Until 26 January 2020 at Gallerie d'Italia – Palazzo Leoni Montanari, museum headquarters of Intesa Sanpaolo in Vicenza, the exhibition “Kandinsky, Goncharova, Chagall. Sacred and beauty in Russian art”: appointment to celebrate twenty years of activity of the Vicenza museum which houses the Bank's collection of ancient Russian icons.
The exhibition is curated by Silvia Burini, Giuseppe Barbieri and Alessia Cavallaro in an organic collaboration relationship with the Russian Arts Studies Center of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice.
On display are 19 Russian icons, belonging to the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, compared with a very select sequence of 45 works, many of which have never been seen in Italy, created between the end of the XNUMXth and the first decades of the XNUMXth century, mostly from most important museum of Russian art in Moscow, the Tretyakov Gallery, as well as the museums of Yaroslav, Astrakhan, the MMOMA and the Bakhrushin Museum of Performing Arts in Moscow, as well as the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice and the Museum of Modern Art Costakis Thessaloniki Collection.
The exhibition explores the importance of the theme of the sacred in Russian art from the last part of the nineteenth century to focus on the main figures – such as Kandinsky, Natalia Goncarova and Chagall, but also Petrov-Vodkin, Malevich and Filonov – who have revealed more than other exponents of the avant-garde, the profound affinity between the philosophical-theological conception of the icon and the spiritual and aesthetic research of the exponents of the avant-garde.
The attention of the Russian artistic world for the centuries-old tradition of icons exploded in the second decade of the XNUMXth century, but even previously authoritative representatives of the late XNUMXth century had shown a growing interest in sacred art: this is the case of the most influential protagonists of the Art Nouveau – like Ivanov, Vrubel', Vasnecov, Nesterov, all present in the exhibition – which grapple with sacred, Christian and pagan subjects, without however directly linking them to the more ancient tradition. Instead, the relationship with the icons that was established a few years later, with the Avant-garde, was much more stringent. Even if the themes are not explicitly religious and the works are not intended for worship, as was also the case with the painters of the end of the century (who often use those subjects in an anti-ecclesiastical function), the resonant presence of the iconic matrix in the context of the Avant-garde is much more pronounced.
The avant-garde of the early twentieth century aims to unhinge a painting understood as an illusory representation of the visible and finds a valid connection precisely in icon painting. Although within it there have been currents, such as Futurism and Constructivism, which opposed the intimate essence of the icon, other protagonists, such as Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncarova or Malevich, have revealed the profound affinities with the spiritual and aesthetic research of the avant-garde.
For the Russian people, the perception of nature in visual-pictorial terms is not to be considered as a simple aesthetic experience. Rather – as Kandinsky continually repeats – it is a sort of "inner need" that derives from the need to experience the invisible (nevidimoe), in a totally natural way, in everyday life (bytes). The icon is assumed as the foundation and guarantee of this approach, as an effective expression of the invisible in pictorial art. Kandinsky he is the first to leave figurativism behind to enter a world of abstractions. Natalia Goncharova uses biblical images, from GenesisatApocalypse, to inform us of the approaching hour of Judgment. Unlike Kandinsky, he reveals profound humanity with an essential figurativism, without obscuring it in abstraction. He captures the world's ills in secularization, industrialization, urbanization, revealing them as factors that seek to minimize the richness of Russian culture and its peoples. In the meeting with Larionov and Goncarova and their primitive painting, with clear references to the icon, also Malevich opens up to a non-figurative painting, which explores the spaces of «nothing», freed from any figurativism. And in Chagall we can discover a further dimension of the influence of the Sacred in Russian painting of the first decades of the XNUMXth century, that of an everyday mysticism ("I am a mystic. I don't go to church or the synagogue. For me, working is praying") which, starting in his case above all from the reading of the biblical text, he knows how to give life to a visual universe of extraordinary suggestion: «It has always seemed to me and it still seems to me - observes the painter - that the Bible is the main source of poetry of all time ».
The exhibition aims to present the concrete phases of this process of discovery and expression of the "true beauty" that which, instead of stopping us at the world of the object, it can lead us to a beyond compared to it. At the same time, the visitor is given the opportunity to compare his own experience with the depth of the values and forms of this very dense phase of early XNUMXth century art.
Giovanni Bazoli, Chairman Emeritus of Intesa Sanpaolo, states: «In 1999, the first headquarters of the Gallerie d'Italia was born in the sumptuous Baroque residence of Palazzo Leoni Montanari in Vicenza, immediately identified as the "house of icons" because, as part of the great project to enhance the art collections owned by the Bank , it was destined to house one of the most important collections of Russian icons in the West. Twenty years after the inauguration of that exhibition, with the aim of promoting a more widespread knowledge of our collection, we are presenting today an exhibition which, thanks to exceptional loans from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and other international museums, documents how the Russian modern art has drawn lifeblood from the spirituality of the ancient iconographic models. The Gallerie d'Italia of Intesa Sanpaolo in Vicenza, on the occasion of their twentieth birthday, reaffirm their vocation to be a meeting place between Eastern and Western Europe, which also leads to recognizing the fruitfulness of their common Christian roots".
Cover image:
Wassily Kandinsky (Moscow, 1866 – Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1944) – Destiny (Red Wall) 1909, Oil on canvas, 84×118 cm – The Astrakhan State Art Gallery na PM Dogadina
