The Avant-garde. To the 21st Century by Cart, 6+

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DESCRIPTION OF EXHIBITION

The exhibition includes more than 200 works of art by prominent representatives of early Soviet art from the Kirov region’s museums, including the Vyatka Art Museum, the Yaransk Local History Museum, the Slobodskoy Local History Museum, the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan, and private collections. These are works by Nikolai Feshin, Vasily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Ivan Klyun, Olga Rozanova, Georgy Lazarev, and other masters.    

The exhibition’s reconstruction debuted at the Yeltsin Center Art Gallery in Yekaterinburg (2020–2021), followed by the Vyatka Art Museum in Kirov (2021) and the Museum of Russian Impressionism in Moscow (2022).

Two museums joined the fourth point of the route. They were: The Soviet Local History Museum of the Kirov Region, which is participating in the Exhibition for the first time after curators discovered new exhibits in 2023, and the Tretyakov Gallery, which displays seven paintings by Konstantin Chebotarev, whose collection the Kazan viewer last saw more than a century ago.

Kazan is a central point in the transfer of Russian cultural paradigms from West to East; it was here that the artistic tradition represented by Feshin’s school gave a new impulse to the development of national identity. The exhibition highlights Kazan’s importance to the cultural and historical perspective of the 20th century as a whole.

The exhibit represents finds and discoveries directly related to the Kazan Art School, including works by Pavel Benkov, Vasily Bogatyrev, Nikolai Feshin, and Vera Vilkoviskaya.

The organisers intend to continue the series of restorations and discoveries of works from the Yaransk Local History Museum, which began as part of the preparation for the first exhibition in 2020. Three paintings by artists Georgy Lazarev and Leonid Pletnev will be restored for the Kazan exhibition. The works of art will be displayed immediately after the restoration work is completed.

The artists’ work at the exhibition demonstrates how explosive the first decades of the century were in terms of the abundance of ideas and methods for putting them into practice, in the process of development from the tenets of academicism to innovative experiments. It is impossible not to admire the courage of the art curators who offered samples of the most relevant contemporary art at that time to viewers in Russia’s patriarchal corners.

Curators of the Exhibition: Anna Shakina, Ildar Galeev and Andrey Sarabyanov.

For reference

In 1921, local educational enthusiasts Evgeny Medvedev, Sergei Yakimov, Sergei Vshivtsev, and Nikolai Belyanin organised the Third Travelling Art Exhibition, which was scheduled to visit seven cities in the Vyatka Governorate. To accomplish this, 322 works by 55 artists from Moscow, Petrograd, Vyatka, and Kazan were gathered, including both realistic painting masters and avant-garde artists. Paintings, graphic works, and sculptures were transported on carts because they were the only form of transportation available throughout the country at the time. However, the exhibition was only held in Sovetsk and Yaransk, and due to the autumn mud-locked roads and a lack of funds, it was impossible to take away the works, and they remained forgotten in the storerooms of museums in the Vyatka Governorate until the end of the 20th century. The history of the 1921 travelling exhibition was rediscovered, and the pieces were taken out of the storerooms, thanks to Anna Shakina, Andrey Sarabyanov, and Ildar Galeev.

In 1921, the public’s reception was not always positive — many works by modern painters were unclear to the audience. Today, visitors can enjoy the scope of the first exhibition collected for the province, as well as the variety of Soviet art from the first two decades of the 20th century.