Art's Masters & Misses

During the early years of the Soviet Union, a counterrevolution that had nothing to do with the White Army took place. Its voice was quieter, but its significance was indisputable.

It was a revolution waged by women artists -- a few working with official sanction, most working underground -- who bore witness to the social change occurring all around them and captured its spirit on canvas. Among them, a few bright stars earned international fame to rival that of their male counterparts. They were Lyubov Popova, Natalya Goncharova, Aleksandra Ekster, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova: the so-called Amazon artists who changed the face of art for 20th-century Russia.

Last year, the Guggenheim Museum organized "Amazons of the Avant-Garde," a traveling exhibit dedicated to these women that hung at museums all over the world and, in February, at Moscow's Old Tretyakov Gallery.

It is to these women -- as well as the countless other female artists who have worked in Russia and in early Russian princedoms since the Middle Ages -- that the New Tretyakov Gallery's latest exhibit, "Women's Art," is dedicated.

The exhibit, a collection of 500 pieces spanning 1,000 years of women's art in Russia, includes paintings, sculptures, brocades, furniture and photographs from the Tretyakov's own collection as well as from several other museums and galleries all over Russia.

Because many art forms have been restricted to men at one point or another, "Women's Art" features a great deal of work by anonymous artists, as well as by celebrated ones. Five centuries ago, for example, women were not allowed to paint icons -- one of the main vocations for artists of the day -- so aspiring female artists expressed their creativity in other ways: by making, for example, funeral shrouds or furniture, all of which is on display at the exhibit.

"It [the exhibit] represents a woman's view of the Russian woman's world, with its troubled history," said the show's curator, Nadezhda Yurasovskaya. "The exhibit illustrates how the talent of Russia's female artists has endured so powerfully despite very difficult circumstances."

The idea to hold a show that would feature the work of women artists from the Middle Ages to the present has been long in coming to fruition -- five years, to be exact. Exhibit co-organizer Natalya Kamenetskaya said that when the gallery began to look for funding for the exhibit, most potential sponsors were not receptive.

"There's no such thing as women's art. There's either good art or bad art," said Kamenetskaya. "The only problem is that they [potential sponsors] think the good art is usually done by men."

So Kamenetskaya enlisted the help of a friend, Yelena Kochkina, director of women's programs at the Open Society Institute.

Together, the three women approached the Tretyakov, one of Russia's leading art galleries, with the concept and won approval. The show now hangs in the New Tretyakov's spacious rooms. It is an eclectic, democratic display of the talents of women from many walks of life -- some anonymous, some named, all deserving of the recognition they've now acquired. This is a long overdue tribute to their relentless dedication.

"Women's Art" (Isskustvo Zhenskogo Roda) runs to March 31 at the New Tretyakov Gallery, located at 10 Krymsky Val. Metro Oktyabrskaya, Park Kultury. Tel. 230-7788, 951-1362, 238-1378.