Nice apartment: the audience was invited to visit the avant-gardists
The Zotov Center offers to learn how Rodchenko and Stepanova played mahjong, Vera Khlebnikova and Peter Miturich raised little May Miturich, and Robert Falk and Alexander Labas shared the same muse. The exhibition "House 21. Visiting Artists" unites works and documentary materials by completely different, dissimilar creators, who have in common a place of life and work: 21 Myasnitskaya Street. Izvestia could not help but visit the great ones.
Where is this street, where is this house
In the first half of the 1920s, a unique educational institution operated in Moscow - the Higher Art and Technical Workshops. Abbreviated as VKHUTEMAS. This institution was created on the basis of the Stroganov School of Art and Industry and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, but the pre-revolutionary pedagogical traditions there were decisively reformed. VKHUTEMAS became the forge of the avant-garde. Vasily Kandinsky, El Lissitsky, Vladimir Tatlin and other leaders of leftist art taught there.
However, other directions were also welcomed. It is not for nothing that such different masters as Kukryniksy, Alexander Deinera or George Nissky turned out to be among the graduates. The institution was characterized by a rare style pluralism. And also — the desire to create all conditions for creativity and teaching. Teachers received decent salaries and business trips abroad, apartments and workshops. Some artists were given rooms in a house owned by VKhUTEMAS: on Myasnitskaya 21.
Outstanding painters, now internationally recognized, lived there, worked, socialized, rested, quarreled and fell in love. And, of course, an attempt to combine their work in one project has been made more than once. For example, 10 years ago, the Artstory Gallery hosted the exhibition "Myasnitskaya 21. Crossroads of Destinies", focused on the figures of Labas, Falk and Rodchenko. The Zotov Center, however, approached the task much more thoroughly and on a larger scale: there are many more works here, and among the heroes are not only superstars, but also much less well—known personalities - for example, the founder of photomontage, Sergey Senkin.
Window to the courtyard
The architecture of the exhibition itself imitates the house and the courtyard in front of it. In the courtyard, we "meet" the works of Labas, Konstantin Istomin, Peter Miturich, Vasily Rozhdestvensky — they all painted views of Myasnitskaya from the windows of their rooms, or interiors and tenants, like Falk. For example, he captured Raisa Idelson several times, who became his third wife and Labasa's second wife. The canvases "A woman combing her hair" and "A woman lying under a Cezanne painting" are very well known and have been exhibited many times. However, here they take on a new context: we are not looking at painting as such (magnificent), but at the history of people and places.
A piquant detail: Next door is a portrait painted by Falk of Yulik Labas, the son of Alexander and Raisa. Art turned out to be above jealousy. At the time of the painting's creation, both artists were already in a new relationship, but they continued to be friends with Idelson and communicated with their families.
The central exhibit featured on the poster of the entire project is "Morning. By the window" by Konstantin Istomin. A girl reading by a curtained window, behind which a view of the city opens (however, we can only imagine it), is a gentle and at the same time mysterious image. But full of homely comfort and the romance of waiting for something new. At least the beginning of a new day. It is symbolic that the viewer meets her among the first, barely climbing to the third floor of the museum.
However, with the same success, this work can be perceived as, on the contrary, not the beginning, but the end of the plot: created in 1930, it anticipates future socialist realism. Tatiana Yablonskaya's "Morning" and Yuri Pimenov's picturesque lyrics are just around the corner. And all those avant-garde experiments that unfolded in the 1920s in the house on Myasnitskaya will soon be swept away by a new trend (or rather, the political ideology behind it).
Apartment bypass
But don't get ahead of yourself. It is better to look inside the "house" — imitating its structures with aged doors and special flavors (this is called the beautiful word "olfactory art"), designed to create a sense of real domestic space. The five apartments, united by a common corridor, house paintings by Alexander Drevin and Nadezhda Udaltsova, drawings by Peter Miturich and Vera Khlebnikova, book illustrations by Vladimir Favorsky, photomontages by Sergei Senkin and Gustav Klutsis, photographs, paintings and art objects by Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova.
Some of these subjects are familiar to art lovers quite well, some will be a discovery. But in all cases, the curators tried to surprise with an unexpected approach and find rarities. For example, the children's drawings of May Miturich, a Soviet illustrator, for whom his mother, the artist Vera Khlebnikova (sister of the poet Velimir), actually put an end to her career, look very touching. Mahjong is also striking, the chips for which were hand—made by Rodchenko and Stepanova — this is definitely not what their names are associated with, but we have seen photos and paintings of the couple more than once, but hardly a set for a board game. Here it is more than appropriate: the couple loved to play with each other and with numerous guests.
By the way, true to its approach, the Zotov Center has created interactive zones: visitors are also invited to play mahjong (of course, not the one made by geniuses) and create their own photomontage in the footsteps of Senkin and Klutsis. Senkin himself is the real discovery of the project: in Soviet times, his name was mentioned, as a rule, in connection with Lenin's visit to VKhUTEMAS: it was Senkin who communicated most with the leader and tried to explain to him the principles and tasks of the new art. Well, in our time, this master has been almost forgotten. And now Zotov is taking a step towards returning his legacy to the general public. As it turns out, Senkin's work is in no way inferior to the much more famous experiments of Lisitsky and Klutsis in the same direction.
There are more traditional things in the "apartments" — for example, paintings by Drevin and Udaltsova, and these things are one better than the other. Drevin, with its signature brownish color scheme, is represented by the Altai cycle, and items from the largest museums (Tretyakov Gallery, State Museum of Fine Arts) are juxtaposed here with works from private collections that are not so often exhibited. But Udaltsova's Armenian cycle is no less attractive: she performs oriental plots full of southern charm with broad emotional oil strokes. Filled with incredible dynamics, they seem to swirl into whirlwinds, dragging the viewer's attention away from the depicted objects as such.
Paintings, drawings, photographs, montages, engravings, household items, perfumes, and even an installation by the modern art group Mishmash in the form of a multitude of doorbells... With all the focus on a specific time and place, the exhibition turned out to be colorful - and this is rather a plus. Not only because it is interesting for a wide variety of visitors to watch it. But also because it perfectly reflects the very spirit of the era, when avant-gardists and realists, traditionalists and experimentalists, supporters of pure and applied art got along well, were friends, created side by side and were full of faith in a bright future. A little bit of their optimism won't hurt us today.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
