A premonition of change and disruption: the Silver Age was shown at the Tretyakov Gallery

The exhibition includes “masks”, searches and anxieties

The exhibition “Heroes and Contemporaries of the Silver Age” opened in the main building of the Tretyakov Gallery. This is a story about a time of change, which was reflected in art by the breaking of the realistic tradition, the search for new forms, the premonition of a future that was radically different, but at that time very vague. It is no coincidence that the final point was the painting “The Hours” by Marc Chagall – one of the master’s most mysterious and attractive works, filled with anxiety and a feeling of lost time.

– This is the period of the breakdown of the realistic form and the birth of a new aesthetic model of the 20th century. Watercolor, gouache, tempera, pastel – fast techniques allowed artists to react vividly to the situation of the time, filled with a premonition of change and uncertainty of the future, says Irina Shumanova, one of the curators of the exhibition, head of the graphics department of the 18th – early 20th centuries at the Tretyakov Gallery.

The project opens an overview of the main artistic groups and art associations of a turning point. Here are “World of Art”, and “Libra”, and “Scorpio”, and “Golden Fleece” – magazines where artists published their works and manifestos. There was a heated debate between them, with the authors often changing “camps” and collaborating with different groups.

Life itself pushed me to search for something new, to quickly change forms and techniques, or to nostalgia for the old. After all, it was a time of technical breakthrough, when photography “cancelled” classical realism, and industrial innovations gave rise to a fundamentally new vector of art, such as futurism.

The uncertainty of the future forced us to look for answers in the past. Moreover, St. Petersburg artists turned more to the Golden Age, and Moscow ones – to pre-Petrine Rus’. There was also great interest in religious topics.

Mikhail Nesterov, Natalia Goncharova, Nicholas Roerich, Sergei Chekhonin, Viktor Vasnetsov, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin were involved in the design and decoration of churches, but many of their ideas remain only in graphic sketches. Church art, which many famous masters turned to at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, is also transforming, moving away from traditions and experiencing a turning point. Other authors use iconographic motifs to convey the feeling of troubled times and loss; there is this, for example, in Vrubel’s “Seraphim” and Filonov’s “Golgotha”.

But the motive of acting is most clearly manifested in border times. Heroes in fancy dress, musicians and harlequins, guests of artistic cabarets, spectators in a theater box – artists direct allegorical scenes, seemingly filled with grace and fun. Only behind every mask lies a hidden anxiety, every masquerade is like a feast during the plague. It is no coincidence that in the last hall of the exhibition a composition by Yuri Annenkov with the telling title “Crucified Harlequin” is presented, where several semantic and historical lines of the exhibition converge. –

– Artists of the Silver Age wanted to soar above reality, to escape from it, turning into wandering harlequins. This is a kind of role model of behavior of that time,” explains another curator of the project, senior researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery Evgenia Ilyukhina.

All this bright and motley variety of creative searches and reflections of the era of change leads to “The Hours” by Marc Chagall. Before us is a huge antique clock on a disturbing yellow background. In the corner of the canvas there is an unnaturally small man, sitting with his back to a massive structure, who looks out the window and sees only pitch darkness there. Here, alone, face to face with the abyss, the “playing man” seems to throw off the mask that allowed him to hold on in public, and appears real, with all his doubts and worries reflected on his almost stony face.