Geniuses such as Chagall, Altman and Shteremberg returned to Moscow with a large and ambitious exhibition dedicated to the Hebrew avant-garde art that succumbed a century ago to the advance of the steamroller of Socialist Realism.
"Contemporaries called this renewing movement 'Renaissance'" that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, comments one of the curators of the exhibition, María Gadas, in reference to a whole host of creators who revolutionized and filled the nascent movement with content. Soviet art.
From Chagal to Altman
The exhibition «Hebrew Vanguard. Chagal, Altman, Shterember and others" inaugurated at the Hebrew Museum and Center of Tolerance in Moscow with a hundred works that include drawings, paintings, sculptures, photos and stage models.
In addition to well-known names such as Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman and David Shteremberg, creators such as El Lisitsky, Robert Falk, Iosiv Tchaikov and many more are also present.
They were united by the search for their Hebrew traditions with an infinite thirst for experimentation that brought together avant-garde styles such as cubism, suprematism, constructivism, fovism or abstractionism.
«Around 1910 there is an incredible and sudden increase in interest in Jewish traditions and communities on the part of creators with Jewish roots, which became the common factor of the main figures of the new Hebrew art of the early XNUMXth century. », adds Gadas, as he passes through the museum rooms.
This interest, which had its seeds in ethnological research of the Hebrew communities with the participation of young creators, took shape in the Cultural League association in kyiv, a movement that spread to dozens of cities in the Russian Empire and that embraced the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 with desire for renewal.
Russian and Ukrainian Jews
Visitors can enjoy here the suprematist pieces - with games of geometric figures and basic colors - by the painter and designer El Lisitsky, born in the Russian region of Smolensk, in which the desire to give a utilitarian character to art predominates, materialized in book covers.
Very different are the works of Shteremberg, originally from the Ukrainian region of Yitomir, who alternated still lifes with a particular perspective with personal landscapes in which one can see the imprint of his stay in Paris, where he drank from the influence of Paul Cezanne and rubbed shoulders with Chagall and Diego Rivera.
Also interesting are the scenographic experiments of Isaac Rabichev, also a native of the Ukrainian capital, or those of Moscow's Robert Falk, in which the sobriety of the design comes together with ample possibilities of movement for the actors.
The highlight of the exhibition is the reconstruction of an exhibition of Chagall, Altman and Shteremberg held in 1922 in Moscow, for which a house with three rooms was built like a Chinese box, an exhibition within another exhibition.
"It is an exhibition that is unthinkable today, a kind of cosmos in a single space," says Gadas, while inviting people to go inside this "house", with doors and windows through which you can look inside.
Despite the intense work of curating the exhibition, one of its main artists, Chagall, could not be fully presented, since the famous Tretyakov gallery refused to give up its series "Introduction to Jewish Theater."
However, the curators of the exhibition did not want to do without these works, which they projected on the walls of the improvised house.
Revolution and exile
Despite the creative work of the Cultural League for several years and the positive attitude towards the Bolshevik government of a large part of its members, the movement was dismantled in the 1920s and its headquarters, handed over to Narkomprós (People's Commissariat for Instruction), precursor of the Ministry of Education of the USSR.
After the dissolution of the Cultural League, many of these creators emigrated abroad, such as Chagall, while others, such as Falk, Shterenberg, Altman or Lisitsky, decided to continue living and creating in the "new Russia", so similar and so different from the what they dreamed of.EFE