Translated material
20th century - remember everyone
Benefit performance of the Russian Museum in Tsaritsino
For its 110th anniversary, the Russian Museum opened its exhibitions “Time to Collect...” and “The 20th Century in the Russian Museum” in Moscow, in the Great Tsaritsyn Palace. For the exhibition about the past century, “kilometers” of selected items were brought to Moscow, which were removed from the permanent exhibition and taken out of storage. (One can’t help but frighten the thought: is there anything left in St. Petersburg itself?) As a result, an aesthetic and historical concentrate of an incredible fortress arose. For the viewer, in recognizing, if not the work, then the master, lies an inexhaustible source of intellectual nirvana - a feeling of belonging to the culture of the twentieth century, deep rootedness in it, almost complicity in its creation. Everything is close - here is Malevich, here is Kabakov, here is Larionov, here is Andy Warhol. The last name is not a hallucination of a soaring spirit; the exhibition actually contains a small, but very significant addition from the works of Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Georg Baselitz, Jeff Koons.The presence of works by the masters of international modernism is initially perceived as a justified desire of the museum to truly show the best of the collections of the 20th century. But later, quite possibly contrary to the wishes of the curators, this section begins to seem like a necessary contextual counterbalance, allowing us to look at the exhibition from a position more free from local preferences.
And if the title of the exhibition, which speaks of the “20th century,” does not include the word “art,” then the viewer concludes that he is being invited to examine through the pictorial fabric the movement of the shuttle of history, which carried away the logic of events among the artists themselves. You begin to understand this logic from Vrubel’s “Demon”, selfless experiments in the field of form and color by Kandinsky, Exter, Tatlin to the frightening insights of Filonov, further, to total totalitarian optimism, to the Patriotic War, the “thaw” of the 60s, and, finally , to the complex movements of the mechanisms of postmodern thought, reflecting on this entire path and its involvement in it.
Less epic is another exhibition of the Russian Museum taking place in parallel in the building of the Tsaritsyno Grand Palace - “Time to Collect...”. Being completely independent, it nevertheless serves as an excellent commentary-addition to the first. It contains items from private foreign collections. According to the very informative captions to the works, many of the works were new to Russia and were previously unknown even to researchers.
The most memorable example is “The Princess and the Lobster” - a canvas measuring two by three meters with a naked young lady in an ancient Russian kokoshnik with gems, angrily dragging a giant shrimp by the mustache in the emerald surf. The author of this painting is the eminent artist Philip Malyavin, a specialist in Russian women in fluttering sundresses. The exhibition includes Goluborozov artists, Korovin, Annenkov, magnificent exotic works by Yakovlev, and excellent photographs of the 20s. Most of the works (like Malyavin’s painting) were created in exile. The strange and often sad spirit of Russian art outside Russia forces us to perceive things that appeared in our homeland differently, to re-evaluate the degree of completeness of ideas about them and their place in Russian art. Unlike the “XX Century” exhibition, this is an exhibition-search, an exhibition-hope, hinting that although much has already been found and returned to the cells of history from which it once fell, even more may still be hidden.