NEW YORK ?€” Give credit to Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim's director. He remains a genius hustler.
For the opening Thursday of "Amazons of the Avant-Garde,'' the exhibition of paintings by six Russian women from around the time of the Revolution, Krens invited President Vladimir Putin to stop by.
Taking a break from the UN Millennium Summit, Putin attended the exhibition premiere, jokingly describing it as Russia's "expansion" to the United States, The Associated Press reported. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his wife, Nane, also attended the exhibition's opening.
"While we are summing up the century at the Millennium Summit, we proudly recall Russia's contribution to world culture," Putin said.
Krens' latest multinational enterprise links the Guggenheim and the cash-challenged Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This is a big deal potentially. The two museums plan jointly to franchise themselves (the Hermitage, like the Guggenheim, has already been multiplying, with an outpost in London and one coming in Amsterdam), and to swap pictures and exhibitions. A permanent, tourist-ensuring Hermitage section would be installed at the proposed Guggenheim near New York's Financial District. There would even be more nonmodern art shows uptown.
"Amazons," which has previously traveled through other Guggenheim venues in Berlin, Venice, Italy and Bilbao, Spain, and opened to the public on Friday, is a concise exercise organized by Matthew Drutt, a Guggenheim curator, with Moscow-based art expert Zelfira Tregulova and John Bowlt, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Southern California. Monographically arranged, it tendentiously focuses just on the years before and after the Revolution and on painting; several of the artists continued to work much later and did more than paint. The women ?€” Alexandra Exter, Natalya Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova ?€” are familiar, thanks to a slew of Russian shows.
Only a couple of them, Goncharova and Popova, are great painters; the others are not, but the exhibition isn't a case of special pleading. The Russian avant-garde wouldn't have been what it was without them collectively. In one way or another, each nudged Russian culture, briefly anyway, into the 20th century, a testament to the impact of women on modern art before the word feminism came around.
They didn't paint alike, so they certainly weren't a unified group. Goncharova mixed Russian folk art, Chinese and Byzantine art with German, French and Italian modernism to make neo-primitive, Cubo-Futurist, mystical masterpieces. As that list implies, her section of the show is a mad dash through different styles.
Stepanova gravitated from Cubo-Futurist illustrated poems to images of dancing robots based on some sort of mathematical calculations she made. Udaltsova was a Cubist turned Suprematist. Exter was a colorist ?€” like her friends in Paris the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay ?€” who was influenced not only by Cubism but also by Ukrainian embroidery. Popova, next to Goncharova, was the finest painter. She began with Cubism, then absorbed one idea after another before she, like several of these other women, decided in the revolutionary spirit that easel painting had had its day and switched to utilitarian, proletariat-friendly textile and stage-set designing.
The show doesn't pursue the story that far. Popova and Rozanova both died young. Goncharova left Moscow for Paris to design for Diaghilev and stayed. Exter moved to Paris in 1924 and taught at Leger's studio. Stepanova's career fizzled under the Soviet regime, as did the career of Udaltsova, branded a formalist by Stalin. She died in 1961.
Art historian Linda Nochlin recently joked that before it all came apart, this was at least "one avant-garde that featured women working rather than just taking off their clothes and lying down.''
If it were possible to have met any one of them, it would probably be Goncharova, the Damien Hirst of pre-revolutionary Moscow, who issued crazy decrees, appeared in outrageous films and cabarets, and scandalized the public with pictures that the police repeatedly confiscated as pornographic and blasphemous. She became a sensation and great success, her inspiration having been the Futurists. She aspired not just to Futurism's aesthetic but also to its mastery of hype, its worship of change for its own sake. At the same time her art came from a mind saturated in fantasies of homeland, mystical religion, primitive art, peasant society and the peculiarities of the human body.
"Peasants Gathering Grapes'' typifies at least two of her fixations, ancient stone idols and native Russian subjects, which she combines into a purely modern image whose god (Futurism's god, too) was the machine.
The other women achieved Goncharova's imaginative level sporadically. Rozanova ended up painting a couple of amazing abstractions, one of them a single quivering green stripe against bare white, Barnett Newman before the fact.
Udaltsova, who studied in Paris under Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier, made solid, unremarkable Cubist pictures with exceptions like "At the Piano'': its fragmented forms, in syncopated rhythm, imply movement ingeniously. Stepanova's illustrated poems and dancing figures are crudely painted, which becomes a virtue in one striking self-portrait in which she grimaces, a tick-tack-toe board and black dots for her eyes, eyebrows and nose.
Popova's legacy is obscured without the textiles, typography and stage designs, although the paintings, even this show's uneven selection of them, give an idea of her gifts. As with Udaltsova, she studied in Paris under Metzinger and Le Fauconnier, and she must have scrutinized Leger from the beginning, because "Composition With Figures,'' its mechanical figures locked in a shimmer of gold-blue faceting, is very close to his style. But it is far from secondhand because of Popova's extraordinary way of building space and her exquisite touch.
For the opening Thursday of "Amazons of the Avant-Garde,'' the exhibition of paintings by six Russian women from around the time of the Revolution, Krens invited President Vladimir Putin to stop by.
Taking a break from the UN Millennium Summit, Putin attended the exhibition premiere, jokingly describing it as Russia's "expansion" to the United States, The Associated Press reported. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his wife, Nane, also attended the exhibition's opening.
"While we are summing up the century at the Millennium Summit, we proudly recall Russia's contribution to world culture," Putin said.
Krens' latest multinational enterprise links the Guggenheim and the cash-challenged Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This is a big deal potentially. The two museums plan jointly to franchise themselves (the Hermitage, like the Guggenheim, has already been multiplying, with an outpost in London and one coming in Amsterdam), and to swap pictures and exhibitions. A permanent, tourist-ensuring Hermitage section would be installed at the proposed Guggenheim near New York's Financial District. There would even be more nonmodern art shows uptown.
"Amazons," which has previously traveled through other Guggenheim venues in Berlin, Venice, Italy and Bilbao, Spain, and opened to the public on Friday, is a concise exercise organized by Matthew Drutt, a Guggenheim curator, with Moscow-based art expert Zelfira Tregulova and John Bowlt, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Southern California. Monographically arranged, it tendentiously focuses just on the years before and after the Revolution and on painting; several of the artists continued to work much later and did more than paint. The women ?€” Alexandra Exter, Natalya Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova ?€” are familiar, thanks to a slew of Russian shows.
Only a couple of them, Goncharova and Popova, are great painters; the others are not, but the exhibition isn't a case of special pleading. The Russian avant-garde wouldn't have been what it was without them collectively. In one way or another, each nudged Russian culture, briefly anyway, into the 20th century, a testament to the impact of women on modern art before the word feminism came around.
They didn't paint alike, so they certainly weren't a unified group. Goncharova mixed Russian folk art, Chinese and Byzantine art with German, French and Italian modernism to make neo-primitive, Cubo-Futurist, mystical masterpieces. As that list implies, her section of the show is a mad dash through different styles.
Stepanova gravitated from Cubo-Futurist illustrated poems to images of dancing robots based on some sort of mathematical calculations she made. Udaltsova was a Cubist turned Suprematist. Exter was a colorist ?€” like her friends in Paris the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay ?€” who was influenced not only by Cubism but also by Ukrainian embroidery. Popova, next to Goncharova, was the finest painter. She began with Cubism, then absorbed one idea after another before she, like several of these other women, decided in the revolutionary spirit that easel painting had had its day and switched to utilitarian, proletariat-friendly textile and stage-set designing.
The show doesn't pursue the story that far. Popova and Rozanova both died young. Goncharova left Moscow for Paris to design for Diaghilev and stayed. Exter moved to Paris in 1924 and taught at Leger's studio. Stepanova's career fizzled under the Soviet regime, as did the career of Udaltsova, branded a formalist by Stalin. She died in 1961.
Art historian Linda Nochlin recently joked that before it all came apart, this was at least "one avant-garde that featured women working rather than just taking off their clothes and lying down.''
If it were possible to have met any one of them, it would probably be Goncharova, the Damien Hirst of pre-revolutionary Moscow, who issued crazy decrees, appeared in outrageous films and cabarets, and scandalized the public with pictures that the police repeatedly confiscated as pornographic and blasphemous. She became a sensation and great success, her inspiration having been the Futurists. She aspired not just to Futurism's aesthetic but also to its mastery of hype, its worship of change for its own sake. At the same time her art came from a mind saturated in fantasies of homeland, mystical religion, primitive art, peasant society and the peculiarities of the human body.
"Peasants Gathering Grapes'' typifies at least two of her fixations, ancient stone idols and native Russian subjects, which she combines into a purely modern image whose god (Futurism's god, too) was the machine.
The other women achieved Goncharova's imaginative level sporadically. Rozanova ended up painting a couple of amazing abstractions, one of them a single quivering green stripe against bare white, Barnett Newman before the fact.
Udaltsova, who studied in Paris under Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier, made solid, unremarkable Cubist pictures with exceptions like "At the Piano'': its fragmented forms, in syncopated rhythm, imply movement ingeniously. Stepanova's illustrated poems and dancing figures are crudely painted, which becomes a virtue in one striking self-portrait in which she grimaces, a tick-tack-toe board and black dots for her eyes, eyebrows and nose.
Popova's legacy is obscured without the textiles, typography and stage designs, although the paintings, even this show's uneven selection of them, give an idea of her gifts. As with Udaltsova, she studied in Paris under Metzinger and Le Fauconnier, and she must have scrutinized Leger from the beginning, because "Composition With Figures,'' its mechanical figures locked in a shimmer of gold-blue faceting, is very close to his style. But it is far from secondhand because of Popova's extraordinary way of building space and her exquisite touch.
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