How To Fit a Country Onto Fifth Avenue

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Walking through the enormous exhibition of “Russia!” – nearly 300 works that overflow Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda into side galleries at the Guggenheim – I kept trying to imagine an analogous show called “America!” or “France!” or “Italy!” Russia was the only country I could envision deserving of an exclamation point; in all other cases the punctuation rang as false advertising.


Russia, that immense, dark, cold, and severe country, has produced monumental and unique spirits: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Malevich, Rublev, Eisenstein, Kandinsky, Tarkovsky (the list goes on). “Russia!” the exhibition, however, is all over the map, too large and scattered to bring the immensely fascinating country into focus. The sprawling and boundless blockbuster is as vast and wandering as the country itself.


It feels like the contents of another entire museum have been stuffed in side the Guggenheim. The exhibition’s works, comprising mostly paintings from the 13th century to the present, come from numerous public and private collections both in and outside of Russia. These include Russia’s Hermitage, Kremlin, State Tretyakov, and State Russian museums, which rival those of New York and major European cities.


I have never been to Russia, so I was thrilled to hear that so many paintings that had never been out of the country were coming to New York. Yet “Russia!” feels like a compromise between too many curators both here and abroad. There is no guiding vision. More often than not, especially in the 19th- and 20th-century sections of the chronological exhibition, “Russia!” comes across as confused and oddly out of date. The show feels like a state-sponsored proof of artistic talent and strength, of the type one used to see during the Cold War. The exhibition seems to want to place Russia in competition with its own misunderstood view of the West, rather than illuminate the country’s own artists.


Nevertheless, there are many masterpieces, and “Russia!” begins with a bang that stayed with me throughout. Some two dozen breathtaking icons and tapestries open the exhibition. Many are anonymous. Some are by Dionysii, Andrei Rublev, and Danill Chernyi. Dionysii’s “Crucifixion, From the Pavlo-Obnorskii Monastery, Moscow” (1500), in which Christ, surrounded by saints, wailing angels, the Virgin, and her attendants, sways within a yellow ground, is reminiscent of the tenderness of Duccio. Rublev and Chernyi’s abstract tempera on panel, “Ascension” (1408), is a brilliant play on flatness, volume, space, and symmetry; its surprised figures are mysteriously natural and human.


“The Virgin of Vladimir” (1514), of the Christ child and the Virgin surrounded by vignettes of the Life of Christ, is an expressive transformation of decorative elements into human emotions. Finally, the five panels “Christ in Glory,” “The Virgin,” “St. John the Baptist,” “Archangel Michael,” and “Archangel Gabriel” – all from the Deesis Tier in the Cathedral of the Dormition at the Kirillo (1497) – are a tour de force hung high in the High Gallery and visible from the rotunda.


Many of the greatest works in the exhibition, Modernist and Constructivist, date from the early 20th century. They include Chagall’s “The Soldier Drinks” (1911-12), Kandinsky’s “Painting With White Border” (May 1913), and “Sketch for Composition II” (1909-10), all from the Guggenheim, as well as Tatlin’s “Counter-Relief,” Liubov Popova’s “Painterly Architectonics” (both 1916), and works by Malevich, Rodchenko, and Vladimir Stenberg.


Other sections of the exhibition are devoted to specific Russian collections. One, from the Imperial Collections of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, includes masterworks by Rubens, Guido Reni, Van Dyck, Watteau, Claude Lorrain, Louis Le Nain, and Chardin. Another gallery is filled with paintings from the collections of Moscow merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, both of whom collected important Modernist works by artists such as Matisse and Picasso. Shchukin, during the early 20th century, almost single-handedly kept Matisse alive.


Here you can see two magnificent Matisses, “Girl With Tulips” (1910) and “Vase of Irises” (1912); a couple of outstanding Picassos; a Parisian street scene, in luscious grays, by Marquet; a worthwhile Monet landscape; the rock-solid Cezanne portrait “Lady in Blue” (c. 1900), and Derain’s amazing silvery gray, cream, and green “The Wood” (1912).


All these wonderful works are reasons why “Russia!” – despite its shortcomings – remains required viewing. But the Socialist Realist and contemporary sections of the show, interesting only for their political and social elements, are negligible as art. And all too often we are presented with Russian attempts at European and, especially in the contemporary section, trendy American, art.


Rather than being given the real Russian deal, we are being shown that Western influence can go hand in hand with Russian social activism and independence. In fact, what most often happens in the exhibition is a culture clash on canvas: Northern Russian temperament, illustratively overwrought, is dressed up in ridiculously ill-fitting French finery, Realist sincerity, or, more recently, art world politics and misused American slang.


In “Russia!” I came across many Russian artists I had never heard of whose works were astonishing. Ivan Vishnyakov’s “Portrait of Sarah Eleonora Fairmore” (1749), in which her dress looks like a sky and her arms take on lives of their own, is ethereal. Dimitry Levitsky’s “Portrait of Agafa Dmitrievna” (1785) is a grand, sweeping work worthy in places of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. And three landscapes by Arkhip Kunindzhi, especially the silvery-blue snowscape “Patches of Moonlight (1898-1908), are reminiscent of the dreamy animals and moons of Rousseau. Other striking works include Vladimir Borovikovsky’s “Portrait of the Sisters Princesses Anna and Varvra Gagarina” (1802) and Orest Kiprensky’s “Portrait of Ekaterina Avdulina” (1822).


Standing before Vasily Perov’s “Portrait of the Writer Fedor Dostoevsky” (1872), a competent likeness in grays and browns, I was struck by how little it conveyed of a man who practically invented the psychological novel. Later on in the show, I came across Malevich’s stark masterpiece “Black Square” (c. 1930). Compared to “Black Square,” Perov’s portrait of Dostoevsky comes across as a mere illustration of the Russian spirit, not, as in the Malevich painting, an embodiment of it. “Russia!” despite its ups and downs, is still definitely worth the trip; but viewers must do the work the curators have left undone.


September 16 through January 11 (1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, 212-423-3500).


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