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Dali-Picasso Exhibition in Moscow (An Overview)

I’ve got a special skill: I’m excellent at visiting exhibitions on their last day. 26th of September was the last day of an exhibition I’ve longed to visit since 2020. In the top photo you see my selfie between Moliere and Honore de Balzac – by Pablo Picasso and below there are several pieces from Salvador Dali’s halls. And whereas Picasso is represented at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Dali’s artwork is mostly in private collections, to my knowledge, at least. To say I was thrilled to visit the exhibition of artwork of two of my favourite painters is clearly an understatement.

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts Turns 100

google-doodle-centenary-of-pushking-museum-of-fine-arts
Google celebrates the centenary of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts with a delicate Doodle

The impressive building of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Volkhonka St., across the road from the restored Christ the Saviour Cathedral, was solemnly opened on May 31 (June 13), 1912. The video below from the Museum’s collection shows the Emperor Nicholas II visiting the museum and being greeted by Ivan Tsvetaev, the founder of the Museum and the father of the famous Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva.

The initial collection was based on the copies of antique sculptures from the Moscow State University, which are now exhibited in the halls of the Ancient Art Department. As for paintings, especially the invaluable pieces by Gaugin, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, etc, these had been transferred from St. Petersburg museums. Still more works had either been bought or donated by private collectors, which tradition continues to this day. Only recently two private collectors donated to the Pushkin Museum a painting by Dirk Hals, The Merry Company (which apparently is a version of an earlier eponymous work by his elder brother, Frank), and the only surviving work of a little-known German artist, Adam Elias Borni who painted a trompe-l’oeil artwork featuring his colleague, another German painter Dietrich. The latter work was bought in Austria, and art historians may now be able to identify other works by Borni.

I don’t remember the first ever time I visited the Pushkin Museum, although I told you how once I spent nearly 6 hours in the cold February weather to attend an exhibition by Claude Monet. The space is the biggest problem the museum will have to address in the next 6 years. There is a special 2018 Agenda that seeks to add more buildings around the original edifice. I bet many citizens and visitors would give a lot not stop queueing outside the building for hours on end.

I do, however, remember all exhibitions that I attended, which should be a good illustration to the painstaking effort of the museum and its long-term director Prof. Irina Antonova to foster partnership between the Pushkin Museum and other world art depositories. Apart from Claude Monet in 2002, I visited (in no particular order):

pushkin-museum-of-fine-arts-pablo-picasso-girl-on-ball
Pablo Picasso, A Girl on the Ball (PMFA, Moscow)

Moscow-Berlin, photographs and paintings (1996; a review in Kommersant in Russian)
Paul Cezanne (1999)
USSR and USA in photographs (~1999)
World Museums, the partners of the Pushkin Museum (1998; the exhibit included paintings by Dali and Chagall);
an exhibition of artwork, mainly sculpture, by the wonderful Italian actress and beautiful woman, Gina Lollobrigida (?)

Speaking of different items in the collection, there is a full-size copy of Michelangelo’s statue of David, and a small hall containing quite a few paintings by Picasso, mainly from his Blue and Pink periods. I secretly took a photo of A Girl on the Ball in 2001 – it was a film camera, not digital, printed on Kodak, so it’s great it actually survived to this day.

In March this year I did a small video of the Pushkin Museum in late evening, so you can see a kind of Gothic close-up of an impressive Classicist building erected after the design by R. Klein and V. Shukhov. And bearing in mind that even Google joined the celebrations by adding a special Google Doodle, we wish the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts many happy returns (and maybe another couple of Turners in the collection)!

Related posts:

William Blake exhibition at the Pushkin Museum
Russia-Italy Year: Giotto, French Impressionsts, and Andrei Rublev
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a Qype review
Exhibition of Caravaggio Paintings Comes to Moscow
Queue Up for Art: The National Passion of Russians
L’Amour pour l’Art: Why Do We Visit the Great Artistic Shrines?

Russia-Italy Year: Giotto, French Impressionists, and Andrei Rublev

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)

The cross-cultural year between Italy and Russia, celebrated in 2011, is quickly picking up the pace with the several exhibitions of outstanding Italian artists visiting Moscow – in exchange to a reciprocal visit of the collections from Russian museums.

In particular, the visitors to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow will see Giotto’s Madonna and the Child (Madonna col Bambino at the Museo diocesano di Santo Stefano al Ponte, also known as Madonna di San Giorgio alla Costa, in Florence), and the famous polyptich from the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. In exchange, the Florentines will be able to first-hand explore the icons by Andrei Rublev, Dionisius, and the Pskov School.

Meanwhile, the visitors to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan can see the works of French painters that had been bought by the Russian art collectors and donated to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition includes paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso. This is the first time these precious specimens of world’s painting are exhibited in Italy. One of the art collectors, Ivan Morozov, went to Paris to personally buy Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard. Over 15 years, in which Morozov spent 200-300 thousand francs annualy, he collected over 200 works of European artists.

The exhibition in Milan runs until February 5th, 2012.

 

Guillaume Apollinaire – Toujours/Forever

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire

Toujours

À Madame Faure-Favier

Toujours
Nous irons plus loin sans avancer jamais

Et de planète en planète
De nébuleuse en nébuleuse
Le don Juan des mille et trois comètes
Même sans bouger de la terre
Cherche les forces neuves
Et prend au sérieux les fantômes

Et tant d’univers s’oublient
Quels sont les grands oublieurs
Qui donc saura nous faire oublier telle ou telle partie du monde
Où est le Christophe Colomb à qui l’on devra l’oubli d’un continent

Perdre
Mais perdre vraiment
Pour laisser place à la trouvaille
Perdre
La vie pour trouver la Victoire

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 – 1918)

Forever

for Mm Faure-Faviere

Forever

We shall be going farther

And never advance anywhere

And moving between the planets
And constellations
The Don Juan of a thousand-and-three comets
Without ever leaving the Earth
Seeks the new powers
And seriously takes the phantoms

So many worlds lose themselves in oblivion
So oblivious they are
Who then will make us forget this or that part of the world
Where is Columbus who will lose a continent of our memory in oblivion

We need to lose
To really lose
So as to leave the room for a rediscovery
We need to lose
Life to find the Victory

Julia Shuvalova © 2011

Всегда

мадам Фор-Фавье

Всегда
Мы будем все дальше идти,
Не продвигаясь вперед никогда.

И от планеты к планете,
И от созвездий к созвездиям,
Даже не покидая земли,
Дон Жуан двух тысяч комет
Ищет новые скрытые силы
И мираж всерьез принимает.

Сколько Вселенных себя навсегда забывает!
О как велика их забывчивость!
Кто же самих нас заставит забыть
Ту или эту часть света?
Где тот Колумб,
Что сумеет в памяти нашей
Закрыть континент.

Потерять,
Но потерять до конца,
Чтобы оставить открытию место.
Жизнь потерять,
Чтоб Победу найти.

© М. Kudinov.

error: Sorry, no copying !!