Guggenheim Museum Exhibition of Russian Art

Monday, 19 September 2005 10:44

NEW YORK, NY.–The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents RUSSIA!, the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art ever shown in the United States. With more than 275 objects, this innovative exhibition features the greatest masterworks of Russian art from the thirteenth century to the present, including icons; portraiture in both painting and sculpture from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries; critical realism in the nineteenth century as well as socialist realism of the communist era; landscapes through the centuries; pioneering abstraction; and experimental contemporary art—many of these works will be seen for the first time outside of Russia. The exhibition also features a selection of first-class Western European paintings and sculptures from the imperial art collections assembled by Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicholas I in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and later in the early twentieth century by the Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. These works testify simultaneously to the perspicacity and daring of Russian art collectors, the discernible influence of these outstanding collections on the development of Russian art, and the special relationship between Russia and the West. A significant number of the selected artworks have either rarely or never traveled abroad, notably: icons by the fifteenth-century painter Andrei Rublev and the sixteenth-century painter Dionysii; Ivan Aivazovsky’s epic seascape The Ninth Wave (1850); Vasilii Perov’s introspective portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872); Ilya Repin’s iconic Bargehaulers on the Volga (1870–73); Mikhail Vrubel’s haunting Symbolist masterpiece Lilacs (1900); and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (ca. 1930), from the Hermitage. The works will be on loan from Russia’s greatest museums—the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Hermitage Museum, and the Kremlin Museum—as well as regional museums, private collections, and a select number of museums and private collections outside of Russia. According to Thomas Krens, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, "This exhibition will serve as a unique opportunity to introduce the international public to the most valued artistic treasures culled from Russia’s greatest museums. RUSSIA! is in keeping with the Guggenheim’s distinguished history of presenting groundbreaking exhibitions of Russian art, including Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection (1981), The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (1992), Amazons of the Avant-Garde (2000), and Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism (2003). Undoubtedly, an exhibition of this scope and reach will not be repeated in this generation." RUSSIA! is conceived as a series of key moments in the history of art in Russia. Added together, the various sections of the exhibition both tell the remarkable and interconnected history of Russian art of the last eight hundred years and Russian collections of Western art since the eighteenth century and demonstrate that Russia’s major contributions to the history of world art extend far beyond the already well-known and revered icons of the Russian Orthodox faith and the avant-garde of the early twentieth century. The unique architecture of the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright building will play a major role in this ambitious presentation. The spiral of the museum will be filled with eight-hundred years of Russian art, so that in a single view, looking up or across the ramps of the distinctive interior, visitors will both comprehend the remarkable span of Russian artistic production from the early thirteenth century to the present and be able to identify recurring themes through the centuries. Two of the Annex galleries will present a selection of Western masterworks collected by the monarchs Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Nicolas I and the merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, respectively, which testify to the foresight of Russian collectors and highlight the relationship between Russia and the West since the eighteenth century. These sections will feature Anthony Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Guido Reni, Bartolome Murillo, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Claude Monet, André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso.

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