Left, left

A rarity of the exhibition is the painting on wood “Bathhouse” (1910s) by Maria Sinyakova-Urechina, one of the notorious futurist Sinyakov sisters

Judging by the name, the new Moscow gallery from the “rich” claims to be a museum, but still looks more like an antique salon. And not only because two of the four floors in the house on Spiridonovka are occupied by a dense “permanent exhibition” of the Shishkins and Vasnetsovs in gilded frames, surrounded by armchairs and mahogany bookcases. (We don’t know whether this art is traded or just shown by the antique art association “New Hermitage”, which opened a museum-gallery. Let the financial inspectors be interested in this.) But also in the small halls of the second floor, where the “exhibition of Russian avant-garde 10- x and 60s" entitled "Left, Left", dazzles the eye with 160 works hanging in two or even three rows. It's like being in an antiquities shop, not a museum or gallery.

However, this is the case when it is not at all necessary to take by skill, but by numbers. It is understandable that the author of the exhibition concept, one of the most eminent Moscow collectors and chairman of the Fine Art Collectors Club, Valery Dudakov, wants to make public as many things as possible taken from 20 (!) private, and therefore secret, collections. But the brilliant composition of the “participants” of the exhibition - Matyushin, Lentulov, Malevich, Popova, etc., on the one hand, and Kabakov, Roginsky, Sooster, Rabin, etc., on the other - would have made it an event even with a more modest number of works. Why strive for museum scale if there is no spacious room? Secondly, the organizers themselves are clearly aware of the doom of an attempt to show the encyclopedia of the Russian avant-garde due to the gaps that are absolutely inevitable in the case of personal collections (“abstract expressionism, constructivism, Suprematism are rarely found in private collections,” Dudakov justifies himself in the catalogue). Thirdly, this, thank God, is not just an exhibition of paintings, graphics and sculpture, but a conceptual project. He always demands rigor, laconicism and thoughtfulness.

The idea, however, is not to say that it is very complicated. “Fathers” and “sons,” avant-garde artists of the 10-20s and nonconformists of the 50s-70s, collide wall to wall (or rather, hall to hall). The search for formal, ideological or other intersections is left to the attentive viewer, who can find a pair of artists separated by half a century of distance and a stairwell. The gallery signed everyone up as “leftists”, adding Mayakovsky’s line to the title of the exhibition. Which is not entirely correct in relation to many artists of the “first” avant-garde, which was not so uniformly politicized, and certainly, alas, inapplicable to the escapists and anti-Sovietists of the “second” avant-garde.

The latter is taken mainly from the collection of Evgeniy Nutovich. The collection has already been exposed several times, so the exhibition of “other art” does not promise discoveries - unlike the section at the beginning of the century, where in the vernissage crowd all you could hear was: “What Burliuk! Where is Sinyakova from? Sort of Bogomazov!” The ambitious project turned out to be a parade of antique rarities and a birthday party for collectors. As well as the exhibitions on the first and third floors of the New Hermitage.

However, if you pass along Spiridonovka, be sure to stop by Dudakov.