The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts announces exhibition events planned for 2020. The new season will give visitors an opportunity to see unique graphic works from the museum collection that encompasses five centuries of European drawing. Masterpieces by many prominent artists will be presented, from Albrecht Durer to Henri Matisse. The Pushkin Museum will hold two milestone exhibitions of Italian art. A collection of world-famous paintings from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples will be displayed, representing two important periods — the Renaissance and Baroque — and works by 16th century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo will be brought to Russia for the first time. Plans also include a major solo exhibition of Bill Viola, one of today’s most influential video installation artists, a joint “Tattoo” project about the art of tattooing in cooperation with the Paris-based Musée du quai Branly, and a showing of the collection of contemporary graphics belonging to the Guerlain family. The traditional music festival “December Nights,” which celebrates its 40th anniversary in the coming year, will be accompanied by an exhibition in commemoration of great pianist and festival founder Svyatoslav Richter.
Main Building
The first exhibition of 2020, “From Durer to Matisse. Five Centuries of European Drawing from the Collection of the Pushkin State Museum,” will open in the Main Building on March 24. In 2019 this collection was successfully displayed in Paris at the Fondation Custodia. This will be a debut exhibition to demonstrate the rich scope and diversity of the Pushkin Museum’s collection of drawings to the Russian audience. Visitors will see about 170 works dating back from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 20th century. They are authored by such great masters as Durer, Carpaccio, Veronese, Bernini, Rembrandt, Rubens, Poussin, Watteau, Boucher, Tiepolo, David, Renoir, Picasso, Chagall, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Malevich, Bryullov, and Vrubel, just to name a few. The exhibits will occupy the entire central exhibition axis of the Museum.
Russia’s first solo exhibition of Bill Viola, one of the most influential contemporary video installation artists, is scheduled to open on July 14 and is a major project within the framework of the “Pushkin XXI” program. The exhibition will encompass 14 years of Bill Viola’s creative activities (from 2000 to 2014). His works will enter into a kind of dialogue with pieces of classical art from Italy that will be presented side by side.
“Masterpieces from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples” will be one of the major projects of 2020. (Previously, the Pushkin Museum held an exhibition named “Guests from Naples. Artemisia Gentileschi and Her Contemporaries.”) It will be held in July in the Main Building. Visitors will see 50 unique paintings and objects of applied art from the rich collection of the Capodimonte Museum and Royal Park in Naples. The main idea of the exhibition is to tell and demonstrate the history of Capodimonte, which holds museum treasures belonging to two of the most important historic periods: the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The exhibits mostly come from the Farnese collection of Titian, Raphael, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and many others, as well as the acquisitions of the Bourbon dynasty which ruled in Naples in the 18th and 19th centuries. The culminating point of this exhibition is a peculiar kind of dialogue between two innovators of the Baroque era, Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, who influenced the subsequent development of European art.
“Giuseppe Arcimboldo and His Time,” another project dedicated to Italian art, will open in December following the Neapolitan exhibition. It will be the first time that this artist’s works have come to Russia. The main objective of the project is to demonstrate the heritage of Arcimboldo (1526-1593) in the broader context of the European culture of late mannerism on the threshold of the 17th century. The exhibition will feature works by Arcimboldo and his contemporaries: about 80 paintings, graphic pieces (drawings and engravings), and objects of applied art, including 8 famous “heads” from the museums of Italy, Sweden, Germany, Japan, and other countries.
The exhibition “20th Century of Svyatoslav Richter” will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the international music festival “December Nights” founded by Svyatoslav Richter and Irina Antonova. This project will be a reflection on the era of this famous Russian musician. The selected Russian and foreign pieces of musical art will serve as an associative way to reveal Richter’s emotions, dramatic tension, and the complexity of that time rather than to reflect his personal artistic preferences.
Gallery of 19th and 20th Century European and American Art
One of the major exhibitions of this Gallery in 2020 will be “Tattoo,” a joint project in cooperation with the Paris-based Musée du quai Branly. The exhibition about the art of tattooing will open on March 3. Visitors will see about 150 works telling the history of this cultural phenomenon with extensive chronological and geographical coverage. The exhibition will describe the development stages of tattoo art with the use of various materials in different regions around the globe: from traditional objects to works of contemporary artists who creatively rethink tattooing, from early Modern Age engravings to art photography. The tattoos themselves will be showcased in an unusual way, on the surface of three-dimensional silicone models created especially for this project. These casts of body parts are tattooed by the leading artists from around the world.
Another major project, “Exhibition of Contemporary Graphics from the Pompidou Center Collection (Guerlain Family),” will open in the Gallery on October 27. Visitors will see about 200 pieces of graphics collected by Daniel and Florence Guerlain. The drawings are creations of artists including Mark Dion, Kiki Smith, Giuseppe Penone, Benoit Fougeirol, and Silvia Bachli, as well as Pavel Pepperstein, Sergei Anufriev, and Alexander Ponomarev.
There will also be two chamber exhibitions in the Pushkin Museum. The exhibition “Buddhist Sculpture of Korea” (works from the National Museum of Korea) is planned for the autumn of 2020, timed to coincide with the year of cultural exchange between Russia and Korea and celebrating the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations established between the countries. The Pushkin Museum will present some of the best masterpieces of Buddhist sculpture, including those bearing the “national Korean heritage” status.
In the winter of 2020 the Pushkin Museum will open the exhibition “Keepers. Brotherhood of the Key” to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its Numismatics Department (1945-2020) and display the treasures that have been gathered into the numismatic collection since its establishment.