The exhibition presents more than fifty works by Moscow artists, both of the twentieth century and modern. The project addresses different individuals and epochs, but demonstrates the connection of generations – the artists’ works are united by the proximity of artistic means adopted in the common environment of the Moscow school of painting. The plot of the works of Muscovite artists is their city. The exhibition demonstrates the image of the outgoing Moscow – its way of life, characters, space.
We often talk about Moscow. We live in it. We see Moscow every day. We’re sorry about her. Cities change their appearance during human life, and every change is sad, because this is how the present turns into the past. We inherited the city of the twentieth century – Moscow is brilliant, ironic, sophisticated, ruined, reborn, hungry, sovereign, communal. She is Chekhov, Mkhatovskaya, Shchukinsko-Morozovskaya, Tsvetaevskaya, Ilfo-Petrovskaya, Bulgakov, Mosfilmovskaya – the list is delightfully endless.
Our exhibition is another list of Muscovites: Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky, Aristarchus Lentulov and Robert Falk, Konstantin Istomin, Alexander Drevin, Samuel Adlivankin and Rostislav Barto, Alexander Labas and Nikolay Romadin, as well as: Anatoly Zverev and Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Mikhail Roginsky, Natalia Nesterova, Vladimir Veisberg, Boris Kasatkin and many others. Each of them is involved in the Moscow school of painting – refined color, European, subtle and very precise.
Pyotr Konchalovsky builds a portrait of an unknown Moscow beauty of the 20s as a hot harmony of red and orange shades. Robert Falk paints the Moscow actress Azarch-Granovskaya as a Renaissance duchess, ironically trying on the mask of a ceremonial painter. Evgeny Oks combines pale winter apples, a spacious window sill and glass utensils in a still life of 1951 into a composition. The early Dmitry Krasnopevtsev gives the backyards of the Moscow store a romantic appearance of a Parisian corner of the Musketeer times. The accuracy of color creates the illusion of the truth of life – watching the play of red and green in the landscape of Boris Kasatkin, we are transported to the 80s, to the hot summer on Pirogovka.
The major chord of the exhibition “Behind Moscow” is Natalia Nesterova’s famous theatrical landscape “Pechatnikov Lane” (1985), which depicts a House with caryatids, recently saved by enthusiasts from destruction.
