Parisian evenings of Baroness Ettingen Automatic translate

In the 1910s, during the heyday of the Paris avant-garde, few of the innovators in art - artists, writers, critics, musicians - did not know the salon of Baroness Ettingen in Montparnasse. The fatal beauty with a sonorous title, nee Polish aristocrat Elena Mionchinskaya, arrived in Paris with her cousin, a talented artist and a connoisseur Sergei Yastrebtsov, at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Passion for new art, the intensity of creative energy, constant vibrant initiatives, often taking the form of romantic relationships, made Baroness Ettingen and Sergey, who took the pseudonym Serge Fera, one of the key figures in the artistic life of Paris. Over the long years of their life, they managed to give impetus to dozens of avant-garde projects and participate on an equal footing in them: in their "inner circle" were Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Cubists of the Golden Section group and Italian futurists, masters of the Paris School, poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau.

Exhibition of the Pushkin Museum named after A.S. Pushkin, in partnership with French colleagues, is called upon to recreate the vibrant and rich atmosphere of the Parisian life of Ettingen and Fera of the 1900s - 1950s. It will include materials unknown to the general public of the private archive of the French heirs of the Baroness - the Russo family - along with works from the largest Parisian art museums of the twentieth century - the Pompidou Center and the City Museum of Modern Art. It is estimated that the project will feature about 40 paintings, up to fifty drawings, unique archival materials, works of applied art and design.

The leitmotif of the exhibition will be the salon of the Baroness - a meeting place for avant-garde masters, as well as the versatile talents of his mistress, a secular lady, who simultaneously acted as an artist, poet, and critic. Therefore, the apartments on Raspail Boulevard on Montparnasse, decorated with paintings by Henri Rousseau (Customs), were equally attractive to talents in all forms of art.

A separate topic will be the story of Oettingen and Fehr as patrons of the avant-garde. In the 1910s, the salon of the Baroness concentrated around herself and recluses Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and more open Albert Glez, Jean Metsenje, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger, and the future Dadaist Francis Picabia, and the compositions of Serge Fera himself are not inferior in their expression to textbook samples cubism. Beloved Baroness, an artist from Finland Leopold Survaz, became one of the pioneers of abstract art.

At the same time, the relations of Baroness Ettingen with literature were romantic and sublime - poets and writers enjoyed its special location. Legendary was the magazine Paris Nights (Soirees de Paris), which Ettingen and Fera “presented” to their friend Guillaume Apollinaire in 1913, who turned it into the podium of the avant-garde. A special section of the exhibition will tell about the verses of Apollinaire, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Andre Salmon that sounded in the house of the Baroness, their relations and relations with artists.

The end of World War I was the time of the “explosion” of innovative theater projects in Paris. Along with the “Parade” in the Picasso sets, in 1917 it was Apollinaire’s play “Breasts of Tiresias”, composed by Serge Fera, called by the authors “surrealistic” - this is the famous word that sounded for the first time.

The revolution in Russia deprived Etingen and Fera of income, turned them from generous philanthropists into tireless authors of ever new creative initiatives. The Baroness actively wrote poetry and published, interacted with the musicians of the famous French Six and the artists of the Paris School, and her 1920s fashion and design experiences intersected with the works of her famous contemporary Sonya Delaunay and art deco aesthetics. In turn, Serge Fera in the inter-war twentieth became famous for his theatrical projects and philosophical compositions with harlequins, which Cocteau so enthusiastically admired. Having lived to old age, Fera remained the keeper of the memory of the heroic times of the emergence of the avant-garde, carefully preserving the archive of Baroness Ettingen.