Modernism

An exhibition of French Impressionist and Modernist artists from the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts is currently being shown, with great success, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and will later move to the National Museum ofArt in Osaka. It was organized by the popular Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun which supports many cultural projects in Japan.

The idea behind “Europe, Russia, Europe” was a simple one: bringing together important works from leading museums from 28 countries creates an impressive exhibition. Careful study of these works gives rise to a multitude of fascinating questions and discussions. The most obvious, perhaps, would be: when and how did the plastic languages of European art develop? How, and why, do the artistic processes taking place in various areas of Europe differ? In what ways do the arts overlap and influence each other? What is the relationship between cultural and historical processes? How is politics reflected in art, and does art determine politics?

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).

The “Tretyakov Gallery Magazine” and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art have been collaborators since the latter’s opening, with articles on the shows of Antony Gormley and Mark Rothko, and the exhibition of works from Frangois Pinault’s collection appearing in these pages. Co-editor Natella Voiskounski met with Garage Chief Curator Kate Fowle recently to discuss Garage’s Louise Bourgeois exhibition - one of the major events of the past exhibition season, which introduced Moscow viewers to the artist’s works from the last two decades of her life. Bourgeois was among the very few artists who represented both modern and contemporary art - she belonged to the 20th and 21st centuries equally, both chronologically and artistically.

The Spring 2010 exhibition “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention” at the Jewish Museum in New York was a highlight of the city’s artistic season, revealing in particular the artist’s Jewish identity. Man Ray, later titled a “prophet of the avant-garde” in America, was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Pennsylvania, the eldest child in a Jewish family of Russian origin. Emmanuel was nicknamed “Manny”, and from 1912 onwards, when the Radnitzky family took the surname Ray, he began to use “Man Ray” to label himself as an artist; while never completely rejecting them, he nevertheless came to free himself from his familial roots. As Man Ray he concentrated on building up an artistic identity which found its realization in creative photography, the visual arts, film-making, poetry, literature and philosophy.