Published: 15 June, 2009, 19:39
Edited: 15 June, 2009, 19:39
The majority of works by 40 artists of several generations, who moved to America in the first half the 20th century, will be unveiled in Russia for the first time ever.
“American Artists from the Russian Empire” highlights the Russian contribution to the US art scene in an international project at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.
The heritage of the Russian artistic society abroad is being actively integrated into the Russian art context. However, attention is more often turned to immigrants in Europe, even though Russian natives have scattered all across the world. In distant states Russian immigrants are often remembered as significant figures in the artistic and social life. And this process was also very significant in the USA: such masters as Max Weber, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko or Louise Nevelson lived and worked there.
The exhibition shows a cut of Russian art in America and its brightest personages. The time range of the project covers the period from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Works of the leader of Russian futurists, David Burlyuk, and paintings by Pavel Chelishchev, showing the evolution of style from art deco to surrealistic compositions, are represented at the exhibition – along with the great modernists such as Jules Olitski, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Alexander Liberman.
The sculpture section also includes examples of great masters of the Euro-Atlantic modernism as Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine, and Jacques Lipchitz.
The selection of archival photos and two documentary films will also be displayed at the exhibition.
Overall, the exhibition shows the role of Russian emigrants in the formation of the American avant-garde and abstract expressionism of the 20th century. Artists were leaving the Russian Empire for many reasons: those fortunate went to study in Europe; others ran overseas from the Jewish persecution; and the rest tried to escape hunger, devastation and the repression brought by the October revolution of 1917.
The second wave of immigrants flocked to the western coasts of the Atlantic due to the fascist persecutions of Jews and the Second World War. As a result, Russia’s art community initially was doomed to absence of unity and was dispersed across the huge territory of the US.
The exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery, represented by some 80 pieces of the best emigrant masters, is a part of the project’s tour, which started in Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, (Oklahoma, US), then shifted to The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), and will come to an end in the San Diego Museum of Art (California, US).
The exhibition is on from June 16 through to September 13 at the Tretyakov Gallery.