by Jon Lackman | 23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice:
As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best of all possible worlds … Although from the 1960s onwards so-called “underground” artists did explore styles – abstraction, surrealism – condemned by the party as decadent, true liberty of expression came only with the fall of communism. It is rare to see this poignant history mapped out in a single exhibition. That Russians! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary achieves this feat with clarity and grace is partly a credit to the curators, Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, and partly a testament to the diverse yet complementary passions of two Italian collectors, Alberto Sandretti and Alberto Morgante, on whose holdings the show is based … Numbering a staggering 22,000 works and encompassing avant-garde, socialist realism and unofficial styles, Sandretti’s collection is indicative of a breed who had indiscriminate enthusiasm for all things Soviet … Alberto Morgante’s collection has different ideological origins. Concentrating on avant-garde and underground art, it was purchased almost entirely through Franco Miele, an art critic.
However, an article in ARTnews by Konstantin Akinsha argues that “many of the works attributed to Russian masters … are not what they’re claimed to be”:
[B]oth collections were previously unknown, and scholars and experts in the field of the Russian avant-garde are puzzled by the avant-garde art on view. The names are familiar: Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, Lissitzky, Tatlin, Goncharova, Larionov, and so forth, but the pictures in many cases don’t match the labels. Experts in the Russian avant-garde, a field in which fakes abound, are particularly concerned with provenance and are suspicious of any work that was not exhibited or published during the lifetime of the artist said to have created it … [One] previously unknown work is Girl with Goat, attributed to Marc Chagall and dated 1911. ARTnews brought this picture to the attention of the Paris-based Marc Chagall Committee, which branded it an “obvious fake” (faux évident).
This Alibi Online review has images.
