Installation of the exhibition “Muses of Montparnasse” at the Pushkin Museum, June 21, 2021, in Moscow © Pushkin Museum.
“Muses of Montparnasse” is a Pushkin Museum project inviting Sylvie Buisson to lead, as co-curator alongside Alexey Pethukov, Chief Curator of Modern Paintings at the Pushkin Museum, a major summer exhibition devoted to the totem women of the 20th-century avant-gardes.
A total of 221 works from French and Russian public and private collections have been brought together—assembled for France by Sylvie Buisson, former curator of the Montparnasse Museum and author of “Femmes artistes”, Gallimard-Alternatives, Paris 2012, assisted by Irina Lebelle; and for Russia by Alexey Pethukov, curator of the Pushkin Museum’s Modern Art Department, and its director Marina Loshak.
The sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs by 50 artists evoke the glory days of the world’s most welcoming and cosmopolitan artists’ district in Paris: Montparnasse in the early 20th century.
Men and women settled there from every corner of the globe to learn their craft in the footsteps of Rodin, Manet and the great masters of the Louvre, meeting on café terraces, at dances and in their studios to discuss their dreams and ambitions, and to help one another escape the poverty that threatened them. Living together, known and unknown alike, they were the protagonists of the great adventure of the 20th-century avant-gardes.
At the heart of all this ferment, women played a decisive role. Muses by nature, in addition to their work as artists, they displayed the charm and intelligence that characterised them in the circles of Rodin, Bourdelle, Picasso, Modigliani, Foujita, Kisling, Kees Van Dongen, Man Ray, André Breton, among other artists…
They include Camille Claudel, Chana Orloff, Marie Vassilieff, Jeanne Hébuterne, Marie Vorobieff-Marevna, Kiki de Montparnasse, Mela Muter, Jacqueline Marval, Marie Laurencin, Youki, Dora Maar, Maria Elena Vieira, Sonia Delaunay, Tamara de Lempicka, María Blanchard, Romaine Brooks, Viera da Silva, Valentine Gross-Hugo, Claude Cahun, Leonora
Carrington… surrounded by Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Moïse Kisling, Kees van Dongen, Foujita, Man Ray…
Few were those whose lives were not tragic, tested by encounters so intense, so passionate and so perilous that most struggled greatly to overcome the obstacles of a society hemmed in by the bourgeois conventions of the 19th century. Their self-portraits are so many expressions and assertions of their existence as artists.
Muses and artists, muses or artists—muses, artists—historians and art critics recognised them. Their male partners benefited from it.
Visitors to this exhibition will be astonished by the grandeur of these visionary women’s works—and by their power of attraction.
Catalogue © Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
We are delighted that the poster and the catalogue pay a strong tribute to a French artist who is relatively little known to the general public, yet appreciated for her avant-garde spirit and pictorial ardour even in her own time and by discerning collectors—a combative woman, with exemplary modernity and career: Jacqueline Marval. Arriving in 1895 from her native Chartreuse to Montparnasse, 9 rue Campagne-Première, her talent and boundless audacity earned her the friendship and respect of the greatest—Matisse, Van Dongen, Marquet, Picasso, Manguin and Camoin, among others.
The exhibition will open to the public on July 13.
1926 Kiki de Montparnasse – Circus Scene © Jacques Boutersky, Paris 2021
In addition to Sylvie Buisson, curator, Ariane Tamir and Éric Justman contributed to this project for Chana Orloff’s work, Jacques Boutersky for Kiki de Montparnasse, and Raphaël Roux, known as Buisson, for Jacqueline Marval’s work.
Foujita 1927 “Youki in Fur” Hand-coloured heliogravure © A.A., Paris 2021
We all hope that Russia will quickly emerge from the red zone that cuts it off from the world, and that we will be able to visit this fine exhibition properly before it closes on October 3.