MONTECARLO.- For its next summer exhibition, the Grimaldi Forum Monaco will be presenting « From Chagall to Malevich, the revolution of the avant-garde », exhibition produced in connection with the Year of Russia in the Principality of Monaco. The exhibition will be one of the outstanding events of the Year of Russia celebration which will run throughout 2015.

This wide-ranging exhibition will bring together major works by great artists who from 1905 to 1930 represented the avant-garde movement in Russia. They shaped an unprecedented modernity, distinguishing themselves totally from what had been known before: Altman, Baranoff-Rossin, Burliuk, Chagall, Chashnik, Dymchits-Tolstaya, Ender, Exter, Filonov, Gabo, Gavris, Goncharova, Kandinsky, Kliun, Klucis, Kudryashov, Larionov, Lebedev, Lentulov, Lissitzky, Mashkov, Malevich, Mansurov, Matiushin, Medunetsky, Mienkov, Morgunov, Pevsner, Popova, Puni, Rodchenko, Rozanova, Shevchenko Stenberg, Stepanova, Sterenberg, Strzeminski, Suetin, Tatlin, Udaltsova, Yakulov....

These artists were the forerunners of the tremendous upheaval in the way of thinking about, seeing, and representing the reality. If academism was still around, these young creators, both in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, could not be satisfied with that vision of the past. The arrival of electricity, of the railroad, of the automobile, of the new means of communication forged a new language. The artists would impose a vision that corresponded to what was around them, to what they were experiencing, to who they were themselves. New ideas flourished. It became clear that there was no halting these great upheavals in a society that was also insisting on change.

New ways of representation, until then unknown began to appear, and to become inseparable from this current of modernity that expressed the impact of the discoveries taking place in those first years of the 20th century, in literature, music, dance as well as in plastic arts. The sounds, the words, the form jostled and turned upside down commonplace ideas. Between a strait-laced, outdated world and the innovators of this period, the gulf was enormous. In this shaken-up world, artists developed a language that stripped away the old and made way for the future.

Different movements emerged, outside of all convention, creating schools or movements that illustrated the energy and wealth of creativity at the beginning of the 20th century: Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Cubo-futurism, Rayonism, Suprematism, Constructivism—movements producing new and unknown forms of representation, indelibly interwoven with their era.

Such is the essential outline of this great story of the “avant-garde” artists who shook up centuries of convention and academism.

In order to present a subject of such scope, the exhibition curator Jean-Louis Prat has obtained important loans from major Russian institutions: the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow. Other great Russian museums such as the Nizhny Novgorod, Astrakhan, Krasnodar, and Tula museums, all of which benefited from deposits of art at the beginning of the October 1917 Revolution, have also been contacted and have agreed to make exceptional loans. Some of the important European museums such as the George Pompidou Center in Paris complete this prestigious list.

The exhibition will bring together 150 major works. A bilingual scientific catalogue, richly illustrated, including essays by specialists on avant-garde art as well as notices and bibliographies on the artists and the different movements of that period will be published for the event.