From Russia
"From Russia" by Adele Weder, Summer 2008, p. 86
Filled with spectacular works from Russia’s top public museums, “From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870–1925 from Moscow and St. Petersburg” is an exhibition that’s hard not to love. The rarity of the works’ appearance abroad and the star power of its content guaranteed the exhibition a warm welcome in London. But even more impressive than the corralling of marquee names were the exhibition’s deft curatorial revelations. With its origins in the late 19th- and early 20th-century collections of the Moscow textile magnates Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, the exhibition evokes not only the cultural cross-currents between Europe and Russia around the turn of the previous century, but also their impact on society’s lurching transition to modernism.
The exhibition’s opening salvo is a slate of works by the Russian realists—Ilya Repin’s 1901 portrait of a barefoot Lenin, for instance. What follows is a sequence of important works by Rousseau, Daubigny, van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and others. The juxtapositions suggest the history laid out in the curatorial statement: in Russia, the realists drew inspiration from the first two, while the renegades travelled to Paris to scout out the latter names and bring their works to Russia, and this jagged cross-fertilization helped fuel one of the most explosively creative periods in art history.
At the heart of the show, in the Royal Academy’s central domed hall, a newly constructed model of Vladimir Tatlin’s famous Monument to the Third International (1920) serves as a kind of fulcrum between European Impressionism and the Russian Constructivism that follows in the next galleries. Above the model, on a suspended screen, plays a 1999 film made by MIT architecture students depicting present-day St. Petersburg and its bustling citizenry, with Tatlin’s monument Photoshopped into the background and towering over the cityscape as if it had actually been constructed as planned. It makes for a powerful bridge to the subsequent galleries. The next section is devoted to Sergei Diaghilev, another patron who brought French art to Russia and vice versa.
The exhibition concludes with the Constructivist progeny of the France-Russia connection: Chagall, Malevich, Kandinsky et al. The socio-political context in which these artists lived has now fundamentally changed, of course. Under Stalin’s reign, their works were considered to be noxious artifacts of the decadent West, and remained locked in Moscow cellars for decades. As the now-retired Royal Academy exhibitions secretary Sir Norman Rosenthal opined at the critics’ preview, this exhibition argues that art is more important than political ideology—it lasts longer.
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