The exhibit "Revolutija from Chagall to Malevich from Repin to Kandinsky" will be at MAMbo–Museum of Modern Art of Bologna from December 12th, 2017 until May 13th, 2018.
It is produced and organised by CMS Cultura in partnership with the Municipality of Bologna/Bologna Museum Institute and thanks to the support of the official partners Volvo Italia, Gruppo Hera and other important sponsors. The show commemorates one hundred years since the Russian Revolution with a vibrant and unrepeatable collection of works on display tailored to a mixed local and foreign audience. Evgenia Petrova, Curator and Deputy Director of the State Museum of Russia and Joseph Kiblitsky of the same museum tell the story of those tumultuous times through the eyes of the most famous artists of that historical period.
More than seventy works, historical films, photographs, and sculptures are on display;masterpieces of Russian and avant-garde artists among which, to mention but a few: the iconic and lyrical Promenade by Chagall, The Black Square, The Black Cross and The Black Circle by Malevich, the Portrait of Poetess Anna Achmatova by Natan Altman, heir to French Cubism; Kandinsky’s abstract works On White (I) and Twilight in an open dialogue with the works of the couple Michail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, overtures to Russian avant-garde.
It is a story that witnesses the extraordinary modernity of the Russian cultural movements of the early 20th century: from primitive times to cube-futurism, suprematism and constructivism, by simultaneously creating a chronological parallel between figurative expressionism and purely Abstract. The art of the Russian avant-garde is one of the most important and radical chapters of modernism.
The period from 1910 to 1920 saw the birth of diametrically opposed schools, associations, and avant-garde movements at a dizzying pace that has never been seen in any other moment in the history of art, before or ever since. The visitor’s route through the exhibit leads up to the 1930s of socialist realism with highly suggestive works like Vasilij Kuptsov’s painting with Maksim Gorkij at the centre or the Tupolev ANT 20, named after its inventor, which was used for Stalinist propaganda. And then there’s Vera Mukhina’s 1937 sculpture The Worker and the Kolchoziana, that not only caused uproar at the World’s Fair of Paris but later became one of the most distinctive symbols of the USSR.
