Avant-garde culture

Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a key figure of the English modernist movement in both art and literature, acquainted with - as friend or enemy - almost all the key figures of British culture in the first half of the 20th century. Best known from 1914 as the founder and leading proponent of the pioneering British modernist movement Vorticism, his considerable legacy in another field, portraiture, was the subject of a retrospective at London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG).

In the spring of 2010 the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow organized two exhibitions themed around the relationship of Russian artists and Central Asia. The first show - “Turkestan Avant-garde” - mostly featured pieces from the 1920s and 1930s, while the second, “Rakhmat, Tashkent!”, was timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War (World War II). It featured mostly paintings and drawings created by artists who, evacuated to Central Asia, lived there from 1941 to 1945.

Gor Chahal carried out his special project “Bread of Heaven” in collaboration with the Tretyakov Gallery. Such projects are different from solo shows: each special project is usually focused on a certain idea related to the oeuvre of a particular artist. One of the objectives of such special projects is to present artistic innovations and to add to the gallery’s collection the works of the best contemporary masters who, rather than producing separate pieces, are determined to generate a continuous body of work, following the avant-garde concept of arts synthesis. Within the space of the gallery, the room where these experiments develop is at the conclusion of the permanent exhibition of 20th-century art, just before the suite of rooms on the second floor where the newest art trends are showcased: thus, the room connects the traditional and the modern.

Warhol - dandy, flaneur and artist - appears as the perfect embodiment of the painter of modern life.

Russian artists, or as they are usually referred to “artists of Russian origin" - those who left Russia for good at the beginning ofthe 20 th century, and won recognition and fame abroad and whose artworks are represented in almost all world-famous museum collections - no doubt constitute an invaluable part of the Russian cultural heritage. Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973), a renowned sculptor of the 20th century, is no exception. His bright extraordinary creative activity started in France and ended in the USA. In 1928, the outstanding Russian art critic Abram Efros called Lipchitz's sculptural work "the highest and most dominant point of the Russian intrusion" into the art of the West. Lipchitz became one of the most notable adepts and advocates of Cubism and he persistently applied Cubist principles in his works, gaining enthusiastic recognition from both connoisseurs and the general public. Over time Lipchitz drew back from the movement, though in his monumental and easel works continued to visualize expressive deformations of organic natural forms, boldly shifting flat planes, resulting in a structural angularity; later he came to a looser spatial play. Lipchitz's first solo exhibition was held in 1920 and many have followed since then. After his grand exhibition at New York’s MOMA, retrospective exhibitions have been organized all over the world - at the Tate Gallery in London, in many European cities, as well as in Israel and the USA. Lipchitz's sculptures are eyecatching attractions of many a square and public building, and the artist was decorated with special awards from a number of academies and universities. In 1946 Lipchitz was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honour. Lipchitz's heritage is carefully preserved in many museums, some of which are world famous, while others are of regional importance, like the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson, Arizona, situated close to the Mexican border. The author of the article, devoted to the unique collection of the sculptor’s work, is Dr. Lisa Fischman, Chief Curator of the University of Arizona Museum of Art.