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The Jewish Museum Recaptures the Brilliance of a Vanguard Theater, Cut Short |
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Marc Chagall, Introduction to the Jewish Theater,(detail) 1920, tempera, gouache, and opaque white on canvas. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
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NEW YORK, NY.- During the artistic ferment following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, major artists joined actors, choreographers, writers, and musicians in creating a daring new theater. This collaboration gave rise to extraordinary productions with highly original stage designs that redefined the concept of theater itself, attracting large, diverse audiences and garnering international critical praise. In Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949, on view from through March 22, 2009, The Jewish Museum tells the little-known and tumultuous story of this vanguard artistic flowering, which thrived on the stage for thirty years before being brutally extinguished during the Stalinist era.
More than 200 works of art and ephemera, the majority never before exhibited, have been drawn from collections in Russia, France, Israel, and the United States for the showing. Marc Chagalls celebrated, monumental murals are featured, in addition to more than 100 watercolor, gouache and crayon drawings of costume and set designs, executed in the experimental modes of Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism by such artists as Natan Altman, Robert Falk, Ignaty Nivinsky, Isaac Rabinovich, and Aleksandr Tyshler.
Rare film footage of early performances transports viewers back to another time. Fascinating archival materials such as music, posters, prints, programs, and period photographs of productions and actors in character help recapture extraordinary moments. Many items in the exhibition survived a 1953 blaze at Moscows Bakhrushin State Central Theater Museum, the premier repository for archives of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater (GOSET), and a major lender to the exhibition. The fire, almost certainly intentional, was an attempt by the Soviets to stamp out the legacy of the Russian Jewish theater.
Following its showing in New York, Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 travels to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco where it will be on view from April 25 through September 7, 2009.
The exhibition has been organized by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Senior Curator at The Jewish Museum. She first learned of the Bakhrushins trove while researching another exhibition in Moscow nearly a decade and a half ago: I became aware of the achievement of artists who, in the heady days after the revolution, embraced the avant-garde and the potential of a peoples theater.
These artists created a uniquely new theater, one that combined visual art and music with stylized expressionist performances. They also had an affinity for the grotesque and the comedic melodrama of Yiddish folklore, continues Goodman.
The Jewish theater movement in Russia was represented by two companies based in Moscow with very different approaches. Habimas productions, performed in Hebrew, emphasized the ideas of Zionism and Jewish national rebirth. Soviet ideologues soon deemed the theaters policies at odds with socialist ideals. In 1926, Habima left the Soviet Union to settle in Palestine, eventually becoming Israels national theater. In contrast to Habima, GOSET, which performed in Yiddish, presented daring expressionistic dramas. With its innovative blending of Jewish folklore and literature, Constructivist-inspired sets, and expressionist acting techniques, GOSET was wildly popular with Jews and non-Jews alike.
The legendary murals created by Marc Chagall in 1920 to adorn the GOSET theater will be displayed in a gallery that replicates its original intimate size. Painted by the artist in a little over a month, Chagalls murals will cover the Museums walls with engaging representations of GOSETs performers using vibrant color and geometric forms that dance across the surfaces.
Natan Altmans faux-naïve, yet sophisticated color drawings for the sets and costumes of one of Habimas most acclaimed productions, Solomon An-skys The Dybbuk (1922) are another highlight. Already a leading avant-garde artist, Altman transformed familiar folkloric characters into a visual feast of exaggerated, distorted, and twisted forms. Rare photographs of the original production, directed by Evgeny Vakhtangov, a protégé of the renowned Konstantin Stanislavsky, will be shown on video, and the productions Constructivist set model (reconstructed), poster, handwritten score, and program also will be on view. Costume design drawings by the artist Robert Falk for GOSETs production of At Night in the Old Marketplace are animated with an angular visual vitality in portrayals of prostitutes and the walking dead.
In 1932 Stalin issued a decree stating that all artistic endeavors must conform to the goals of the Revolution. The only approved form of artistic expression was Socialist Realism. Thereafter, the avant-garde fell out of favor. Many in Russias theatrical avant-garde feared for their lives and began to opt for safe works. In 1935 GOSET mounted Shakespeares King Lear, which, rather ironically, became the companys greatest success due in large measure to the acclaimed performance of the brilliant actor Solomon Mikhoels. Helping to convey the gravitas of the production are emotive watercolors by set designer Aleksandr Tyshler and photographs of Mikhoels, by then GOSETs director, as Lear.
In 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was murdered at Stalins direction, his brutal death staged as a truck accident. More than ten thousand people attended his funeral. GOSET was liquidated the following year. Exhibition visitors will be able to see the actors broken eyeglasses, retrieved when his body was found on a snowy road, as well as film footage from Mikhoelss funeral.
Other productions to be featured in Chagall and the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 include Habimas The Golem (1925), and GOSETs The Sorceress: An Eccentric Jewish Play (1922), 200,000: A Musical Comedy (1923), and At Night in the Old Marketplace: Tragic Carnival (1925).
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