Cover trumps: the textile capital of the Moscow region showed avant-garde masterpieces

About 200 exhibits, including masterpieces by Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Ilya Mashkov and Olga Rozanova, will show the path of advanced Russian art of the early 20th century. In Serpukhov opened the exhibition "Factory of the avant-garde. The pattern of the new world", with the city's Museum of History and Art presenting almost its entire (unusually rich for a regional institution) collection of Russian avant-garde, the Russian Museum supplemented the exposition with a multimedia component, and a whole team of Moscow curators was responsible for the concept. "Izvestia was among the first to evaluate the project, which may turn out to be one of the lures for the capital's tourists during the January holidays.

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The Russian avant-garde became one of the main exhibition trends not yesterday or even the day before yesterday, but this year the concentration of high-profile projects devoted to the national art of the first third of the 20th century is especially great. Right now there are two retrospectives - Alexei Morgunov's at the Tretyakov Gallery and Lyubov Popova's at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, plus the Music Museum is showing a panorama of sound experiments from the early Soviet era ("We Sound People"), and the Zotov Center is tracing the links between constructivism and contemporary art ("Russian Incredible").

Another bright tendency is to expand the permanent exposition with things of the Russian avant-garde from the storerooms. Previously, the Nizhny Novgorod Museum of Art placed almost its entire collection of this period in its halls, and other large institutions have similar plans. But not everything can be demonstrated in permanent mode. For example, graphics can be kept in the light for no more than three months. Therefore, the optimal solution is an exhibition that accumulates almost everything that the museum has in stock, but builds sometimes disparate things into a single line. Next summer we are waiting for such a project from the Russian Museum, but Serpukhov has already followed this path, joining forces with colleagues from both capitals.

The museum near Moscow has about 70 works of avant-garde art. Most of them are works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, including exemplary works of the highest level. It is logical that it is their legacy that is in the center of attention at the exhibition "Factory of the avant-garde. The pattern of the new world", although the famous couple is not directly related to the textile theme indicated in the title (a reference to the "specialization" of the city known for its spinning manufactories). But is it so important if we can see Larionov's early, very rarely shown pastels, echoing either the Miriskusniks or the French Impressionists? Or Goncharova's much better-known but invariably delightful large canvases - "Dahlias", "Sheep Shearing", "Women with Rake", "Autumn"?

From Lubki to Cubism

The exhibition attempts not only to show the works of avant-garde artists, but also to explain the origins of their aesthetics. For example, wooden sculptures of Nicholas the Wonderworker (Nikola Mozhaisky) dating back to the 17th century and religious lubki of the 19th century are juxtaposed with Goncharov's pencil depictions of the crucified Christ, the Mother of God, and Saints Boris and Gleb. And it turns out that cubist and primitivist elements were widespread long before the early 1900s and did not contradict tradition. Well, and samples of applied art - mochesniki (boxes for storing bundles of flax), the bottoms of spinners, tiles - become the keys to understanding the decorative, ornamental elements of the art of Larionov and Goncharova.

The creativity of the spouses is complemented by canvases by Pyotr Konchalovsky, Robert Falk, Alexandra Exter. And along with things from Serpukhov, which, of course, dominate the exhibition, there are also valuable inclusions from other collections, primarily from the Yekaterinburg Art Museum: Olga Rozanova's "Objectless Composition" (an exemplary suprematist piece) and Ilya Mashkov's huge, very effective "Woman's Portrait with a Mirror".

The next stage of Russian art - 1920s-1930s - is represented more modestly, and here we should not talk about the avant-garde, but about the emergence of socialist realism (a very spicy "Morning on the Beach" by Vladimir Lyushin) and the penetration of constructivism developments into everyday life and design - this theme is well illustrated by samples of printed fabrics from the Serpukhov Cotton Trust factory based on sketches from the early 1930s. An equally interesting echo of the same motif is a service created in the second half of the 20th century with the participation of Malevich's pupil Anna Leporskaya.

Flavors of the avant-garde

The exposition of originals is supplemented at the exhibition by an installation reflecting the life of the city in the early Soviet period and multimedia projections made by the Russian Museum on the basis of its collection of Russian avant-garde. Not without the now fashionable technique with odors: four flasks contain fragrances designed to create a perfumed image of the era.

The exhibition is the result of the work of curators trained under the Avant-Garde Lab 6 program, a joint project of the Avant-Garde Center of the Jewish Museum and the Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-Garde. Maestro Andrei Sarabianov acted as a consultant, and among the group's leaders is Igor Smekalov, Doctor of Art History and chief researcher at the Tretyakov Gallery's 20th Century Graphics Department, who made the aforementioned Morgunov retrospective.

At the same time, the curatorial vision in this case was limited by the collection of the Serpukhov Museum itself and, apparently, by the modest possibilities of bringing in foreign exhibits. Therefore, we cannot expect a balanced representative narrative. Nevertheless, for the general public it is a valuable opportunity to get a better understanding of the much-publicized, but still not quite understandable to the ordinary viewer artistic phenomenon, and for experts and connoisseurs - a chance to see those pearls of the Serpukhov collection (mainly pastels and drawings), which are usually kept in the funds. And at the same time - an immersion into the history and specifics of a wonderful town, located at the junction of three regions and quite deserving to become a point of a tourist route during the January holidays.