Russian Art, Part 1: Who's Afraid of Modern Art?

I can't believe that I have gotten so behind in my posting. I wonder if I should do less and write more? That seems counterproductive somehow.

At any rate, three weeks ago my delightful landlady Natalia invited me to accompany her to the opening of a new Russian modern art museum, Erarta. This place already had a commercial gallery, and then decided to open a museum as well.

The opening was quite an event; probably close to a thousand people attended, certainly many more than expected. Outside before the doors opened there were bands playing and lots of balloons. An MC read off the names of the featured artists, who were ushered into the building to put on their uniforms for a promised soccer game. Finally admitted, we climbed the stairs to the fifth floor--the elevator was occupied by a kind of live art event--and saw a small rectangle of turf with a full sized soccer goal box on each end. That left about 10 feet of playing space between the two goals.

Two teams consisting of some of Russia's most prominent living artists entered to the cheers of the crowd and flipped a coin to determine who would start play. Off they went and twenty seconds later with the first score the game ended. Loud music was playing, and the artists starting stripping out of  Erarta T-shirts to reveal--another just like it underneath. Then they threw their shirts into the adoring throng, like beads at Mardi Gras. That was the beginning of an evening of fun, frivolity, and fine art.

The new museum has five floors and features well-lit and attractively spaced galleries. I was struck by an entire floor of religious lithographs, arranged in groups of 14, like stations of the cross. Other floors featured more secular and sometimes humorous exhibits, often accompanied by living replicas of the subjects. (I assume that these live art events occurred only for the opening night.)

Virtually all of the art works on display were figurative in the broad sense, and most in the narrow sense of depicting the human form.  (This reminds me of an incident in which Joan Miró supposedly declined an award by a society of abstract painters, because, as he said, his art was not abstract; indeed, every squiggle in his fascinating paintings represents something, albeit obliquely.)

I think if I loved every work in a modern art museum, the curator would not be doing his/her job properly. But among those works I liked best were these by Dmitry Shorin, Anastasia Bazanova,  Alexander Kosenkov, Konstantin Grachev, Ekaterina Gracheva, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Alla Dzhigirei, and Nikolai Kopeikin, whose elephant painting so frightened me in the picture at the top of this post.

After five floors of the museum, I was too exhausted to tour the five floors of the gallery on the other side; that will have to wait for another occasion. The gallery store separating the two parts featured a machine that produces reproductions of the art works full-scale and painted on canvas. So if you can't afford the original, you can still take home a pretty convincing copy.

Clearly the event delighted the huge crowd, which in turn must have thrilled the organizers. I, for one, was grateful for the opportunity to see what is going on in Russian art circles today and to interact with the artists themselves. One stairway features a series of self-portraits of many of them--another way to help us remember the people behind the art.