Chagall and the russian avant-garde

Grenoble Museum is pleased to welcome an exceptional exhibition outside the walls of the Centre Georges Pompidou

Grenoble Museum - March 5, 2011 - June 13, 2011

Chagall, Double portrait au verre de vin©Centre Pompidou

The exhibition "Chagall and the Russian avant-garde", the Museum of Grenoble presents from March 5 to June 13, 2011, is part of projects outside the Walls that realizes the Centre Georges Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art for several years in major regional museums in France.

More than 150 works from the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou can trace a particularly fertile period in the history of Art of the twentieth century Russian avant-garde, guided by the universe of a fascinating poet of modern art: Marc Chagall.

In Grenoble, a lesser known facet of his collections is enhanced: the Russian avant-garde.

An original approach was chosen for this exhibition because it is unclassifiable work of Chagall that allows, according to various moments, the successive stages of the vanguard of the early twentieth century Russia.

 

 

W. Kandinsky, Improvisation III, 1909©ADAGP©Centre Pompidou

A special place is reserved also to Kandinsky, a towering figure in Russian art of this period.

The exhibition devised to track the abundant creativity of the first three decades of the twentieth century in Russia, which brings together over 150 paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs, begins with early works by Chagall.

 

Chagall, Le marchand de journaux, 1914©ADAGP©Centre Pompidou

Paintings and gouaches made in Vitebsk and in St. Petersburg, reflect the profound originality of his universe.

Impregnated with Russian popular culture and Hasidic spirituality, his works offer a very personal vision of the world and life, that in a visual language of total freedom and intense poetry.

 

 

Nathalie Gontcharova, Les porteuses, 1911 ©RMN–P.Migeat

Meanwhile, loans to Russian folklore allow other artists to emerge from the academic heritage of the nineteenth century, in the case of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova paintings with their neo-primitivist paintings.

This applies also to Kandinsky that integrates in the Blue Rider Almanac numerous references to popular art, an influence illustrated by the presentation of some icons and engravings from the late nineteenth century's legacy from Nina Kandinsky.

The pre-war period was marked by numerous exchanges between France and Russia. Stays of Russian Artists in Paris. Prestigious modern art collections of Serge Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in Russia, exhibitions comparing the vanguards of the two countries in Moscow and St. Petersburg ...

 

Jean Pougny, La boule blanche, 1915©ADAGP©Centre Pompidou

Mixing of men and ideas found in the creations of the Russian community of Paris with painters like Pougny and Survage or sculptors like Archipenko and Zadkine ...

The years before the Soviet Revolution wrote the most beautiful pages of Russian art of the twentieth century.



 

M. Larionov, Portrait de femme, 1911-1912©Centre Pompidou

Rayonism and Cubo-Futurism are evocated with major works of Larionov and Gontcharova, but also the art of Chagall, after his first stay in Paris and his discovery of cubism and Delaunay, as masterpieces as a double portrait of wine or glass doors of the cemetery.

One room is reserved for the advent of Suprematism in 1915, which gathered around the famous black cross on white background several other works of Malevitch and Lissitzky and Pougny.

Constructivism is illustrated by a serie of paintings, reliefs, photographs and rare documents that crowns the monument Model of the Third International Tatlin.

 

Kandinsky, Promenade, 1920©Centre Pompidou

The Kandinsky of the late 1910 is represented both by a series of Russian landscapes, amazing and colorful, and by one of the great masterpieces of abstract this time, "In the Grey".

Finally, projects on architecture, cinema, theater, from Tchernikhov to Exter, from Vertov to Kandinsky and Chagall, illustrate the diversity of forms used by Russian artists in this historical moment when Art was beyond genres and categories to invent a new world.