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Moscow December Evenings open with an exhibition on the history of masks
After last year’s unsuccessful exhibition of traditional December evenings organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, doubt crept in whether anyone still had the strength and courage for this festival. Thank God, everything turned out to be not so sad. Today the December Evenings 2006 will open with the exquisitely conceived and carefully prepared exhibition “Masks: from myth to carnival”. Sixteen museums (four of which were Italian) and one private collection of M. and L. Zvyagin took part in its creation. Among the Russian museums: the Pushkin Museum, the Hermitage, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum, the Museum of Theater Puppets at the Theater. Sergei Obraztsov, Theater Museum named after. A.A. Bakhrushin, St. Petersburg Kunstkamera...The idea is to trace the history of the mask. Its ritual functions in traditional cultures are replaced by the search for the image of the hero of ancient theater and Japanese Noh theater. The difficulties of identifying one's own appearance explain the emergence of medieval carnivals (then masquerades). Commedia dell'arte improvises with the role-playing mask prepared by fate, and symbolism recognizes that the mask is the face.
All the intended turns of a powerful and interesting theme are revealed in the exhibition. We have collected excellent and characteristic examples of humanity guessing at different periods of its history all kinds of facial expressions and grimaces. The special art of “mimic fussing” has gone from African animal faces conjuring danger to the black half-masks that noblemen of the gallant age gracefully hold in portraits.
Curators Svetlana Khodzhash, Irina Danilova, artist Boris Messerer made sure that the exhibition was as spectacular as possible. The gallery of the main staircase of the museum is decorated with crimson display cases in which totemic and ritual masks of traditional and ancient cultures look very impressive. The new European “mask” culture was invited to the White Hall, where the December Evenings concerts are held. The works collected there - etchings by Callot, paintings by French masters of the Rococo era, Wedgwood and Meissen porcelain, theatrical sketches by Benois, Somov - build the right mood of melancholy capriccio, longing and a vague premonition that true life is created only by the bizarre arabesques of the imagination, and true beauty will be seen only in the absurd guise of Pulcinella. By the way, Hoffmann’s masterpiece “Princess Brambilla,” which the writer himself called “Capriccio in the spirit of Callot,” very much corresponds to this mood. There, the magician and charlatan Celionati gives the hero-actor advice: “...You will be the last fool if you dress up in a beautiful mask, because this will deprive you of the opportunity to contemplate the beautiful [beloved]. The more ridiculous, the uglier, the better! So that the nose is as large and dignified as possible, and wear my glasses with peace of mind!”
The exhibition design clearly articulates two main storylines: the mask as a ritual replacement of the face and the mask as a theme for reflection on the search for one’s own identity, in other words: the mask as alienation of oneself (prehistoric and traditional cultures) and the mask as a path to oneself (Modern times). Each of these lines is already a promising axis of a huge independent exposition. Therefore, despite all the merits of the current exhibition, created on the “two in one” principle, the feeling of an outline, a sketch, a study remains. It is characteristic that instead of a detailed catalog with large scientific articles and an intelligent story about the history and iconography of unique masks from New Guinea, American tribes or Buryatia, Lithuania, Dagestan, we are offered only a nice but modest booklet with a good introductory article by Vyacheslav Vs. Ivanov about the mask as an “alienated accessory” of the human face.
Perhaps, the concerts of the December Evenings will help to understand the theme in all its whimsical complexity, in which the mask will become a symbol of different themes: theater, myth, ritual, carnival, metamorphosis, four temperaments... In addition to the recognized regular participants of the festival (Yuri Bashmet, Alexey Lyubimov, Natalia Gutman, Alla Demidova) are promised not so popular, but highly valued by connoisseurs of ancient music, European ensembles of authentic performances of works of the 14th-18th centuries.