Moscow gallery exhibition

Photographic Minimalism from Masao Yamamoto
There is something in the art of photography, its momentariness, that makes it similar to the poetic form of a haiku. Masao Yamamoto’s photography performed in a rather black and white manner, and employs the visual and poetic aesthetics of this island country. His prints are small — about 5 x 3 inches, almost devoid of colour and make their author seem indifferent to the sophisticated digital gadgets made in Japan for tourists. His photographs are simple, even too simple for those unaware of this simplicity, but suggestive – what is so highly valued in his motherland. The viewer in this case has a chance to interpret and thus complete something unsaid, becoming involved in the world of the photographer. Landscapes, still-lives are his favourite themes. They are like a vague record of places and moments Yamamoto has lived through. For him “holding small-sized prints on the palm of his hand is like holding a memory.”
This exhibition is presented in the premises of the Red October Chocolate Factory – the new location of the Pobeda Gallery that has moved here from Winzavod.

Avant-garde Artists as Collectors of Arts
All the World’s a Stage is the name of an exhibition being held in the graphics section of the Tretyakov Gallery. It presents a private collection of engravings that used to belong to two of the most avant-garde Russian artists of the twentieth century – Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova. The engravings were donated to the museum at the end of the 1980s. Larionov’s and Goncharova’s own masterpieces are frequently shown at major exhibitions in Moscow and in many other museums abroad.
But this time, the curators are displaying those things the couple collected and which served as inspirations for their own art. Mikhail Larionov, a painter who became attached to Impressionism, Primitivism and Rayonism (near-abstract art presented by Larionov himself in 1913), in the 1910s worked with the ballet-producer Sergei Diaghilev on the Ballets Russes.
His wife, whose great-aunt was Natalya Pushkina (Goncharova by birth), the poet’s wife, played a key role in the avant-garde movement in pre- Soviet Russia, being an absolute equal to her husband. As provocative as any Futurists’ actions in the 1910s, their lectures, exhibitions, illustrations yet proved them as leaders of this movement in Moscow. Like her husband, Goncharova also worked on ballet sets, first in Geneva and later in Paris where she joined Diaghilev’s team.
The exhibits at the current exhibition include engravings and lithographs of the 17th-20th centuries from Europe and Asia, on the history of costume, theatre billboards, sports, circus and dance. Some of these, like Gallo Gallina’s Greek Dance from Giulio Ferrario’s encyclopedia on history published in Milano in 1816, or Utagawa Toyokuni’s fine woodcuts of the Edo epoch, are real rarities and are surely worth seeing.
March 1 – until September

Moscow Nights and Moscow Days as seen by a Swiss in 1957
If only you knew how dear to me Are these Moscow evenings!
Leonard Gianadda surely heard this song – Moscow Nights – when he came to Moscow in 1957 to make a photo essay for the Swiss newspaper Illustré. A student then, but already a photographer, he arrived in the USSR together with 34,000 other young people from different countries of the world for the World Festival of Youth and Students. That was an ambiguous event for all participants. On the one hand, freedom of communication and friendship was proclaimed, and on the other, Soviet students were prosecuted later for simply writing to their new foreign friends. This was when a group of small-time business people called fortsovshiks started coming up to foreign students in the lobbies of their hotels and hassling them to buy them Soviet badges, signs and hats, jeans and sneakers. This joyful, but certainly dualistic festival was recorded for posterity in video and photo chronicles. Young people danced and sang in Gorky Street, Prospect Marx and on Pushkin Square. They got to know each other, listened to jazz, danced and discussed their lives. For the photographic eye behind a 35mm Leica belonging to Leonard Gianadda it had two sides: perfectly directed official events, a myriad smiling faces but at the same time rows of soldiers defending or protecting (who from whom?), an overcrowded underground. This series became a starting point for Giannada as a street photographer; and he began to travel extensively. He created a photographic series about Cuba and the USA, became Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour Member of Council of Musée Rodin, Musée Toulouse- Lautrec, Musée d’Orsay, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson and founded the Pierre Giannada Foundation in honour of his tragically deceased brother. That Moscow series of photographs was not written about in Soviet papers, they were considered much too ‘scandalous’. There is nothing scandalous about the photos now; everything has a backstage. And at that pre-Cold War period this particular backstage was neither in fashion, nor in demand even outside the USSR.
Until March, 14