Digest

Exhibition review

FROM RUSSIA picture that Shchukin purchased from the Abstraction’ gives us the extraordinary French and Russian Master Paintings Drouet Gallery in 1908, sits slightly Bathing the Red Horse by Kuzma Petrov- 1870 –1925 from Moscow and incongruously in this company. But the Vodkin, and true avant-garde originality in St Petersburg painting that dominates the room is Russian art emerging in works by Royal Academy Main Galleries, Matisse’s exuberant execution in deeply Kandinsky and Malevich. 26 January to 18 April 2008 saturated blue, green, and terracotta, Finally, in the circular space that nestles Dance II , an enormous work (260 x 391 cm) among the rooms we are treated to two That the first edition of War and Peace that has justly been chosen as the symbol works by the constructivist, Vladimir Tatlin (1863 –1869) begins with swathes of for the whole exhibition. Along with a —a literally off-the-wall sculpture, Corner French, which Tolstoy translated into companion piece, Music , it was Counter-Relief , and a model of his Russian for the 1873 edition, reminds us commissioned by Shchukin in 1909 for the Monument to the 3rd International , a never- that French was the language of the pre- grand staircase of his Moscow mansion. realised enormous tower that would have revolutionary Russian aristocracy. It is On the wall opposite, Bonnard’s exquisite housed the headquarters of the Comintern. fitting, therefore, that the first painting we Summer Dance is beaten into submission The works for this exhibition have been see in this French –Russian exhibition is Ilya and deserves to be displayed elsewhere. loaned by four major Russian galleries — Repin’s portrait of a besmocked Tolstoy, If that were all, we would be satisfied, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art and barefoot, pretending unconvincingly to be but the remaining rooms demonstrate the the State Tretyakov Gallery (both in a Russian peasant. The exhibition shows huge influence that Morozov’s and Moscow) and the State Hermitage us the extent to which French painters Shchukin's collections had on Russian Museum and State Russian Museum (both influenced their Russian counterparts artists of the time. A whole room contains in St Petersburg). Their stormy passage to during a period, turbulent for both paintings connected with Sergei Diaghilev London had to be enabled by countries, that began with the and his Mir Iskusstva (World of Art), many parliamentary legislation. Don't miss it. Franco –Prussian war, included the of which are familiar from reproductions on Russo –Japanese war, the minor Russian the sleeves of books and discs. Here is the Jeffrey Aronson revolution and Potemkin mutiny of 1905, white-forelocked Diaghilev himself, DOI: 10.3399/bjgp08X279599 the first World War, and the Russian rendered by Léon Bakst, Serov’s spine- Revolution proper, and ended with the tingling nude portrait of the dancer Ida Rubinstein, Alexander Golovin’s full-length signing of the Locarno Treaty. Vincent Van Gogh: Portait of Dr Felix Rey, 1889. The exhibition starts deceptively quietly, portrait of Fyodor Chaliapin dressed in the Oil on canvas, 64 x 53 cm, The State Pushkin with a small room of paintings by the golden robes of Boris Godunov, and Boris Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. French Barbizon landscapists, Corot, Grigoriev’s outrageous double Daubigny, and Theodore Rousseau, and portrait of the innovative theatre salon painters, such as Besnard, alongside impresario Vsevolod Meyerhold. those of Russian contemporaries, such as In a later room Russian neo- Valentin Serov, Isaac Levitan, and Mikhail primitivism is represented by, Nesterov, some of whom studied in Paris. among others, Chagall’s bizarre After a photographic introduction to the Jew in Red , Ilya Mashkov’s great Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin grossly amusing Self-Portrait and Ivan Morozov, we see in the next small with Pyotr Konchalovsky (a w o

parody of Cézanne’s Overture c room some of the numerous French s o

Tannhäuser , seen in the second M paintings that they acquired — Cézanne, , s t

room), and works by Natalie r

Monet, Renoir. Impressive, to be sure, but A e

Goncharova and Mikhail n it does not prepare us for the explosion of i F f the next room, a magnificent hall with its Larionov. The room entitled o m

‘Cubofuturism’ yields paintings u galaxy of Gauguins, pot-pourri of e s by Liubov Popova and Pavel u

Picassos, and feast of French artists, M n Filonov and includes Nathan i including Le Douanier Rousseau, Derain, k h s

Altman’s semi-cubist portrait of u

Marquet, and the Nabis, Bonnard, Denis, P e the poet Anna Akhmatova, t a and Vallotton. A single piece by van Gogh, t S

anorexically reminiscent of e his Portrait of Dr Félix Rey , who attended h Virginia Woolf. ‘Towards T him in Arles after he had cut off his ear, a ©

British Journal of General Practice, March 2008 215