| The exhibition “Vladimir Izdebsky and his Salons” opens today The Moscow Art Center on Neglinnaya presents an exhibition, excellent in concept and execution, dedicated to the art dealer and artist of the early 20th century, Vladimir Izdebsky. It was prepared jointly with the Russian Museum. All the exhibits were brought from there. Muscovites got the chance to see this joint exhibition before the residents of St. Petersburg. Other lucky people who learned about the little-known hero of the Russian avant-garde, Vladimir Izdebsky, are so far only the Swiss. The Russian Museum showed them the exhibition “Izdebsky and Kandinsky”.
In the first hall of the MCI there are cube-futuristic sculptures and paintings by Izdebsky himself, donated to the Russian Museum several years ago by the master’s daughter Galina Izdebskaya-Pritchard. (The plaster originals were translated into bronze already in the Russian Museum.) The second hall houses a free reconstruction of the famous Izdebsky Salons with paintings by Lentulov, Mashkov, Kandinsky, Goncharova, Larionov, D. Burliuk...
Salon differs from salon. We know this, if only because in the era of Voltaire and Diderot, the word “salon” was synonymous with the newest, fashionable, as they would now say, “current” art (read examples of artistic criticism of the Enlightenment, “Salons” by Denis Diderot). Nowadays, “salon” is branded as secondary, anemic, impersonal art, in which “figures of speech” and the syntax of some “great style” are replicated, be it realism, abstractionism, impressionism, surrealism. Acquaintance with the Salons of Vladimir Izdebsky takes us back to that blessed time when the mention of this word was associated not with the nauseating Levo-Moskhov “surrealism” a la Shemyakin, but with the energy of genuine creative life.
It is unlikely that Vladimir Izdebsky will be remembered as a great artist or theorist of avant-garde art. His genius lies elsewhere. He had a phenomenal intuition for talented people. I talked to them. He was friends (especially devotedly with Wassily Kandinsky). And, as they say, he promoted them. I did promotion for them. Izdebsky became the first producer, manager, and curator of avant-garde art in Russia. So our Marina Loshak, Lena Selina, Aidan Salakhova are his direct heirs.
Vladimir Izdebsky lived first in Odessa, after the revolution - in Paris and America. Tours of two Salons organized by him started from Odessa. Time and route of the first: 1909--1910, Odessa--Kyiv--Petersburg--Riga. Time and route of the second: January - May 1911, Odessa - Nikolaev - Kherson. If you think that Odessa resident Vladimir Alekseevich took the forerunner of the “Great Utopia” or the “Amazons of the Avant-garde” around the capitals, take a closer look at the dates. The beauty is that, as such, the distinctions between avant-garde and traditionalism, right and left art “struck” people during their direct acquaintance with the Izdeb Salons. There was some noise. The adrenaline rush for participants and spectators is much greater than at some Maxidrome. A journalist by mentality and by one of his professions, Izdebsky chose a brilliant tactical maneuver: he pitted the languid World of Arts artists Narbut, Lukomsky against the brutal Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova. In one hall there is Grabar, in the other - newfangled Europeans Matisse, Van Dongen, Metzinger. According to the place of study: on one wall - “Russian Parisians” (Kruglikova, Tarkhov, Gershenfeld), on the other - “Russian Munichians” (Kandinsky, Bekhteev, Verevkina, Yavlensky, Izdebsky himself). The strategy is win-win. The PR is crazy.
Thanks to Vladimir Kruglov, the chronicler of the Izdebsky Salons in the exhibition catalogue, we get to know in detail the criticism of those years. Two irreconcilable camps emerged. Some are liberals. Others are conservatives. Today it is more fun to read “conservatives”, especially the great artist of the Russian land Ilya Repin. He spoke twice with an angry philippic in the St. Petersburg “Birzhevye Vedomosti”: “Here awaited us a whole hell of cynicism of Western mediocrity - hooligans, Savras without reins (even curses are wonderfully peredvizhniki!!! - S.Kh. ), throwing out things in complete freedom courbettes with paints on canvas.” His organizer is a small entrepreneur, an art broker, obsessed “with the scandalousness of the Matis, these miscarriages, infecting the beautiful, pure sphere of art with a miasma of decomposition.” Ah, Ilya Efimovich did not understand that from now on, the world art market will depend on such entrepreneurs and brokers, and with their help, communication technologies regarding contemporary art in general will be formed. Sergei KHACHATUROV |
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