Avant-garde culture

The exhibition 'Alberto Giacometti. Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings" is the latest in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts' series of large-scale international projects, which in themselves reflect much more than ideas brought about by the long examination of its own collections. The museum researchers' inquiring minds and painstaking efforts have always been aimed at projects illustrating different stages of arts history that fill in the gaps of the museum's existing displays. Such projects introducing Modernist artists and classics of 20th-century avant-garde art have included exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso (the first in Russia), Amedeo Modigliani, Raoul Dufy, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Piet Mondrian, and Andy Warhol. 40 years ago such shows were a veritable cultural shock, a bold display of a different art language against the background of the 'aestheti-cized mythology" of the totalitarian state.

Exhibitions of paintings by the prominent artist and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky, one of the leaders of the avant-garde movement, became a significant event in the cultural life of Norway at the beginning of the 20th century. Kandinsky's works were exhibited there twice, first in 1914 at the "Der Blaue Reiter" (Blue Rider) exhibition (in Christiania, now Oslo, in February-March, and in Trondheim in April-May), and then in April-June 1916, at a joint exhibition with the German artist Gabriele Munter in Christiania.

FROM 1923 UNTIL HIS DEATH IN 1964, ALEXANDER ARCHIPENKO LIVED IN THE UNITED STATES WHERE HE PRODUCED A LARGE BODY OF WORK. WHILE ARCHIPENKO SCHOLARS HAVE FOCUSED MAINLY ON HIS EARLY YEARS IN FRANCE AND HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CUBISM, IT IS ONLY NOW THAT RESEARCHERS ARE EXAMINING THE ARTIST'S PRACTICE AND THE RECEPTION HE RECEIVED DURING THIS LATER PERIOD, AND HIS PLACE IN THE WIDER STRUCTURE OF AVANT-GARDE CULTURE.