by Jon Lackman | 19 September 2007 | Modern
From the International Herald Tribune:
A visit to the State Tretyakov Gallery’s newly updated permanent exhibition of 20th-century Russian art is as dizzying as the twists and turns of the country’s history and ongoing debates over post-Soviet national identity.
It fills 42 halls of the museum’s Krymsky Val affiliate, a vast late Soviet-era labyrinth not far from the 19th-century mansion housing the Tretyakov’s flagship collection of icons and 19th-century art.
“To combine works of classics of the avant-garde – Larionov, Malevich and Tatlin – Soviet official art and the anti-Soviet underground, and to add to it contemporary art that many regard as garbage – is a task of the utmost difficulty,” wrote the art critic Olga Kabanova in Vedomosti, a business daily, late last month.
She called the exhibition “the museum’s main achievement.” Curators and critics are hotly debating the merits of the show, which opened in full to the public in June.
In other news, “The auction of spectacular Russian art owned by the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has been cancelled after a Russian billionaire bought it on the eve of the London sale, promising to return it to Russia.” (The Age)
