At the end of 2020 prior to all galleries were closed in Moscow to have the second wave of the coronavirus, the Museum of Moscow opened “100 Years Old: VKHUTEMAS, School of the Avant-Garde.” Lauded as one of one of the most crucial social occasions in the resources, it instantly had to close until a couple of weeks back.
The mouthful of an acronym VKHUTEMAS stands for the Higher Art as well as Technology Studios, universities opened in numerous cities of Soviet Russia soon after the 1917 Revolution. They are typically called the Soviet version of the German Bauhaus.
From 1920 to 1927, the Moscow VKHUTEMAS had on personnel some of the best avant-garde artists, designers, designers, and sculptors educating a brand-new generation of talented young would-be artists as well as builders. Among the educators were Alexander Deineka, Vladimir Favorsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Pytor Konchalovsky, Vera Mukhina, Vasily Kandinsky, and the Vesnin brothers.
For the exhibit, a team of passionate as well as young managers at the Museum of Moscow revealed a huge cache of Russian and Soviet art that had been considered shed for life. For the very first time it shows in one place functions from numerous media that had actually been shown independently in the past or partially– or, as with the situation of architectural plans– never ever exhibited at all. It also presents graphics and paints from exclusive collections and also descendants of VKHUTEMAS grads.
The concept of the exhibit– showing the entire tradition of VKHUTEMAS in one program– was proposed by a teacher at the Stroganov Institute, Alexander Lavrentiev, that is the grandson of progressive symbol Alexander Rodchenko.
The event has on display paintings, graphics, sculptures, building versions, porcelain, textiles, as well as furniture all created by the VKHUTEMAS trainees. VKHUTEMAS was started in the years immediately after the Revolution to create propaganda and usher in the “new life.” They were developing a brand-new world, as seen in the tower-figure “The World Belongs to Us” that VKHUTEMAS students constructed in the 1920s, recreated for the show in steel by Nadezhda Plungyan, curator of the paint area of the exhibition.
VKHUTEMAS was relabelled VKHUTEIN (Higher Art as well as Technology Institute) in 1927. When socialist realistic look ended up being the leading imaginative ideological background and it fell victim to the campaign versus formalism, the institution made it through till 1930. The organizers stressed at the opening that a lot of the jobs had actually been merely damaged by pupils and also teachers of VKHUTEMAS in order to make it through throughout the Stalinist repressions. Some artists, like Gustav Klutsis and also Alexander Drevin, were carried out in 1938. Vladimir Tatlin was successfully gotten rid of from artistic life, and Vladimir Favorsky was discharged from his job for formalism.
As Alexandra Selivanova, the primary curator said, the organizers wished to reveal the process of production, not the final result; to put on display screen creativity, not work of arts. They wanted to show to customers functions that had actually been suffering in unsafe oblivion for years without the essential conditions for safekeeping.
The curator of the graphics area informed The Moscow Times that in selecting musicians the coordinators restricted themselves to musicians that were least known and had been– in his words– “tossed overboard.” That’s why jobs by VKHUTEMAS celebrities such as Alexander Deineka, Yuri Pimenov, Kukryniksy or the creator of the Puppet Theater, Sergei Obraztsov are not shown below. One of these very carefully curated operate in the graphics section is the “Metropolitan” poster of 1927 with sophisticated red-capped conductor and also conductress.
Much of the exhibition is devoted to the manufacturing departments, each in its very own hall: printing, fabric, porcelains, woodworking as well as metalworking. This is where site visitors can find out how the VKHUTEMAS printing fonts were established, concerning Favorsky’s school and his pursuit for a brand-new kind of book, just how fabric designers studied brand-new modern technologies and exactly how porcelains ended up being a medium for distributing propaganda. On display screen are furnishings and the lights components that are precursors of the forms we use today.
Visitors can get an unique pamphlet with Moscow addresses attached in some way with the lives, job and also tasks of VKHUTEMAS trainees as well as trainees. As an example, it shows the apartment or condos of Alexander Deineka and also Moisei Ginzburg in the popular “ship residence” recently restored on Novinsky Bulvar; the homes of El Lisitsky, the Vesnin bros, Vera Mukhina, Alexander Tyshler, Vladimir Favorsky, Solomon Telingater, as well as the VKHUTEMAS class on Rozhdestvensky Bulvar.