Paris and the Russian Avant-Garde, 1900–1930 - five online talks by Dr Natalia Murray

The Ballet Russes was one of the most celebrated achievements of Russian 20th-century art, though ironically it had little impact in Russia itself. Created by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, over the next two decades the company revolutionised the arts –and it continues to influence cultural activity today. The Ballet Russes revealed Russian culture and traditions to Europe, and although the company remained essentially Russian, it never appeared in Russia and few of its creations were ever seen there.

This talk focuses on the two major collections assembled by the wealthy Moscow merchants Ivan Morozov (1871-1921) and Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936), and their impact on the development of the Russian avant-garde. Often regarded by their contemporaries with distrust and suspicion, these two visionary patrons assembled unprecedented collections of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which changed the character of Russian Modern art.

The year 1910 was when the term ‘avant-garde’ was used for the first time in Russia; this was also the starting point for art freeing itself from the need to represent reality or observe academic convention. For this liberation of Russian art, artistic developments in Paris were crucial. Many Russian avant-garde artists, including Mark Chagall, Petr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov and David Shterenberg spent time in Paris. For Chagall, Paris was his chosen city; the avant-garde movements of the 1910s provided the young painter with a pool of experimental work, which he enriched with his own cultural references. He lived and worked in Paris most of his life, accomplishing such important commissions as the ceiling of the Paris Opera theatre.

One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky, spent most of his life between Munich and Paris, dying in 1944 as a French citizen. Kandinsky believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that also expressed volumes about the artist's inner experience. In this talk we will look at his works, and the origins of his first abstractions, as well as other Russian artists who developed non-objective art in Russia.

This talk is dedicated to the amazons of the Russian avant-garde, whose art challenged traditional aesthetic and social values and redefined the boundaries between art and life. These women considered themselves artists first and became zealous participants in a great aesthetic revolution. Forming an intense and energetic group, they took part in radical exhibitions in Kiev, Moscow and St Petersburg, read the latest journals and studied Post-Impressionism and Cubism in Paris. Revolutionary in their art and politics, they seized the freedom of the first decades of the 20th century to pave a remarkable path from primitivism to cubism and from representation to abstraction.