" Venus Sovietica " at The State Russian Museum

Saturday, 10 November 2007 09:43

St. Petersburg, Russia - The State Russian Museum opened the Venus Sovietica exhibition in the Benois Wing of the Mikhailovsky Palace. The exhibition comprises circa 120 paintings, works of easel and printed graphic art, posters, sculptures, objects of decorative and applied art from the collection of the Russian Museum as well as photographs from private collections of Moscow and St Petersburg. The exhibition will be on display till March 10, 2008.

In the title of the Venus Sovietica exhibition both words are equally important. On the one hand, it implies “goddess of love and beauty”, on the other hand, refers to the Soviet period of Russian history from the Great October Socialist Revolution to 1991. One pole is a radically changed social status of a woman; the antipole is a traditional artistic concept of her as of a muse, source of inspiration and voluptuous beauty. Both poles have intricately intertwined.

Proclaimed by the revolution and the Civil War status of an emancipated woman, equal in rights to a man in work and family life, is represented most fully and diversely in the posters. It was not infrequent that, resorting to this form of art to fulfill an important social order some artists deliberately deprived their heroines of corporal, gender and even aesthetic essence.

Some other forms of art, such as painting, sculpture and drawing, offered an incomparably wider spectrum of senses, conveyed in the female nudes. Painters, sculptors and graphic artists accentuate poesy and feminine fragility, sensuality or crude earthliness and even grotesque and humor.

Different stages of the Soviet epoch dictated different aims. Thus, in the 1930s the ideal of beauty was equated with corporal beauty of a body, demonstrating robust health and strength. Nevertheless, even in the oeuvre of Alexander Samokhvalov and Alexander Deineka two types of representation and two types of beauty coexist. Their paintings, devoted to sport and work, the Metrostroi girls and athletes seemingly deprived of intimacy, secrecy and mystique, are, nevertheless, tinted with lyrical and sensual author’s attitude.

How voluptuous, refined and piquant are the wonderful miniatures by Alexander Samokhvalov (sketches for the unrealized Joy of Life)! And how masterfully Alexander Deineka conveyed the captivating magic of a woman at a toilet table, tête-à-tête with a mirror in his Night! Needless to say for the nudes, the eternal theme with every artist. Notwithstanding the changeability of the ideal of beauty, the curves of a female body, femininity of pose and gold glimmer of skin remain important and dear to the artists.

The artist’s models by Yury Pimenov, Vladimir Lebedev and Alexander Shevchenko were, certainly, painted by the artists all for themselves, since they could never leave the artists’ studios. Possibly, these paintings are too personal and biographic. The more surprising is Vladimir Malagis’s model painted traditionally, against drapery, in a classical pose and with a slightly gloomy unfriendly face bearing individual, but, by no means, aristocratic “beauty”.

The iconography of the Venus Sovietica corresponds to its historical progenitrixes in full. The types of the lying Venus (Venus pudica) and Venus at toilet will ever be classical. The myth of the birth of Venus corresponds to the beauties at full length, as if offering themselves for the judgment of the Gods and the viewers. Even the evidently sinful and dissipated female images originate from the Venus sinister, vulgar, woman of easy virtue (Aphrodite Pandemos, associated with mere physical love, according to Plato). Venus had another hypostasis of mother (Venus Genetrix). All these types of Venus existed in Soviet Art though transformed under ideological and aesthetical influence, limited or forbidden for exhibiting in those days.

Quoting Sigmund Freud: “if you want to known more about femininity, than ask your own experience, or turn to poets, or wait for the science to give you a more profound and concordant information.” This exhibition about the 20th century woman is just another answer to a still unsolved enigma of her beauty.

The State Russian Museum today is a unique depository of artistic treasures, a leading restoration center, an authoritative institute of academic research, a major educational center and the nucleus of a network of national museums of art. The Russian Museum collection contains circa 400.000 exhibits. The main complex of museum buildings - the Mikhailovsky Palace and Benois Wing - houses the permanent exhibition of the Russian Museum, tracing the entire history of Russian art from the tenth to the twentieth centuries. The museum collection embraces all forms, genres, schools and movements of art.

Visit The State Russian Museum at : http://www.rusmuseum.ru/eng/museum/