TUMBLEWEED

Gallery of Modern Art. 57 Karla Marxa St. Until 8 October 2016

  The exhibition covers various aspects of life in Russia at the onset of the 20th century, from celebrations for the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov to family festivities, domestic theatre or street scenes... Russia as it really was — the life of a vast empire on the eve of the First World War shown in all its diversity: capital cities and the provinces, palaces and hovels, luxury and poverty, the army and civil society. Cultural life at the beginning of the century is broadly represented: sketches from the Moscow Art Theatre and Mariinsky Theatre, guest receptions at Ilya Repin’s estate Penaty and White Daisy Day (a campaign against tuberculosis), Leo Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana and a Russian costume ball in the Winter Palace, Maximilian Voloshin in Koktebel and the 27th Exhibition of the Peredvizhniki in Moscow. Particular attention is given to architecture and the urban landscapes of Moscow, St. Petersburg and chief cities of the Russian regions. Some 100 works by 20th-century Russian photographers are displayed at the exhibition, by well-known figures such as Pyotr Pavlov, Maxim Dmitriev, Karl Bulla and Iosif Otsup, by amateur photographers whose evidence is of no less importance such as Sophia Tolstoy (wife of Leo Tolstoy), Vladimir Shukhov (world-famous engineer, inventor and architect) and Pyotr Vedenisov (the pianist), as well as by unknown authors whose names have not yet appeared in the history of Russian photographic art, who were consigned to historical oblivion.