Photo: Tower of the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin at Paris – Moscow exhibition in 1979 / Archives MNAM / Jacques Faujour
The anniversary of the legendary Paris-Moscow exhibition, which showed the works of the great Russian avant-garde artists to the Western world in 1979, will be celebrated with a conference on June 12 in Paris.
The participants and organizers of the exhibition - Irina Antonova and other legends of the museum business in Russia and France – will take part in it, The Art Newspaper Russia reports.
The conference will be held at the Pompidou Center, Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Vladimir Potanin Foundation participated in the organization. During the meeting, the organizers of exhibitions in 1979 and 1981, and contemporary art historians will discuss the role of the exhibition in a historical context.
The Paris – Moscow exhibition was the largest and most significant exposition among all the joint museum projects of the two countries - about 2500 exhibits were collected at one site. The exhibition continued the series of Parisian expositions, at which masterpieces from the museums of New York and Berlin were displayed.
The Soviet-French exhibition entered the history of art due to the fact that the paintings of Kazimir Malevich, Vasily Kandinsky and other Russian avant-garde artists were exhibited for the first time. In May 1979, they were presented at the same site with the works of Picasso, Matisse and other French artists.
Two years after the opening in Paris, the exhibition went to Moscow, where it was also a great success. Thousands of Soviet admirers of painting became acquainted with art that they had not previously seen. The exhibition was visited by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Leonid Brezhnev, who highly appreciated the works. According to historians, the exhibition influenced the policy of the USSR in the field of culture and helped to increase the number of international projects.
Russkiy Mir
