Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch — L’avant-garde Russe à Vitebsk (1918-1922) — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 28 → July 16, 2018

Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch — Centre Pompidou Avec près de deux-cents œuvres présentées, le Centre Pompidou propose une plongée immersive au cœur de l'effervescente Vitebsk, qui vit Chagall élaborer un projet ambitieux d’école et de musée d’arts en phase avec les aspirations modernistes de son époque.

The Centre Pompidou is offering audiences a chance to explore a chapter in the history of modernity and the Russian avant-garde: the period of the people’s art school (1918 — 1922) founded by Marc Chagall in his native city of Vitebsk, which now lies in Belorussia.

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2018 marks the one hundredth anniversary of Chagall’s appointment as Fine Arts Commissioner for the Vitebsk region: a position that enabled him to carry out his project for an art institute open to everyone. El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevitch, leading exponents of the Russian and Soviet avantgarde, were two of the artists Chagall invited to teach at the school. A period of feverish artistic activity followed, turning the school into a revolutionary laboratory. The exhibition retraces these fascinating post-revolutionary years when the history of art was shaped in Vitebsk, far from Russia’s main cities.

Through 250 works and documents loaned by the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, museums in Vitebsk and Minsk and major American and European collections, the exhibition presents the output of three iconic figures — Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevitch — as well as works by students and teachers of the Vitebsk school, like Vera Ermolayeva, Nikolai Suetin and Ilya Chashnik.

A catalogue of 288 pages and some 250 illustrations, edited by Angela Lampe, the exhibition curator, is being published by the Centre Pompidou. This major publication includes essays by international experts (including Aleksandra Shatskikh and Jean-Claude Marcadé), a compilation of French translations of hitherto unpublished Russian texts, and a detailed chronology.