Why are you girls?

Tomorrow the exhibition “Amazons of the Avant-Garde” opens at the Tretyakov Gallery

The exhibition “Amazons of the Avant-garde,” organized by the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, is the same exhibition that Vladimir Putin attended the opening of in New York. The President gave a fiery speech there about the achievements of Russian culture and thus, to a fair extent, ensured the arrival of the exhibition in Moscow. A guarantor after all. However, Western museums did not even believe such guarantees and did not give their works: instead of 89 paintings (according to the catalogue), only about seventy are presented at the exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery. Works (painting only) by six artists - Alexandra Ekster, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

The names of the six "Amazons" are well known, as are most of their works. Over the years since the beginning of perestroika, each of the artists has been awarded a personal retrospective exhibition in the same Tretyakov Gallery or in other museums (not to mention such mega-exhibitions as the “Great Utopia” that has traveled half the world). A monograph or album has been published about each. So there are no discoveries at the exhibition. However, the task was different.

Classical art history is the history of men who used women as muses or models. Of course, women artists were included in it, but in such small numbers (and they played, to put it mildly, secondary roles) that they only confirmed the rule. Another thing is the 20th century, which opened the way to art for national and sexual art minorities - Jews, blacks and women. There are so many women that, in principle, the history of art of the last century can only be written on “female material.” The “Amazons” exhibition is another (and by no means the first) attempt at this kind of “art history without men.”

Fortunately, in this case the material allows. In the Russian avant-garde, women really played an equal role with men, and in many cases even a decisive one. It’s not that Mikhail Larionov worked under the thumb of his wife Natalya Goncharova, but not vice versa. Many avant-garde ideas and concepts were born in the minds of women. They also created, for example, overall clothing, one of the main propagandists of which was Varvara Stepanova. So in the concept of the exhibition there is no vulgarization, no exaggeration, no assumptions: without men, so without men.

If the exhibition itself is devoted to purely art historical problems, then its luxurious catalog, as it should be, expands the framework to general cultural ones. Here we talk about the fate of women in Russia, and about women’s weaknesses (it turns out that these seemingly harsh avant-garde women, in their free time from reorganizing the world, made designs for handbags, scarves and wallets), and about sex life (about this, however, a little bit) . The catalog also contains expected examples of feminist discourse itself, for example, Olga Matic’s article “Gender Problems in the Kingdom of the Amazons.”

The only question is how much all this avant-garde gender will appeal to the domestic public. From the point of view of the relevance and success of the exhibition, its topic seems quite risky. Both the avant-garde and feminism, although they were once born in Russia, are now being reproduced with difficulty. Either because both avant-garde and feminist projects have long been implemented in practice and already seem boring. Perhaps simply because neither avant-garde painting (both women's and men's) nor feminist discourse are understandable to Russian people and, accordingly, they do not like. It’s a different matter in the West, where all this is extremely relevant and invariably in demand. Although built on Russian material, the Amazon exhibition is, of course, a Western product. Before Moscow, it was shown in five countries - Germany, England, Italy, Spain and the USA - and everywhere with constant success. What will happen to us, whether “Amazons” will be able to discourage the public, say, from Shilov’s gallery, is unknown.

Nikolay MILK