Dutch 20th-century masters (1945-1985)
8 June 2001 - 9 September 2001

The exhibition features 33 works by Dutch artists who are exponents of Abstract Expressionism, one of the main tendencies in Western art in both Europe and the United States in the second half of the 20th century.
Interest in the ideas of Abstract Expressionism arose as a reaction to the apocalyptic horrors of the Second World War in the course of which concepts of European cultural values were undermined by the forces of ideological evil that gained the ascendancy in Germany and gave birth to art of a totalitarian fascist character. After the war had ended, the creative intelligentsia was faced with the task of re-assessing what is truly valuable and permanent in art. A way had to be found out of the blind alley in which Western European culture found itself, having proved incapable of offering serious resistance to fascist dictatorship. Dutch artists saw this way as lying in Abstract Expressionism, the whole essence of which lies in the attempt to think and create in an uninhibited manner, as children do.
One of the most prominent phenomena in Dutch art during that period was the work of the artists of the COBRA group (whose name derives from the initial letters of three northern European capitals: Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam), that existed only between 1949 and 1951, but had a strong influence on the development of Dutch art in the second half of the 20th century.
The exhibition includes works by members of this group: the Dutch artists Karel Appel, Constant and Lucebert, the Belgian Corneille, as well as works by followers of COBRA - Eugen Brands, Gerrit Benner, Ger Latatster and Willem Hussems. Many of the artists assumed pseudonyms. They tried to produce an new vivid idiom in painting. As Constant, the most many-sided member of the group, asserted: "A painting is no more a construction of colour and line. It is an animal, night, lamentation, a human being or all that rolled into one."
The first exhibition of the COBRA group took place in the Stedelijk Museum in 1949 and generated a real scandal. Stepping over powerful antagonism, the artists managed to restore a feeling of self-confidence in the Dutch creative milieu. In 1951 the group was officially dissolved, since its members did not want to turn into a formal stylistic clique.
Using minimal means the artists achieve the necessary impression, with a special role being allotted to expressive, at times even too intensive colour. Quite frequently a colour contrast is employed that immediately captures the viewers' attention and forces them to reflect on what the painter wanted to express with such an unexpected and nervous fracture in a line or a truly explosive patch of colour.
Despite the deliberate anti-traditional tendency of their work, the COBRA artists did not remain closed to outside influences. One of the sources of their work was not traditional, but primitive art as well as children's drawings, the free flights of fancy in which the artists admired. Besides, one can make out features analogous to Picasso's passionate manner of the 1930s that are particularly evident in Guernica, the heavy, sprawling lines of Leger, the bizarre "floating space" of Chagall's finest paintings and the free linearity of the more abstract Surrealists such as Miro. Finally, they also became acquainted with nascent Tachism in Paris, where the members of COBRA spent the greater part of their time and where they probably saw in photographs examples of early Abstract Expressionism that had even then captured minds in New York.
The Russian public has had little acquaintance with the work of Dutch artists of the second half of the 20th century and this exhibition is intended to reveal to them a new, modern page in that country's art. The State Hermitage in conjunction with the Slavia publishing-house (St. Petersburg) has produced and published a scholarly catalogue for the exhibition.

Palace of the Arts
René Daniels
Larger view

Fence
Armando
Larger view