The talents of women. From Wednesday at the Royal Palace "Divine and avant-garde", 90 masterpieces of Russian art from the St. Petersburg Museum
The talents of women. From Wednesday at the Royal Palace "Divine and avant-garde", 90 masterpieces of Russian art from the St. Petersburg Museum
Milan, October 27 2020 – Saints and peasants, tsarinas and artists. Women are the absolute protagonists of the exhibition “Divine and avant-garde. Women in Russian art", promoted and produced by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura, Palazzo Reale and CMS Cultura, which from tomorrow (and until 5 April 2021) offers visitors a selection of 90 works from the State Russian Museum of St. Petersburg along a route set up in the rooms of the Royal Palace.
“Palazzo Reale continues its collaboration with the most important museums in the world with a major exhibition that fits fully into the 'Talents of Women' programme, representing the female universe both as the subject of the works, capable of telling the story and the life of the Russian people; both as an author, bearer of a gaze capable of representing one's own private and social contemporaneity – states the Councilor for Culture Filippo Del Corno –. An original and fascinating journey that accompanies the visitor along centuries of history, cutting across very different eras and styles, thanks to a selection of masterpieces from the St. Petersburg Museum chosen directly by the museum's curators."
The exhibition, curated by Evgenija Petrova and Josef Kiblitskij of the State Russian Museum of St. Petersburg, intends to give an idea of Russian art from the 14th to the 20th century, of the fundamental role of women in this country, of their beauty, of their contribution to the history of art and modernity, of their role in the battle for emancipation and the recognition of rights. Thanks to a rich corpus of works, created using very different expressive means and techniques - from sacred icons to easel painting, from sculpture to graphics, up to refined porcelain - the exhibition itinerary traces the evolution of Russian tradition and culture through representation of the female universe.
The exhibition is divided into two parts: the first, divided into 7 sections, is dedicated to the artists' gaze on women and therefore collects works in which women are the subject of representation; while the second part, dedicated to the artists of the Russian avant-garde, offers women's gaze on the complex but vital reality that surrounded them in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The 7 sections are structured as follows:
"THE HEAVEN - The Virgin and the saints”: the route opens with ancient and precious icons of the Mother of Christ, protector of Russia, and some saints venerated in the country. In the life of a traditional Russian family, religion had great importance, in fact icons found a place not only in churches but also in homes, of any social level. A special place was reserved for the icons on the walls of the houses, often called krasnyj ugol (red corner or beautiful corner), still present today in many peasant houses.
"THE THRONE - Tsarinas of all the Russias”: after the death of the reforming tsar Peter the Great in 1725, the period of “feminine” reign began in Russia. The tsarinas occupy the Russian throne, ruling an immense country for two long centuries. In this section there are portraits of six of the fourteen empresses who reigned from the end of the 1917th century to XNUMX.
"THE LAND - The horizon of peasant women”: until the early twentieth century, peasant families formed the majority of the Russian population. The story of their lives flows in the exhibition from the beginning of the nineteenth century - starting from Aleksej Venetsianov, the first painter of peasants in Russian history - up to the "suprenaturalism" of Malevich, who in the 1920s portrayed "Girls in the Field" .
"TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE - Women and society”: this section offers portraits of artists' wives and children, together with faces of women important to the country's history, such as the poet Anna Akhmatova and Nadežda Dobičina, the first Russian gallery owner, later head of the Soviet art section at the Russian Museum . Other portraits represent women's jobs: musician, worker, politician. The portraits follow the evolution of styles between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: realist, impressionist, symbolist, cubist, supranaturalist.
"THE FAMILY - Rituals and conventions”: until the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, women were subordinated to rigid patriarchal rules which provided, among other things, the most rigorous purity until marriage. In this section there are some works denouncing the unfair and often humiliating condition of women. Conditions that change, in substance and representation, after the 1917 Revolution, when women obtain equal rights and workers are transformed into heroines.
"MOTHERS - The dimension of love”: with the exception of one canvas - a painting by Zinaida Serebrjakova - the works dedicated to motherhood between the 19th and 19th centuries are all works by male artists. In addition to the evolution of styles, the works reveal the changes in Russian social life and traditions over the past two centuries.
"THE BODY - Femininity revealed”: the theme of the female nude, a classic of world art, also runs through Russian art and occupies this section of the exhibition. Starting from the mid-18th century, nude models posed for drawing and painting courses at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Petersburg, but the female body as an autonomous subject, worthy of being exhibited alongside portraits, landscapes and paintings by mythological and historical subject, it established itself in Russia only between the 19th and 20th centuries. Only then did emancipation allow society to show it naked. The evolution of the representation of the nude allows us to follow the development of the concept of beauty in the trends and avant-gardes of Russian painting.
"THE ARTISTS - Realism and avant-garde Amazons”: in this last part of the exhibition we find the great artists active in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the so-called “Amazons of the Russian avant-garde”, such as Natalia Goncharova, Ljubov Popova and Aleksandra Ekster and others. Their artistic and critical success, as also explained by Lea Vergine - who curated the exhibition "The other half of the avant-garde 1980-1910" at Palazzo Reale in 1940 - was a consequence of the "revolutionary" approach of Russian society of the time which encouraged the professional status of female artists, so that they could express their creative potential with greater support and attention than their other European colleagues. Their talent, however, was revealed to the national and international public only from the mid-1932s since in XNUMX the Soviet regime imposed a ban on any stylistic modality other than realist socialism, thus condemning all avant-garde artists, women and men. , to work only for friends, or for themselves.
The exhibition ends with Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture “The Worker and the Collective Farmer”, created for the USSR pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris.
The exhibition was created thanks to the support of VTB Bank, official sponsor of the project, Kohro, Grand Hotel et de Milan and Straf Hotel, Alfasigma, Bper and Tenaris Dalmine who wanted to support this exhibition project during the restart phase of the culture sector .
The exhibition is part of the program of the Municipality of Milan-Culture "The talents of women". Skira catalogue.
Updated: 27/10/2020