Kandinsky exhibition at the Russian Museum. From the Russian north to the European avant-garde: what to see at the Kandinsky exhibition at the Russian Museum

IN Russian Museum an exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of his birth opens Wassily Vasilyevich Kandinsky, an artist who stood at the origins of abstract art. This is the second exhibition this year dedicated to the anniversary: ​​Russian museums, each with their own “optics,” are approaching Kandinsky’s legacy, closely examining all its facets. The Tretyakov Gallery’s spring exhibition sought the consonance and “contradiction” of two famous and significant works of the artist, written in 1913: “Composition VII” and “Composition VI”. The latter is kept in the Russian Museum, whose curators study Kandinsky from a slightly different angle. They are interested in the national origins in the art of the theorist of non-objectivity, who came from a merchant family of descendants of Siberian convicts.

"Improvisation 11"
1910

Therefore, for comparison, along with the master’s paintings and graphic works, samples of designer porcelain, the exhibition will feature works by his famous contemporaries: Ivan Bilibin, Elena Polenova, Sergei Malyutin, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Alexei Yavlensky, Marianna Verevkina and others.

Kandinsky’s fate, it is worth recalling, was unusual: throughout his rather long life (1866–1944) he was a citizen of three countries: Russia, Germany and France. The artist's great-grandmother was the Tunguska princess Gantimurova, and his father was a representative of the ancient Trans-Baikal Kandinsky family, who derived themselves from the family name of the princes of the Mansi Kondinsky principality.

"Blue Comb"
1917

Kandinsky did not get into art right away. A student at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University became interested in ethnography and made an expedition to the northern districts of the Vologda province.

At the age of thirty, the assistant professor went to study painting in Munich, where, together with the artist Franz Marc, he created the expressionist group “The Blue Rider”. In 1914, the artist was in Moscow. After the revolution, he sincerely tries to get along with the new government, but abstract art is called decadent, and Kandinsky is called a “minion of the bourgeoisie.” Having accepted a very timely offer from the German architect Walter Gropius to teach at the new Bauhaus school in Weimar, he leaves for Europe, where he becomes a world-famous artist.

"Two ovals"
1919

"Black Spot (I)"
1912

"Amazon in the mountains"
1917 — 1918

Mikhail Larionov
"Near the camp"
1910-1911

The Germans consider Wassily Kandinsky one of their own, and the French, and we, of course, too. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth in St. Petersburg, the State Russian Museum opened an exhibition dedicated to the artist - “Wassily Kandinsky and Russia”. The name is correct. Born here in Moscow, the artist established himself in Germany, where he created the first abstract painting in history, lived in France in recent years and died there. The exhibition takes place under the auspices of the V St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum.

So, there was an amazing period in Kandinsky’s life - these were the years from 1914 to 1921, when he lived in Russia, when after the revolution he wanted to organize his own revolution in Russian art. But the exhibition organizers expanded the exhibition beyond this seven-year period. Because they wanted to discern national origins in the works that Kandinsky created far from his homeland.

There is pandemonium in the five halls of the Benois building. Everyone wants to see the unknown, figurative Kandinsky. The period for the study was taken over a quarter of a century - from the beginning of his work in 1896, when a 30-year-old successful lawyer gave up his lucrative position and began to seriously engage in painting, until his departure from Russia in 1921.

“The Russian part of his heritage is presented here, and it is presented in all the forms in which he worked. This is not only painting, watercolor, engraving, which he carved with pleasure, this is also decorative and applied art,” notes Vladimir Kruglov, leading researcher at the Russian Museum, curator of the exhibition.

Spinning wheels, colorful splints, northern icons - this is what Kandinsky saw in his youth, when he was on an ethnographic expedition in the Vologda province. Researchers believe that it was after this trip that he understood how color and rhythm affect the artistic image. And the curators of the exhibition prove that the origins of Kandinsky’s abstractions are also in the north of Russia.

“What makes Kandinsky great is because he could transform folk art through himself. And what he received in the north of Russia, this charge of purity in color, has practically not changed,” says artist Josef Kiblicki.

A separate part of the exhibition includes works by Kandinsky’s contemporaries - Nicholas Roerich, David Burliuk, Marianna Verevkina, Alexei Yavlensky. Under the influence of neo-romantics and expressionists, Kandinsky moved further and further away from figurative painting and came to abstractionism. First. He composed his paintings like music, calling them “Compositions”, “Impressions” and “Improvisations”. He foresaw and encrypted in them the events of his life and of all mankind, as in the most famous - “Composition VI” and “Composition VII” - from the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery on the plot of the Flood and the Last Judgment.

" A large-scale exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the artist’s birth was collected throughout Russia. It should show how much Russian there is in the works of the author, whose expressive abstract language is often considered absolutely European. "Paper" talks about the main advantages of the exhibition.

Exhibition at the Russian Museum - the second Kandinsky retrospective in Russian history

Before the St. Petersburg exhibition, a retrospective of Wassily Kandinsky was held in Russia only once.

Paintings from domestic and Western museums were exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 1989, 45 years after the death of their author. At the end of the 20th century, he was shown there together with Arnold Schoenberg. And then, already in the tenth years of this century, together with the artists of “The Blue Horseman” in the Pushkin Museum.

Works for the exhibition were collected throughout Russia

Unlike the 1989 retrospective, the current exhibition does not include works from Europe. However, paintings for it were collected literally all over the country - 14 domestic museums took part in the formation of the exhibition, including the Russian and Pushkin, the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery.

The selection of works represents the work of Kandinsky from the late 1890s to the early 1920s, that is, before his departure from Russia (which occurred in 1921). In addition, the project also includes works from galleries and private collections in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

This is the first exhibition of the artist’s works in the context of northern folk art

It is known that Wassily Kandinsky’s expedition to the Vologda province, to which he went independently in the summer of 1889, made a strong impression on the artist. The brightness of the clothes and interiors of the local population shocked him.

In general, the folk art of the Russian North had a significant influence on Kandinsky’s worldview and taste, on his desire to create images using the intensity and symbolism of color and expressiveness of rhythm.

After the expedition, the artist began collecting popular prints, icons of “northern writing” and toys. All this can be seen now in the Benois building. In the first hall, objects of decorative and applied art and icons are exhibited, the color scheme of which is echoed in the works of Kandinsky and reflects his aesthetic searches of the 1900–1910s.

The exhibition shows the connection between early Kandinsky and neo-romanticism

Thanks to the paintings of Elena Polenova, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Nicholas Roerich, and Dmitry Stelletsky, exhibited together with Kandinsky’s works, the artist’s works reveal the neo-romantic searches in folk art characteristic of the early period of his work and that time in general.

Kandinsky is presented as a participant in key Russian and European movements

The exhibition at the Russian Museum also presents works by Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Marianna Verevkina, David Burliuk, Alexei Yavlensky.

Together with Jawlensky and Verevkina, he created the New Munich Art Society. The rest participated in their exhibitions. All of them were exhibited in the traveling International Salons of Vladimir Izdebsky, and in the Blue Horseman exhibitions (together with Kazimir Malevich). This happened at the beginning of the tenth years of the 20th century, when the first non-objective works appeared in the artist’s work, and their principle was formulated in the text “On the spiritual in art and, above all, in painting.”

The exhibition will run until November 21, 2016. The entrance ticket costs 450 rubles for adults and 200 rubles for students.

Tolstoy A.V. Artists of Russian emigration. - 2nd ed., rev. and additional - M.: Art-XXI century, 2017. - 383 p., ill. Circulation 1000 copies. The book presents...

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