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- Meeting on Istra: the collections of the two countries were exhibited in the "New Jerusalem"
Meeting on Istra: the collections of the two countries were exhibited in the "New Jerusalem"
More than 160 works, 40 artists, two museums, two participating states - all these are components of the exhibition "Light between Worlds", which opened at the New Jerusalem Museum. But the figures do not fully reflect the importance of the project. The main thing is that for the first time in recent years, two important collections of Soviet modernism have met in Russia — from Nukus (Uzbekistan) and Istra. And the dialogue of the meetings turned into a duet story about the art of an entire era. And also about the fate of those who created and preserved it. Izvestia rated the high-profile project among the first.
Oasis in the desert
The I.V. Savitsky Museum of Art of the Republic of Karakalpakstan is a mecca for connoisseurs of the Russian avant—garde, although it is located in Uzbekistan and not even in the capital, but in the regional city of Nukus. It's all about the unique collection of paintings from the 1920s and 1950s, assembled by ethnographer and archaeologist Igor Savitsky. It would seem that what could be so valuable in a remote outback, literally in a desert? But a lot got caught.
Firstly, the works of artists who were not particularly in demand (or even banned altogether) in Soviet times. Savitsky bought their legacy and took it to Nukus. And secondly, a number of painters from the first half of the 20th century ended up in Central Asia due to various circumstances. For some, such as Robert Falk, who was evacuated to Samarkand during the Great Patriotic War, these were short-term periods, while others, like Alexander Volkov, associated most of their lives with the southern region. Much of what they created in the East also ended up with Savitsky.
As a result, he managed to concentrate about 50,000 works of fine art in his museum, which was opened in 1966. It was only during the perestroika years that the significance of this collection could be truly appreciated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in particular, an exhibition dialogue of the collections of avant-garde from Nukus and the Russian Museum was held. After the collapse of the USSR, Savitsky's legacy became the property of Uzbekistan. It has become more difficult to show things from there in Russia, although it cannot be said that they have completely stopped visiting us. It is enough to recall a two-part, very voluminous project in terms of the number of exhibits, but short in duration, eight years ago at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Izvestia talked about it).
And now the masterpieces from Nukus are back in Russia. In the current geopolitical conditions, this is especially valuable, because we are not even talking about a private collection or individual works, but about a major joint project of the museums of the two states. This is probably the first such case since 2022. Even more interesting is that, on our part, it involves not Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the Moscow region of Istra. But this has its own artistic and historical logic. Just as Savitsky formed the avant-garde collection in Karakalpakstan, in the 1980s, the staff of the New Jerusalem Museum, initially based in the monastery, began to collect things that were not in favor with the authorities — they got away with it far from the supervisory authorities. The result is similar: tens of thousands of items, including the highest class.
Business — time
The new exhibition is designed to show the intersection points of the two collections. Of course, this concept is a bit of a stretch: after all, the collections from Istra and Nukus are very different. They focus on different periods, different authors, different genres, and so on. If you set out to create the most representative selection of works there and there, only a small part of what is currently on display in the "New Jerusalem" will fall into it. But the curators came up with a more interesting move: to identify a period that is perfectly represented in both museums, and to find clear parallels — down to the "rhymes" between specific works.
Such a period was the second half of the 1920s and 1930s, a time when the Russian avant-garde, having lost its former radicalism, began to degenerate into something else — a discord of styles and artistic groups with completely different tasks and approaches, but socialist realism has not yet reigned as the only possible direction. Actually, the exhibition turns out to be a hymn to this artistic stratum, which is still underestimated.
One of the curators, Nadezhda Plungyan, consistently draws attention to him: last year she prepared an exhibition about the group "13" at the Museum of Russian Impressionism (by the way, this association is not forgotten in the "Light between Worlds"), then presented a project with a gender bias "Moskvichka. Women of the Soviet capital of the 1920s and 1930s" at the Museum of Moscow, and now the thematic focus has given way to the desire to build a panorama of the era from items from two specific collections. It turned out very convincingly.
From Demon to Savior
The main thing is that there are simply a lot of good, expressive, bright (literally and figuratively) things here. The viewer is greeted by a mystical canvas by Alexander Volkov, where Christ is depicted on one side and a Demon on the other (clearly with a reference to Vrubel), and at the end of the journey we see the expressionist gospel cycle by Sergei Romanovich, in which the face of the Savior appears through desperate, rough, as if chaotic oil strokes. But inside the route there are works of no less powerful and by no means only religious themes.
Of course, it was not without the theme of the East — the very first hall is dedicated to it. But the West, in fact, is no less in the exhibition: in the landscapes of the same Volkov, one can see homage to Cezanne's "Mount St. Victoria", Maxim Sokolov clearly competes with Monet and Pissarro, and in Rostislav Barto's "Sultry Day" almost De Chirico and Dali are read.
In other words, the exhibition turned out not to be about Uzbekistan and Russia, but about the USSR, where, like in a melting pot, everything came together — styles, traditions, national and international. And for all the subjectivity and specificity of the collection, it actually turns out to be something more than just a meeting of two collections and a reflection of the artistic trends of a certain time. This is a portrait of the era as a whole. But not an illustration of a history textbook, but, on the contrary, an attempt to see the lives and destinies of people outside politics, without ideological cliches (or contrary to them).
And I would like to see a certain symbolism in the fact that this portrait was created by the joint efforts of two countries that were once a single state and between which there were no borders then - neither in life nor in art.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
