Let's dance: an exhibition about dance of the XX century collects masterpieces of the avant-garde

A dance of colors, a ballet of lines, a ball of shapes. The exhibition "Dance of the twentieth century. Matisse, Malevich, Diaghilev, Kandinsky and others" at the Jewish Museum and the Tolerance Center talks about the connection between choreography and fine art, primarily the Russian avant—garde. About 200 exhibits in 10 halls, many famous names of artists and the spectacular architecture of the space allow us to close our eyes to the very conditional connection of many works with the stated theme. Izvestia accepted the invitation to the "Dance".

Seasons of the avant-garde

Just a month and a half after the completion of the large-scale retrospective of Lyubov Popova, the Jewish Museum opens a new project focused on the Russian avant-garde, but, however, not limited to this area. In this case, the focus is not on personality, style, or even era, but on dance and choreography. The angle is certainly not original (it is enough to recall how many exhibition projects dedicated to Sergei Diaghilev's "Russian Seasons" there were), but it is fertile.

The first third of the 20th century was the time of the dance boom. This is the already mentioned Diaghilev enterprise, which in fact introduced the West to advanced Russian art, and the rapid evolution of choreography itself (you can name the names of Isadora Duncan, Vaclav Nijinsky, Ida Rubinstein and other innovators), and the emergence of related areas dedicated to plastics and the body — rhythmics, eurythmia… As a result, almost all major artists of the era paid tribute to the ballet theme.

For example, Leon Bakst is known to us today primarily as the author of costumes for Russian Seasons ballets — the exhibition, of course, has a number of his drawings, as well as two preserved outfits made according to Bakst's sketches. Alexander Benois, another of Diaghilev's constant collaborators, is more sparsely represented. But there are a lot of things by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova. The couple worked with the entrepreneur sporadically, but each such collaboration is a milestone. Including the failed production of "Liturgy" (the Jewish Museum has two works in the series). A series of large-format sketches by Goncharova with images of saints and apostles, combining iconographic traditions and avant-garde motifs, is exhibited regularly, but this is the case when there is not much.

Suprematist and Soviet ballet

However, the curator Maria Gadas clearly did not want to put "The Russian Seasons" at the center of the entire narrative. On the contrary, the exhibition shows that, although important, it is far from the only striking phenomenon of that period that made friends with painting and dance. While Diaghilev was shaking Paris, Malevich's students staged a "Suprematist Ballet" in Vitebsk, turning the choreographic genre into a rally of geometric shapes. Of the artifacts directly related to the production, a poster can be seen at the exhibition (the "Black Square" is emblazoned on it), Malevich himself is represented by lithographs from the book "Suprematism" and an exemplary "Suprematist Composition" from 1915.

Another, not so radical line is the birth of the Soviet ballet. And these are Kasyan Goleizovsky (in addition to photographs of his productions, viewers can see the choreographer's own drawings), and Galina Ulanova, whose pointe shoes meet the public at the very beginning of the journey ... the 1920s and early 1930s in our country turn out to be a time of searching, collisions of completely different artistic concepts and approaches. At one pole are the avant—gardists (Alexandra Exter, Ivan Klyun) in alliance with Meyerhold and other theater reformers, at the other are music halls and mass demonstrations, a movement towards the democratization of art. By the way, the already mentioned Goleizovsky staged a lot of physical education parades, and as an illustration of this topic, one can take the heroine of Alexander Samokhvalov's large—scale drawing "Girl in a T-shirt" - an athletic tennis player. Sportswoman, Komsomol member…

Free dance

Sometimes the connection of the exhibits with the choreographic theme seems quite arbitrary. For example, Wassily Kandinsky's canvases intersect with ballet only through his ideas about the synthesis of the arts, his love of music and the plan of the failed stage performance "Yellow Sound" (a video recording of the late reconstruction is presented at the exhibition, but, of course, this is just a fantasy based on motives). Although do you really need a convincing reason to see the three masterpieces of the founder of abstractionism, who came from the Tretyakov Gallery, Tula and Krasnodar?

The same can be said about Ivan Klyun with "Running Landscape" (from the Vyatka Art Museum), and about Malevich with "Life in a big Hotel" (from Samara), and about Elena Guro, who has never collaborated with choreographers with "The Fawn", and many others. There are plenty of big names here, and beautiful things, too; the meanings don't always "dance out." The concept is fragile and vulnerable, like Zinaida Serebryakova's little dancers (by the way, they are not here for some reason).

After all, is it about ballet images in art? Then what does abstractionism and supremacism have to do with it? About the collaboration of artists with choreographers? Then even the "Ballerina" by Henri Matisse — the thing put on the poster of the exhibition — turns out to be superfluous, not to mention a lot of other exhibits. Well, the story within the framework of one project about the entire history of ballet in the 20th century inevitably leaves out many important names, trends, and performances, and it turns out to be a "gallop through Europe."

On the other hand, no one prevents us from perceiving the exhibition itself as a conditional embodiment of the principles of dancing. A series of images of movement, plastic art, and artistic gestures (in the broadest sense of the word). And the further you go through the exhibition, the less you expect rigid logic and the more you expect a pure dance of beauty. If the sculpture "Winged Creature" by the surrealist Hans Arp needs to be viewed through the prism of choreography, we are ready. If we need to link Robert Rauschenberg's wonderful Russian Rose collection to his collaboration with director Merce Cunningham, then so be it. The large collage of veils, fabric, silk and paper, designed in orange-ochre tones, is as abstract as the compositions of Cunningham and another colleague of the pair, composer John Cage. Their numbers are the apotheosis of counterpoint and randomness: music is not related to dance, dance is related to decoration. In a sense, the exhibition borrows this principle.

The dance here is not about genre, but about feeling. "The whole world is ballet" — the creators of the project could paraphrase Shakespeare. And it's not just the works that "dance". The visitors themselves are unwitting participants in this production. Theater artist Alexey Tregubov styled the space for choreographic classes with machines and large mirrors. However, the audience in the first halls, admiring their reflections and performing steps, do not know that the glass on the back side is transparent, and those who are already completing the journey see through them the newly arrived "on stage." So the guests of the museum in this case also deserve applause: without them, this ball would not have taken place.