Long ago, I had a conversation with artists of the Moscow “realist” school – and they were convinced that painting, globally speaking, was thriving, while sculpture had been in deep decline since the early 20th century. Why do I mention this? Because, let’s face it, we know the sculptural avant-garde poorly. We remember Sergei Konenkov, Vera Mukhina, and, if we are to talk about the postwar period, Vadim Sidur – and, off the top of my head, that is about it.

All the more valuable, then, is the exhibition of Beatrice Sandomirskaya, which opened yesterday at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.



Sandomirskaya’s work is not part of standard art history curricula, and I must admit I am hearing her name almost for the first time. She was a master of avant-garde sculpture, a student of Sergei Konenkov and Kazimir Malevich, with a strong interest in African sculpture and Cubism. Very few people know her, despite the fact that her works are held in major museum collections – from which this exhibition has been assembled. The art historian and academic consultant of the exhibition, Igor Smekalov of the Tretyakov Gallery, has studied Sandomirskaya’s work his entire life and speaks about it with contagious enthusiasm. As he puts it: “…she possessed an animal sense of form… a monster of plastique”.



It is remarkable how many talented people managed to sidestep the “Communist party line” in art. The heroine of this exhibition is a vivid example. Not only was she friends with the wife of Lev Kamenev – who was Leon Trotsky’s sister – and organized exhibitions together with her; although this did not come without consequences, she was, at least, not executed. She spent her entire life making the kind of art she believed in – and lived a long life, well into the 1970s.



There is one counter-relief in the exhibition that might recall Vladimir Tatlin. But what was Tatlin doing in the 1940s – as one could see in the recent exhibition at the Zotov Center? He was painting still lifes – knives, forks, cuts of meat, flowers… Beautiful in their own way, but no longer quite himself. Sandomirskaya, by contrast, remained true to herself throughout her life; she was among those who carried the avant-garde forward to the artists of the Thaw generation. That later continuity, however, is not addressed in the exhibition, which instead focuses on the consistency and evolution of her own artistic language across different periods and themes.



In short, this relatively small exhibition feels like a restrained yet quite a rich version of a “total installation” devoted to Cubism; it is, above all, the discovery of a new figure.

The sense of an installation is reinforced by the exhibition design by Studio CHART – Sergei Tchoban and Alexandra Sheiner.

Sergei Tchoban

We aim to create for the visitor a sense of a kind of “embrace” – through the proportional relationship between the large-scale sculpture and the volume of the halls. These forms begin to interact, and the viewer gradually reads their logic. The space is structured as a sequence of landmarks – from one “guiding star” to another – along axes that I consider fundamental to architectural thinking: they focus perception. It is no coincidence that I learned a great deal from St. Petersburg, with its clear axial structure. The color scheme, meanwhile, is extremely restrained: dark ceilings and a neutral background allow the sculpture to come to the forefront, as if emerging from the space.