March 13, 2024

Centennial Celebration of Avant-Garde Art


Centennial Celebration of Avant-Garde Art
The Birthday (1915), Marc Chagall.  Museum of Modern Art, NY. 

This spring, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow will reconstruct an exhibit of avant-garde Jewish artists originally curated in 1922. The exhibit, "The Jewish Avant-Garde 1910–1930. Chagall, Altman, Shterenberg, and Others,” traces the development of experimental art in the early twentieth century from folk art to the avant-garde style that came to greatly influence early Soviet aesthetics.

Curator Maria Gadas designed the exhibition halls to replicate the original Moscow location as closely as possible and even hung the paintings in the same places. Artwork was loaned out by the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg as well as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Many of the paintings by Marc Chagall from the original exhibit are currently in the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery. While the Tretyakov collaborated with the Jewish Museum, they did not loan out their Chagalls, which meant that projections of the paintings had to be "hung" in their places. The exhibit is also the first time many of these works, including those by David Shterenberg, Natan Altman, and Joseph Chaikov, have been exhibited publicly. 

The exhibition aims to demonstrate how the work of these artists 102 years ago laid the foundation for world art in the twentieth century. 

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