Moscow exhibition presents artist as a harbinger of 21st-century art
The All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts is hosting a major exhibition, ‘Vrubel. The Birth of a New Art’, marking the 170th anniversary of Mikhail Vrubel’s birth. Rather than a conventional retrospective, its curators invite visitors to view this master of Russian Art Nouveau as an experimenter and visionary whose artistic discoveries in many ways anticipated the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The exhibition brings together some 400 works from the collections of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts, the Russian Museum, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Abramtsevo Museum-Reserve and other state and private collections. The Russian Museum alone has lent 45 works to the Moscow project.
Central to the exhibition is a lesser-known facet of Vrubel’s legacy: his ceramics. His majolica, tiles, decorative dishes and sculptural forms are presented not in isolation, but within the context of more than two millennia of art history – from ancient red-figure vases and 16th-century European ceramics to works by contemporary Russian artists.
Thus, Vrubel’s celebrated dish ‘Sadko’ enters into a distinctive dialogue with the work of the French Renaissance ceramicist Bernard Palissy. Alongside the master’s pieces are works by Symbolists and avant-garde artists, including Victor Borisov-Musatov, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, Kliment Redko and Pavel Tchelitchew, as well as contemporary practitioners – Irina Korina, Ulyana Podkorytova, Artem Filatov, Leonid Tskhe and others.
One of the key exhibits was the monumental ceramic fireplace The Meeting of Volga Svyatoslavich with Mikula Selyaninovich. The composition was produced from Vrubel’s design in several copies: one remained in France after the 1900 World Exhibition, while the others are held in Russian museum collections.
The exhibition constructs a long artistic perspective around Vrubel. The master’s distinctive ‘crystalline’ manner, his handling of colour, volume and texture are examined as ideas that were later developed by the artists of the Russian avant-garde and continue to surface in contemporary art. As a result, this anniversary project becomes less a narrative about a 19th-century artist than an attempt to trace how his visual language continues to function more than a century on.
The exhibition ‘Vrubel. The Birth of a New Art’ runs at the All-Russian Museum of Decorative Arts in Moscow until 17 February 2027.
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