| December Evenings opened at the Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka “It will be done!” - this is how the great conductor Evgeny Svetlanov reacted succinctly to remarks from the audience with requests to repeat this or that part of the concert he liked. The axiology of “fulfillment,” the essence that is responsible for the final “completeness” of the perception of art and life, became the main theme of Svyatoslav Richter’s December Evenings in 2004.
Music this time turned out to be not the acoustic background of the exhibition, but its architectonics. The festival's concert program is exceptional: the world-famous Austrian Hagen Quartet, the British Hilliard Ensemble, cellist Mario Brunello, tenor Mark Padmore, violinist Nicholas Znaider, as well as festival director Yuri Bashmet and his Russian friends - the A. Borodin Quartet, Natalia Gutman, Nikolai Lugansk. According to festival curator Inna Pruss, the concert programs are based on the principle of variations of the same theme by composers centuries apart (“Seven Words of the Savior on the Cross” by Haydn and Gubaidullina). The festival exhibition is based on the same principle. On the walls of the White Hall and the enfilade hang engravings, lithographs, and paintings by Pablo Picasso, which one of the authors of the idea of the exhibition, Professor Mikhail Busev, called “paraphrases” of the world artistic heritage. Musicological vocabulary adorned the speech of the curator of the exhibition “Picasso” who spoke at the press conference. Reflections-metamorphoses”, leading researcher at the Pushkin Museum Vitaly Mishin. Both researchers likened the three-part composition of the exhibition to “a score played in several registers.” First, at the very beginning of the 20th century, Picasso, anticipating the time of the great jazzmen, performed variations on the theme of the traditional creativity of the peoples of Africa. Then, in a series of etchings from the 30s on the themes of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the workshop of the ancient sculptor, he gave a visual commentary to the works of Britten “Young Apollo” and Stravinsky “Apollo Musagete” included in the evening program. Finally, in the 50s and 60s, with a wink at composers and postmodern philosophers, he began deconstructing the classical painting of modern times.
Picasso’s “jazz” African improvisations seem like a textbook today. From the funds of the Pushkin Museum, sculptures of primitive peoples, which inspired the birth of European Cubism, and what is there - the entire system of plastic values of the avant-garde, were collected and displayed in a separate showcase. Here are the picturesque prism-cone girls of Picasso himself. This part of the exhibition looks quite academic, like an illustration of a chapter in a 20th century art textbook. The etchings on ancient themes brought from the Picasso Museum in Paris are so self-sufficient in their dazzling accuracy and plastic completeness that the classics here are rather not a theme of improvisation, but an archetype of creativity as such.
The most radically adventurous is Picasso’s “execution” of paintings from the 16th–19th centuries. The freed subconscious of the 20th century man with his fantasms, phobias, desires, complexes torment both the “Gothic” Cranach and the impressionistic Manet. The stable picture of the world is disrupted by a swarming, copulating mass of shameless body-phantoms.
But the most important experience of “recreating the masterpieces of the past” for Picasso was the “Las Meninas” cycle. In 1957, he created several dozen canvases, the basis for which was the painting of the same name by Velazquez, painted in 1656. Several paintings by Picasso, stored in the artist’s museum in Barcelona, came to the exhibition at the Pushkin Museum. The decoration of the “evenings” was also Velazquez’s “Portrait of the Infanta Margherita”, brought from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the main character of the painting “Las Meninas” stored in the Prado (the title translates as “court ladies”, “maids of honor”). Velazquez's painting "Las Meninas" is arranged like a secretary with many secret drawers. Several magically opening spatial valves-corridors create an alarming feeling of imaginary, unreality of the image itself. Velazquez shows the process of creating a visual illusion: in the background he is himself, in front of him is a canvas turned towards the viewer, in the opening - in a stream of light - a visitor to the workshop, in the foreground - Infanta Margarita, surrounded by duennas, chambermaids, courtiers and dwarfs . But this picture is not about them - far in the depths, in a mirror barely visible from the darkness, we see the reflections of King Philip IV and his wife Marianne. It is towards them that all the depicted characters are turned. Thanks to the complex design of all spatial corridors and trajectories, the viewer’s point of view coincides with the point of view of the picture of its main heroes present as ghosts - the royal couple. In his present absence, the hero of the picture and its viewer coincide. Therefore, Velazquez’s “Las Meninas” is a fundamental masterpiece for all European painting. Picasso’s younger contemporary, the French structuralist Michel Foucault, called “Las Meninas” “a depiction of a classical image, and at the same time a definition of the space that it opens.” This picture about the creation and the “disappearing” essence of the picture became for Picasso the material of a multi-part oratorio. Tearing the environment and people into some very primitive geometric segments, triangles, squares, cubes, Picasso affirms the synopsis of his own presence in the classical painting, in many ways the oppositional role of the “visible invisible” of the great Velazquez. Again a parallel with music. The geometric cacophony that Picasso creates with Velazquez can be compared, for example, with Alfred Schnittke’s essay “Not a Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with the subtitle “Not-Shakespearean Overture.” There’s just one thing that’s puzzling: Pablo Picasso didn’t really like music... Sergei KHACHATUROV |
|
