Russian avant-garde works that were displayed in early Soviet collections established by Wassily Kandinsky and Alexander Rodchenko are on show in a groundbreaking exhibition at Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. The works were hidden from view for decades as degenerate art.
In 1918, Kandinsky initiated a plan to spread avant-garde art to the masses by sending works to regional museums. Continued by Rodchenko, the initiative was “in tune with the utopian ideas of the early revolutionary years and like many undertakings of that period was soon rejected”, according to a museum statement. “However, the project allowed many Russian museums to gather unique collections of avant garde art.” At the time, Kandinsky and Rodchenko were working for the fine art department of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat for Education, which was created after the Bolshevik Revolution. Over a period of two years the department bought 1926 works from 415 artists and sent 1211 of them to 30 museums around Russia.
Titled To Be Left Until Called For, the exhibition brings together 105 works from 19 museums, ranging from Omsk Regional Museum of Fine Arts in Siberia, the Kozmodemyansk Museum Complex in the Volga River region of Mari El and the Yelets City Museum of Regional Studies in central Russia. They were locked away for decades during the Soviet era after the avant garde art fell out of favour, and have never been seen together before.
The exhibition is organised by Andrey Sarabyanov, a leading expert on Russian avant-garde art who is editor of the Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-Garde and is now at the helm of the Jewish Museum’s Avant-Garde Center. Although the exhibition includes two Suprematist works by Konstantin Malevich and three paintings and an etching by Kandinsky, it is unique for its previously untold stories.
“Our main idea was to show little-known works, or even better, little-known artists,” said Sarabyanov at the opening. “This was the priority.”
For example, one work in the show is a gouache titled Idyll (mid-1910s) by Varvara Bubnova, the sister of an aunt by marriage of Yoko Ono.
To Be Left Until Called For drew huge queues on its 7 April opening night. Some visitors were shocked by the non-linear display, with paintings bunched together. Sarabyanov defended it as harking back to how paintings were hung in the era of the avant-garde.
A second exhibition, covering the period from 1918 until the end of the avant-garde in the 1930s, will open in 2017. Maria Nasimova, a curator at the Jewish Museum, says the museum is in talks to take the shows abroad, probably to Europe.
The exhibition is sponsored by the billionaire Mikhail Gutseriyev and his Safmar Charitable Foundation. Gutseriyev made international headlines last month for the lavish Moscow wedding of his son, which included performances by Sting and Jennifer Lopez.