Many friends of VKHUTEMAS gathered in the gallery that evening, guests from Germany also arrived - a researcher of the Dessau Bauhaus Foundation Torsten Blume and the head of the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau Wolfgang Thöner. The guests were greeted by the tired, but satisfied with the fruits of their work, the curators and organizers of the exhibition, Anna Ilyicheva and Tatiana Efrussi, the director of the Museum of the Moscow Architectural Institute Larisa Ivanova-Veen and the initiator of the creation of the gallery, the rector of the Moscow Architectural Institute, Oleg Shvidkovsky. As Anna Ilyicheva admitted, the opening was preceded by sleepless nights, but it was worth it.
The Bauhaus in Moscow project touches upon the theme of the relationship between two countries, two cultures and two architectural schools - the Bauhaus and the architectural and artistic space of the new Soviet Russia during its formation and flourishing of avant-garde art. The exhibition presented as part of the project is based on the history of exhibiting in the Soviet Union the works of outstanding masters of the German school, as well as its graduates and students. This is a chronological story of how the relationship between the artists and architects of Germany and the Soviet Union developed in different ways and not always simply.
“As a curator of the exhibition, I was primarily interested in the perception of the Bauhaus by Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s,” says Tatiana Efrussi. “From afar, the Bauhaus seemed revolutionary, close, almost“ours”. When the artists of the German school ended up in the USSR and began to work side by side with the Russian avant-garde artists, it turned out that they were not one bit revolutionary, and not one bit ours, but some completely different. But there was a strange mutual attraction between Soviet culture and the Bauhaus, and this is what our exhibition is about”.
Within the walls of the gallery are collected unique documents, letters, memoirs, photographs and press reviews of those years, found in Russian and German archives, museums and even in personal collections; some of the exhibits are on display for the first time. The central space of the hall was occupied by large multi-colored cubes, which also appeared in the project's logo. This artistic solution was proposed by the artist of the project Sergey Yaralov - with an emphasis on the present, but with an allusion to the past.
The curators call their exposition "an exhibition about exhibitions" because its main sections are devoted to four Bauhaus expositions presented in the USSR: "The first general German art exhibition" in 1924, the "Revolutionary art of the West" exhibition in 1926, "The first exhibition of modern architecture", held a year later, and the “Exhibition of the Bauhaus Dessau. The period of the leadership of Ghannes Mayer "1931.
The acquaintance with the exposition is preceded by two appeals that Russian artists exchanged with their German colleagues in 1919. The words of the appeals today sound rather pathetic and pathetic: "… we feel that we are united with you in a firm desire to do everything to close the gulf that opened up between the peoples due to the policy of violence" (from the appeal of the Bauhausists to the revolutionary artists of Russia). In those years, the pathos was fully justified. This was the official start of the subsequent fruitful Russian-German dialogue, not only creative, but also political, since the social position of the artists of that time was extremely weighty.
In addition to documentary chronicles, accompanied by a partial translation into Russian, each of the exhibitions is illustrated with exhibits that once caused the greatest reaction from the Soviet public - for example, the new school building in Dessau by Walter Gropius, and his own village of Dessau-Terten, a snapshot of a scene from “Triadic Ballet”by Oskar Schlemmer. By the way, with one of the works of Oskar Schlemmer at the 1924 exhibition, an interesting and very indicative case occurred when after the exhibition the hero of his picture, the philosopher Paracelsus, was renamed Pastor by the Russian press. This unexpected perception was explained by the irresistible desire of Soviet society to find revolutionary spirit even in the rather neutral works of German artists. So Paracelsus became a Pastor, unjustly indicating the author's position of critical perception of the church. Such incidents were not isolated. Moreover, the myths of perception arose from both sides.
“The chronology we have built represents a completely new perspective on the relationship between the Bauhaus and VKHUTEMAS. For example, purely business correspondence sometimes reveals very personal and sometimes even conflict situations. And often because the dialogue between the artists of Germany and Russia, who preferred to express their feelings with spatial materials, emblems and symbols, was mixed with political overtones,”says Anna Ilyicheva, project manager and curator of the gallery.
Special section of the exhibition “Bauhaus - VKHUTEMAS. People”are the personal stories of the Bauhaus people, one way or another connected with VKHUTEMAS. Thus, scraps of letters reveal an entertaining story about the visit of German students to Moscow in 1928. One of the members of the delegation, Gunta Stelzel, writes about the Russian capital:
“Moscow is a great city, there is always sunshine. Where is your heart, comrade? Mine is here on the streets. It is very international here - east, not a trace of the west. We are received better than the king of Afghanistan …"
But the head of the Bauhaus wall painting workshop, Hinnerk Scheper, who was invited to Moscow to cooperate with the Supreme Economic Council, is not so enthusiastic in his responses. From his open letter to the students of VKHUTEIN it is clear that he was sincerely disappointed with the outdated method of education, but he expected innovation and experiments from the young and revolutionary state: “Do not conjure over the glare of lead white on a bouquet of fading lilacs against the background of draperies, conjure over yourself, with the help of wire, balance, wood, paper, i.e. over their ingenuity in the material. In the sacred atmosphere of an art studio, you cannot create socially important objects."
The pearl of this section, as well as of the entire exhibition, undoubtedly, was the original exhibit provided by the Moscow Architectural Institute - a personal file of Ghannes Mayer, which had never been exhibited anywhere before. Tatiana Ephrussi talks about him with special pride: “After his dismissal from his post, Ghannes Mayer worked at the Moscow Institute of Architecture. It is a great success that his personal file has been preserved at the Moscow Architectural Institute, in which you can read interesting and little-known facts from his biography. As, for example, the fact that Ghannes Mayer was fired from the Bauhaus Dessau for political reasons, and called his departure to the USSR "an escape into life." In Mayer's personal file, one can also find the reasons why, after a few years, he left the country of the soviets, full of disappointment."
The exhibition will run at the gallery until December 29. Also, as part of the educational program of the project, lectures and workshops by Wolfgang Tener and Torsten Blume were held.
