ARABESCIAN. EAST-WEST Automatic translate

Curator: Suria Sadekova, head of the department of educational and exhibition projects.

The upcoming exhibition, which is being prepared by the curators of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts together with the Marjani Foundation, will unfold in seven rooms on the ground floor of the Art Gallery of Europe and America from the 19th – 20th centuries. Each of the halls will become a separate story about the interactions of Eastern and Western cultures, about the influence of Islamic art on the evolution of artists from different countries. Viewers will see how this interest in the East was born and how artists moved from direct borrowing to new interpretations, and the next generation surpassed their “teachers”, developing in a new way the principles of abstract art laid down in eastern culture. Islamic art has changed the minds of European artists of a new generation, whose eye was brought up on the canons of beauty of Greco-Roman antiquity. “Simplicity - almost to barbarism. The difficulty is almost dizzying. Refinement of the most refined, sensually dreaming people. Seriousness, severity, sometimes the severity of the picture, as in ancient icons. And the soft, flexible, sometimes crafty beauty of the line, ”wrote Vasily Kandinsky. Other coloristic combinations and principles of working with color, compositional construction of space and perspective in the visual arts of the East, and most importantly, the abstract perception of reality, sets new artistic tasks for them. Each of the representatives of European and Russian art will solve them individually, opening new horizons in the decorativeness of oriental art.

The exhibition will feature masterpieces of modernism art by Matisse, Redon, Picasso from the Pushkin Museum’s collection, as well as sheets from Assar Tabrizi’s manuscript Mehr va Mushtari and samples of Persian fabrics of the 16th century, and monochrome miniatures of the 17th – 19th centuries, earthenware bowls, jugs and plates, created in Persia in the XII – XIII centuries. One of the halls will be dedicated to the bewitching world of Georgian painting and its origins, which should be sought in Iranian art during the reign of the Qajar dynasty. With the help of paintings by Iranian artists of the 17th – 19th centuries, works of decorative and applied art of Persia, and paintings by classics of Georgian painting, we will tell the story of the complicated but creatively filled relations between Iran and Georgia. “Persia in the Cinema” is the name of the hall, which will be created with the help of one of the largest Russian film historians, Naum Kleiman, where the paintings by Sergey Eisenstein from the collection of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art will never be exhibited. In the final hall, the audience learns how Islamic art influenced the artistic thought of the beginning of the 20th century, how artists went from a direct interpretation of Persian art to its understanding and creation of their original works based on thoughts about the origins of a special visual tradition of Islamic culture.