In connection with the designation of 2010 as "France-Russia Year," the Montparnasse Museum is hosting a important exhibition of Russian artists who once converged on this storied Parisian neighborhood. Over 70 artists are represented, covering the period from 1915 to the early 1960s, with special focus on the 1920s. At that time, many Russian painters and sculptors left their country in order to freely express their artistic ambitions and to seek out new trends in art.

The museum itself is part of this history: in its building, the painter Marie Vassilieff had her famous studio — a gathering place for Matisse, Satie, and other seminal cultural figures — and her equally-famous canteen, which provided dirt-cheap meals during World War I to those who were literally starving artists.

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Guided by curators André and Vladimir Hoffmann, ARTINFO France traces the exhibition’s major focal points.

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Exile

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Beginning during the political upheavals of the early 20th century, many Russian artists decide to move abroad, and many chose to settle in France. While some artists had supported Lenin and taken part in the revolution’s early stages, most became disillusioned when Stalin took power, preferring to leave rather than to accept ethical and artistic servitude. At the time, Social Realism greatly limited the range of painterly subjects. Still, important artists did remain in Russia, such as Rotchenko, who followed Constructivist principles by applying artistic creation to daily life and mass production. But many other influential talents chose refuge in Paris, the world’s artistic capital at the time.

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Adaptation

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Superstars like Kandinsky and Chagall are featured among these immigrant artists, but one of the exhibition’s strengths is that it also dwells on lesser-known artists like Pougny, Gontcharova, Larionov, and Annenkov, who made their mark on the Parisian art world of the period. Representing various artistic movements and styles — such as Suprematism, Constructivism, and figurative representation — these new arrivals all developed as artists during their exile.

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The French artistic world was then in full neo-classical mode, following Cocteaus rallying cry for a “return to order” — that is, to figurative forms and clear compositions. The models of this movement were Ingrès and Matisse. For Russian figurative artists, it was fairly easy to find a place in this atmosphere: Sonia Delaunay created clothing with bright geometrical designs, while Georges Annenkov became a film set designer and found avant-garde ways of treating the human figure in his pared-down nudes. Abandoning the Suprematist emphasis on the abstract, Pougny’s style showed the influence of the Nabis with its round and colorful shapes.

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Sensuality and Celebration

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Drawing on their interest in figurative representation, the Russians developed a freely sensual style of painting. The show includes Serebriakovas series of languid female nudes, where the artist uses a warm palette to bathe her models in a natural erotic glow. In similar fashion, Marie Vassilieff celebrates the female body with Cubist renderings that maintain bodily proportions and extreme colors that bring Italian Futurism to mind. In general, Russian artists depicted physical beauty without stylizing it. This emphasis on the body also found playful expression in Montparnasse nightlife. During the Union des Artistes Russess charity balls, guests freely stripped off their clothes or dressed in drag.

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Rediscovery

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The Russian artists who chose to live in France stayed there, whether by preference or necessity. Erased from Soviet art history, many were forgotten until the end of their lives. It took years before significant pieces of this exiled cultural heritage were rediscovered — many of them in flea-markets. The works shown here all come from the same collection: Georges Khatsenkov gathered 300 paintings over 30 years of tireless pursuit. Since Perestroika, the Russians have rediscovered their legacy, and today these artists are featured in Moscow’s Russian Museum.