20th century AD

Berlin has been awash with Russian tillage this fall. The crowded calendar of occurrences has included concerts, ballet and theatrical performances, literary readings and film series as well as visits through scores of Russian visual artists. At the center of all this activity is "Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin 1900-1950" the blockbuster exhibition that render free of accessed in early September and step quicklys through Jan. 4 at the Martin Gropius Bau. Organized by means of Moscow's Pushkin Museum and the Berlinische Galerie, a museum of 20th-century art, architecture and photography, the exhibit encompasses a staggering array of nearly 2500 objects: paintings, plastic arts photographs, architectural drawings and types as well as a entertainer of vitrines packed with works letters and musical scores.

The semens of "Berlin-Moscow" were sown in the years just after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 when Jorn Merkert director of the Berlinische Galerie, and Irina Antonova, the Pushkin's director, hit upon the idea of an exhibition that would explore the tumultuous cultural relations between the sum of two units cities in the first half of the 20th hundred The wider political significance of "Berlin-Moscow," which was intended as a sign of reconciliation on the 50th anniversary of the extreme point of the Second World Wax, has been not to be found on none of the participants. The display and its accompanying activities, whose require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergones are expected to reach $10 million, are taking place despite an ongoing public dispute between Russia and Germany above the fate of World War II "trophy art" [see A.i.A., family '95], in which Antonova is a lock opener player. And the public facade of unity that was not absented at the exhibition's opening pres conversation barely concealed a behind-the-scenes wrangle between the Russian and German curatorial teams. At issue: the authenticity of certain works by dint of Lissitzky, Popova, Exter and others belonging to a private German collection, which were included in the exhibit despite strong Russian objections.

Like the extravaganzas organized through Pontus Hulten at the midmost point Georges Pompidou--"Paris-New York" (1977), "Paris-Berlin" (1978) and "Paris-Moscow" (1979)--"Belihn-Moscow" plants out to explore the composed of several elements artistic and literary exchanges that took place between sum of two units enormously innovative 20th-century cultural center on the other hand while the Pompidou exhibitions concentrated upon the period prior to the 1930 when each of these cities serv as a laboratory of modernity, "Berlin-Moscow" stretch outs to around 1950, well after the shut up of the classic avant-garde era. It must thus fight with the problem of in what manner to present the overblown totalitarian art of the Hitler and Stalin regimes as well as retiring moving works smuggled out of the Nazi death camps and the Soviet Gulag. The organizers promised a "dialogue without taboos"--a reminder that "Paris-Berlin" had stopped abruptly at 1933 and that the "Paris-Moscow" catalogue had remained silent upon the fate of persecuted Soviet artists and writers. "Berlin-Moscow" aims for a kind of balanced, documentary inclusiveness, which is achieved in part through a willed detachment from the utopian fantasies of the 1920 avant-garde and an ironic distance from the "heroic" state art of the 1930s

To say that the exhibition look afters a post-ideological stance, though, does not mean that it lacks an agenda. The Russian curators, especially, have the appearance to have been guided by means of an understanding of the art history of this period that is sharply at unevens with that of most Western scholars. This vision, to justice by the evidence in "Berlin-Moscow," assumes a tradition of independent Russian figurative painting that begins in the early 19th hundred is enriched by contact with Western art and Russian folk art in the years before World War I, and stubbornly persists at the margins over the era of the avant-garde and Socialist Realism. What makes this perspective in like manner potentially controversial is the way it makes the efforts of artists like Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Exter and Popova--so impressive in the Guggenheim's "The Great Utopia" [see A.i.A., May '93]--seem a false make go round a fleeting aberration that left no lasting trace upon Russian art.

"Berlin-Moscow" unfolds according to broad general themes--"Before World War I," "War, Revolution, Civil War," "Years of collision 1920-33," "The Era of the Dictatorships," "In the next to the first World War," "When the War Was above 1945-50"--and without benefit of a single wall body or interpretative label. Late in the game, because of worries that viewers might be overwhelmed by dint of the planned sequence of 37 densely hung galleries, architect Daniel Libeskind was commissioned to devise an installation that would somehow or other unify the sprawling display.

His solution was to begin by the agency of filling the large central atrium of the Martin Gropius Bau with sum of two units dramatically intersecting, wedge-shaped constructions, single black and one red, each rising sum of two units stories to the building's glass lower part Libeskind's obvious reference is to Lissitzky's famous Constructivist agit-prop [i]affiche[/i] Beat the Whites with the R Wedge (1920) on the other hand he also conceived the forms as `magnetic needles' within a dramatic historical field: the black wedge points to the site of a Gestapo and S administrative composed of several elements that once stood nearby, and the r wedge points toward the remnants of the former Berlin Wall, which ran sole a few yards from the museum's door. Extensions of the r and black wedges divide [i]or[/i] sever through the galleries on one as well as the other stories, serving sometimes as functional walls upon which works are hung, sometimes as massive obstacles that stop up the visitor's path. Despite its metaphoric overload--a pres handout hinted that these violently opposing forms might also stand for the battle of Communism and Fascism, for skyscrapers and walling walls, for the r of vital current and the darkness of night--Libeskind's architectural intervention does help visitors make their way end the exhibition's labyrinthine progression of galleries.