|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Russia! On 27 March 2006 the largest scale retrospective exhibition of Russian art ever shown abroad opened in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. The showing in Spain follows a 17 week stay in New York which ran from September 2005 until January 2006 during which there were 401,885 visitors. The exhibition, which has enjoyed the patronage of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, was organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation of New York together with the Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography of the Russian Federation, the State Hermitage, the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Kremlin State Historical and Cultural Museum Preserve, and the ROSIZO State Museum and Exhibition Center, Moscow. The exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is a modified and extended version of the project RUSSIA! At the core of the exhibition is works of art relating to the Russian Orthodox Church in the 13th to 17th centuries. These are not only rare masterpieces of painting, but also include decorations of the jeweler's art. Twenty-two exhibits dating from Russia before Peter the Great come from a separate exhibition entitled The Grandeur of the Tsars: Treasures of the Kremlin. This was shown in the Hermitage-Guggenheim Exhibition Center in Las Vegas while the show RUSSIA! was running in New York. This large scale exhibition of Russian art presents more than 250 separate items and displays not only splendid icons but also the Avantgarde artwork from the beginning of the 20th century. Among the masterpieces of Russian art on display are both painting and sculpture portraits from the 13th - 20th centuries; Realism of the 19th century and Socialist Realism; innovative Abstract Art; experimental and modern art. Of particular interest are works from the collections of Western European art assembled in the 18th and 19th centuries by Emperor Peter the Great, Empress Catherine the Great and Emperor Nicholas I, as well as the former collections of the Moscow art patrons Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. These works bear witness to the perspicacity of Russian collectors and to the noticeable influence of their outstanding collections on the development of Russian painting. Among the more than hundred works by Russian artists, works by the following stand out particularly: Andrei Rublyev, Dionysis, Dmitry Levitsky, Orest Kiprensky, Karl Briullov, Alexander Ivanov, Ilya Repin, Ivan Kramskoy, Nikolay Ge, Mikhail Vrubel, Valentin Serov, Natalya Goncharova, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Isaac Brodsky, Alexander Deineki, Alexander Laktionov, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The State Hermitage loaned about 30 paintings to the show, among which the following canvases have generated especial interest: a Self-Portrait by Anthony van Dyck, The Repentence of St Peter by Guido Reni, The Immaculate Conception by Bartolomeo Murillo, Morning in the Harbour by Claude Lorrain, Poppy Field by Claude Monet, Lady in Blue by Paul Cezanne, Conversation by Paul Gauguin, Girl with Tulips by Henri Matisse, Woman with a Fan by Pablo Picasso and Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. The exhibition is filled out by sculptural works, including the Portrait of Peter I by B.K.Rastrelli and the Portrait of Nicholas I by Luigi Bienme. The General Sponsors of the exhibition are: The Alcoa Foundation and Sintexneftegaz. The Sponsors are: the Vladimir Potanin Charitable Foundation, the International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art; the Foundation of Mutual Understanding. Transportation support has been provided by Aeroflot Russian Airlines.
|
|
|||||
|
|
||||||
|
Copyright © 2006 State
Hermitage Museum |
