World Culture: Travelling exhibition “Pioneers of Modern Art: Hermitage Masterpieces from Monet to Malevich” from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum to open in Australia

In October 2018 a new exhibition “Pioneers of Modern Art: Hermitage Masterpieces from Monet to Malevich” is opening in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It will present 65 works created between the 1890s and the 1920s.

The display devoted to the emergence of Modernism as a phenomenon in cultural history will include paintings by great artists associated with France, such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Kees van Dongen and Maurice de Vlaminck, and their celebrated Russian contemporaries Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. The exhibition stresses the enduring significance of artists who brought about a revolution in painting at the beginning of the last century. The main section will be devoted to what became a continuation of the movement initiated by the Impressionists, but the few works by Manet, Sisley and Pissarro will serve as a prologue to the discussion about art in the 20th century.

The only painting in the Hermitage collection by the Australian artist George Washington Lambert, Mask, is also going to Australia. The artist, who was born in St Petersburg into the family of an American engineer, obtained his training at art schools in Sydney, Paris and London and became one of the first Australian artists to achieve recognition in Europe. The painting will take its place in the gallery of Australian art among other works by the painter, which include a sketch for the Hermitage canvas.