RUSSIAN -EAST PAINTINGS. 20TH CENTURY
On my new trip to Moscow, I used all the little free time I had to do cultural exploration.
Having visited the Tretyakov Gallery, I decided to visit the New Tretyakov Gallery.
It's a modern art gallery in a Soviet-style building, located in front of the Gorky Park's entrance, that offers monumental temporary exhibitions.
This time I have been lucky to visit a world I know little about 20th-century Russian painting. Growing up in France, I know more about European painting, among them, we find Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Joan Miró, etc., but less about Russian art.
In the 20th century, several movements emerged, which makes the world of paintings pretty transforming and fascinating. Maybe I should explore, in extension, the European artists of the 20th century and the different movements and their identities in future posts.
Découvrons
Rêvons !
* Let’s discover and dream !
I admit that it was not easy to make a selection from so much Art.
I hope that this little trip will make you want to immerse yourself in this world and have pleasure through the emotions and impressions that painting can transmit.
To make this exploration more concrete, I decided to present to you four genius painters and to add to that five more paintings that I liked.
Enjoy!
4 genius painters
Vasily Kandinsky
Russian painter and art theorist, Vasily Kandinsky, is known as a pioneer of abstract painting, which aimed to offer possibilities for profound, transcendental expression.
Born in Moscow in 1866, in a well-educated, upper-class family, even though Vasily showed at an early age an extraordinary sensitivity, he started painting only at the age of 30, in 1896, abandoning his career teaching law to attend art school in Munich, where he got introduced to the artistic avant-garde.
Being a member of the group "Der Blaue Reiter", highly influenced by German Expressionism, Kandinsky was forced to leave Russia after the war declaration from Germany in 1916. After his return to Moscow and getting married to Nina Andreevskaia (the young daughter of a Czarist colonel), he became familiar with the art of Constructivist Suprematists like Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, and met other avant-garde luminaries like Naum Gabo, Lyubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova.
In 1921, when Kandinsky moved to Berlin to teach at the Bauhaus Academy, his artistic philosophy turned toward the significance of geometric elements - specifically circles, half-circles, straight lines, angles, squares, checkerboards, and triangles.
In 1933, he moved to Paris, and his style again shifted, exploring biomorphic forms, which were more organic than the harsh geometric shapes of his Bauhaus paintings.
He died in Paris in 1944, setting the stage for much of the expressive modern art produced in the 20th century.
Why in Kandinsky's work, do we observe such an interrelation between color and form, which creates an aesthetic experience of sight, sound, and emotions ?
Through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors, he sought to convey the spirituality and the depth of human emotion, beyond cultural and physical boundaries. For these reasons, he considered non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express this "inner necessity".
His works aspire to wake up a unity of sensation, as music creates, being himself of synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon by which a person perceives several senses as being associated. He could therefore " see music " as he found himself following a performance of Wagner's Lohengrin. This specific faculty led him to attempt to transcribe sounds and music into painting, which set him on the path towards abstraction.
Kandinsky painted during his lifetime at least 500 oils and watercolors works, but it's possible many of his paintings were lost or destroyed by the Nazis during World War II, considered by them "degenerate".
“Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many chords. The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.”
Kazimir Malevich
Born in Kyiv in a Polish family in 1879, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, founder of the artistic and philosophical school of Suprematism. He was also a prolific writer, offering treatises on the philosophy of art.
Without any particular encouragement from his family, Malevich started to draw around the age of 12 and attended a number of art schools, first in Kyiv, then in Moscow, with his mind set firmly on an artistic career.
Malevich's early work was largely executed in a Post-Impressionist mode, influenced by Symbolism and Art Nouveau.
Around 1907, when he became acquainted with such artists as Vasily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, and Mikhail Larionov, a shift toward avant-garde aesthetics occurred.
From 1912 to 1913, Malevich mostly worked in a Cubo-Futurist style, combining the essential elements of Synthetic Cubism and Italian Futurism, resulting in a dynamic geometric deconstruction of figures in space.
In 1915, Malevich laid down the foundations of Suprematism when he published his manifesto, from Cubism to Suprematism, abandoning figurative elements in his painting altogether and turning to pure abstraction.
In 1930, Malevich was arrested and questioned about his political ideologies upon his return from a trip to the West, his paintings labeled as "degenerate" and anti-Soviet. In Soviet Russia Socialist Realism became the only accepted style, and Malevich (and his abstraction ideas) was relegated to obscurity.
He died of cancer in Leningrad in 1935.
What defined Malevich's work ?
He worked in a variety of styles, but his most important and famous works concentrated on the exploration of pure geometric forms (squares, triangles, and circles) and their relationships to each other and within the pictorial space.
Also composed of flat, abstract areas of paint, his paintings present a powerful and multi-layered symbols and mystical feelings of time and space, more radical than the Cubists or Futurists.
He believed that art should transcend subject matter, the truth of shape and color should reign 'supreme' over the image or narrative.
Because of his contacts in the West, Malevich was able to transmit his ideas about painting to his fellow artists in Europe and mainly in the United States, thus profoundly influencing the evolution of modern art.
“Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure Art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things”.”
Marc Chagall
Russian-French draftsman, painter, and printmaker, Marc Chagall, is one of the most popular and internationally recognized modern artists.
Born in Vitebsk (Russian Empire) in 1887, the eldest of nine children, Marc Chagall was raised in a Hasidic family and attended local Jewish religious schools. Much of his work will show this attempt to reconcile old Jewish traditions with styles of modernist art.
In his early years, he developed a love for art and a desire to pursue it as a career, despite his parents' disapproval. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1906 as an apprentice to the artist and set designer Leon Bakst.
At the age of 23, speaking no French, Chagall moved to Paris, where Cubism was emerging as the leading avant-garde, and adopted from it, the abstract forms and dynamic composition, infusing though his work with touches of humor, emotion, and cheerful color.
Chagall fell in love and became engaged to Bella Rosenfeld, who came to be the subject of many of his paintings. They married and remained in Russia due to the outbreak of World War I, and Chagall became the Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk.
They came back to Paris in 1923, and until 1941, when World War II crippled most of Europe, as other Jewish artists, they sought refugee in New York City.
When the war ended, Bella died of sickness, Vitebsk was razed during the German invasion, Chagall was in grief, and his work was more dramatic.
In 1947, he moved back to France, married Valentine 'Vava' Brodsky and continued to paint, but his later canvases are remarkably different and colorful, with subjects appearing more melancholic and touches more lyrical and abstract, almost reverting in time to Post-Impressionist motifs.
In 1985, Chagall passed away at the age of 97, making him the last surviving of the original European masters of modern art.
Marc Chagall assimilated numerous styles to create his work without ever completely aligning with any single movement.
Like Picasso, he is a prime example of a modern artist who mastered multiple media, including painting in both oil and gouache, watercolor, murals, ceramics, etching, drawing, theater and costume design, and stained-glass work.
His paintings unite the lyrical emotional aesthetic of Jewish folklore, dream-like pastorals, and Russian life.
“In our life, there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”
Lyubov Popova
Born in 1889 in Ivanovskoe, Russia, Lyubov Popova was a Russian radical artist, painter and designer who was also an active Communist in the 1917 Russian Revolution and the years that followed.
Raised in a creative and prosperous environment, her parents encouraged her to pursue drawing and sketching, and she had a particular fondness for the Italian Renaissance. She traveled widely to expand her artistic education, discovering mosaics in churches and monasteries in Russia.
In 1912, she traveled to Paris to study in the studios of Cubist French painters and the dynamic sculptures of Italian Futurists.
Returning to Moscow, she continued learning about the French avant-garde by visiting the collection of Sergei Shchukin, businessman and art collector of visionary artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse.
Popova's moved towards non-representational art when she joined the Suprematist group in 1916, alongside its founder, Kazimir Malevich.
The Revolution also changed the way Popova saw her art. Following 1917, there was a tension between the Suprematists, who saw art as anti-material and spiritual, and the Constructivists, who saw it as serving the Revolution.
In the last few years of her life, Popova worked in a range of media with the aim of contributing to the making of the new society, creating designs for theater sets and costumes, and producing new typography and books.
Popova died of scarlet fever in Moscow, in 1925, at the age of 35.
She worked at a time when there were extremely few female artists respected by art institutions or schools, and brought a myriad of modern influences to Russian art, in particular Cubism and Futurism, later complete abstraction and simplified geometric forms alongside her Suprematist comrades.
Lyubov Popova was extremely interested in dynamism, or representing movement in art, a problem at the center of many artistic movements, and the focus of many individual artists' lives.
She believed that art should reflect the industrial, egalitarian future, and this meant making work that echoed the geometry and efficiency of machines, as well as moving into a pure abstraction unfettered by elitist ideas of skill, or "natural talent", common to ideas of artistic genius.
In her short life, she had a prolific and varied career and demonstrated that art could have an important part in revolutionary politics and post-capitalist ideas.
“Form + color + texture + rhythm + material + etc.) x ideology (the need to organize) = our art.”
5 paintings, that is a must take a look.
I found these paintings especially attractive and striking to the eyes among these artists works. Maybe it will give you the desire to know more about them and their techniques. But it's all very personal.
I was impressed by the diversity, richness, and creativity of painting in the twentieth century.
It offers an incredible amount of artists whose perception, vision, and impression of the world are so unique and unusual.
Looking at these paintings is like traveling into a previously invisible layer of existence.
THANK YOU FOR READING.
