Exhibition "Behind the Facade of the Epoch". Stories of Moscow artists of the 1920s - 1940s

The Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, together with the Galeyev-Gallery, presents an exhibition project "Behind the Facade of the Epoch" dedicated to Moscow artists, whose creative heyday fell on the crucial years for Soviet culture in the 1920s - 1930s. Masters of independent art - Lev Aronov, Anatoly Gusyatinsky, Lev Zevin, Maria Ilf-Tarasenko, Georgy Pavilionov, Nikolai Prokoshev, Ivan and Nadezhda Sveshnikovs, Roman Semashkevich, Lydia Khromova, Anton Chirkov, Konstantin Edelstein, Sergei Eiges and others. These are people of very different social origins, who left young or in the prime of their creative powers, looking for their own path, style and themes, but did not fit into the official Soviet discourse. Their stories and destinies are closely intertwined, forming a certain social network of that time.

The group of these artists is not homogeneous, it can be divided according to the time of the beginning of creative activity into "senior" and "junior". In the thirties, the opportunity to participate in public art life and exhibitions of "senior" artists, including Boris Golopolosov, Alexander Gluskin, Lev Zevin, Alexander Kitaev, Eva Levina-Rozengolts, Antonina Sofronova, Mikhail Rankov, Konstantin Chebotarev, Anton Chirkov, was catastrophically narrowed. They did not accept ideological changes and remained strange hidden "savonarols" and "malevolent aesthetes" who risked portraying events "as they were" rather than "as they should." The "junior" artists had almost no experience of participating in associations and groups. Due to the lack of the opportunity to work in public in "petty-bourgeois" and "traveling" genres and styles, they were engaged in easel painting "on the table",and they earned their living by teaching, monumental painting, decoration of buildings and streets.

The artists’ look inside themselves, reflection through the search for perspective, form, color solutions - all this made such art unsuitable for the propaganda of the Soviet system, when “life has become better, life has become more fun”. Their work, which synthesizes the influence of various art schools, ranging from the art of the Renaissance to modern styles and trends, is characterized by a polyphony of views, methods and genres. Therefore, it is interesting to show the legacy of the “behind-facade” masters not biographically, but aesthetically - through the search for style, theme, manner of writing, color, perception of time and oneself in it.

The picturesque and graphic works of the presented artists are carefully kept by the heirs and in private collections in Moscow, as well as in the collections of large art museums in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Perm, Saratov, Yaroslavl, Kirov, etc.) and neighboring countries (Nukus, Tbilisi, Sukhumi, Bishkek). Memories of the heirs, stories about individual works, stories about the difficult and sometimes tragic fate of paintings and their creators, reveal the "forgotten" art, which for a long time was kept away from prying eyes.