to the domestic history of art, but little is known to the general public. Tamara Andreevna, nee Prudkovskaya, was the sister of Nadezhda Andreevna Udaltsova, the “Amazon” of the Russian avant-garde. But their fates were different.

The end of 1920 - the beginning of 1930 was the time of T. A. Kafengauz’s successful debut. Her illustrations: landscapes and genre scenes, mainly related to the Crimea, were published in magazines and caused rave reviews. Happy marriage and family life turned the art classes of Tamara Kafengauz into a hobby: during the life of the author, many works did not leave the folders, remaining art “for themselves”. At the same time, T. A. Kafengauz and her relatives gave the work of the master to friends and acquaintances, and they became known in the circles of the Moscow scientific and creative intelligentsia.

For many years, the master worked “at the table”, without exhibiting and not receiving public recognition of her watercolors and drawings: sketches for cycles of illustrations of Russian and European classics (Pushkin, Lermontov, Yesenin, Hoffman, Dickens), landscapes of the Moscow Region, Crimea, and Riga seaside. Small and concise, most often deserted, landscapes have the attractiveness of children’s drawings, which always read admiration for the beauty of nature. Created by watercolors, with small sizes, they are very self-sufficient in composition and color scheme, attract the viewer with their sincerity and delicate primitivism. In some ways, especially the late works of the 1950s, are consonant with the even more transparent and light watercolors of Alexander Labas, made in Jurmala around the same years.

In the monograph, which will be presented for the first time at the opening of the exhibition, the life and work of the artist are revealed thanks to the wide attraction of archival documents. To an even greater extent - through an analysis of the preserved artistic heritage, a considerable part of which was concentrated in the famous collection of a large contemporary Moscow collector Alexei Georgievich Egorov. A fan and lover of graphics, he has scrupulously for many years been picking in his collection the works of Russian and Western European watercolorists, draftsmen, engravers. In addition to exhibitions in the capital and in the city on the Neva, the collector is actively exhibiting. He generously acquaints the Russian creative community with various aspects of his collection. It is equally important that the scientific processing of the collection is being carried out at the same time, new names, works of old and modern masters are being introduced into the research cycle. All this helps to create a full-blooded picture of Russian art culture.