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25/1/2008

From Russia

Royal Academy of Arts, London

This exhibition will be a unique opportunity to explore the fascinating exchange that existed between French and Russian art during a crucial period that was witness to upheaval and revolution. All the paintings have been lent by the four principal Russian museums: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and The State Hermitage Museum and The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg. For the first time, works from these museums have been gathered for a single exhibition.

The four sections

French and Russian realists
The exhibition will be structured around four main themes starting with a presentation of works by the Russian realists, namely the Wanderers, an important group of Russian artists who broke away from the St Petersburg Academy and focused on Russian landscape, contemporary social issues, scenes from traditional peasant life and Russian history. Works by Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Isaak Levitan, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Nesterov and others are shown with paintings by French artists of the Barbizon school such as Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny and Jean-François Millet as well as the Salon painters Jules Bastien-Lepage and Albert Besnard.

The great collectors Shchukin and Morozov
The second section of the exhibition displays masterpieces from the two great Moscow collections, those of Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin . These two Moscow textile merchants were, without doubt, the most brilliant and daring Russian collectors of their day. They scoured Paris for paintings by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and accumulated works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. Shchukin became Matisse’s greatest patron, commissioning the celebrated The Dance as part of an astonishingly bold scheme to decorate the grand staircase of his Moscow mansion. The Dance is perhaps the most sensational highlight of the exhibition.

Diaghilev and the World of Art movement
The third section of the exhibition is devoted to the famous theatrical impresario and exhibition-maker Sergei Diaghilev, who was at the forefront of the World of Art movement. He played a vital role not only in presenting modern French art in Russia but also in taking Russian art to the West, particularly in Paris. Artists presented in this section of the exhibition will also include Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst, Boris Kustodiev, Nochiolas Roerich, Alexander Golovin and Valentin Serov as well as a selection of impressive portraits of great figures of Russian cultural life such as Vsevolod Meyerhold, Feodor Chaliapin and Anna Akhmatova.

Modernism
Cross-currents between Russian and French art were particularly fertile in the early twentieth century. The final section of the exhibition encompasses the exhilarating kaleidoscope of rapidly succeeding artistic developments. Wasily Kandinsky drew on the imagery of Russian fairy tales and combined it with Fauvist colour as a starting point for his daring steps towards abstraction, while Marc Chagall adapted elements of French Cubism to his highly individual and poetic distillation of Russian-Jewish folklore. Bold reinterpretations of Cubism, as well as Italian Futurism, resulted in the brilliant Cubo-Futurist works by artists such as Natalia Goncharova. Suprematism, the radical, purely abstract style pioneered by Kazimir Malevich, is the culmination of these experiments and the exhibition will close with his celebrated Black Circle, Black Cross and Black Square that seemed to reject all forms of pictorial tradition.

Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House Piccadilly - London

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