June 6 at 16.00 in the exhibition hall of the Voronezh Regional Art Museum. I.N. Kramskoy within the framework of the VIII International Platonic Festival of Arts will be the grand opening of the exhibition “Fernand Leger. Poetics of our time. ”

The exposition of the exhibition “Fernand Leger. The poetics of modernity “will include more than 50 works of the artist from the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin – a constant partner of the Platonov Festival.

The audience will have a unique opportunity to see the works of the French modernist, who have not left the museum for a long time – painting, graphics and decorative and applied arts.

Fernand Leger (1881-1955) – one of the great artists of the XX century, who along with Picasso and Braque stood at the origins of cubism. Like many of his contemporaries, he worked in several types of fine arts. He showed himself equally vividly in painting and graphics, he was interested in sculpture, ceramics, stained glass and trellis. The Pushkin Museum will show these different facets of the artist’s talent at the exhibition in Voronezh.

The core of the exposition is the picturesque works of Leger of the late 1940s – early 1950s. During this period, the picturesque manner of Leger is simplified as much as possible, acquires almost a posterior clarity and confidence. The canvas “Reading” (1949) is characterized by strong expressive lines, free arrangement of color planes. The heroine of the work “Woman with a bird on a red background” (1952) seemed to have disappeared from the poster of the post-war years, calling for a struggle for peace. In these portraits, the recognizable features of Nadezhda Petrovna Khodasevich-Leger (1904-1982), wife, pupil and faithful assistant to the artist appear, but at the same time they are generalized female images. A special place in the exposition is occupied by the chamber painting City with Birds (1953): the work of the brush is softer, the created image is more romantic. On the back there is the inscription “Amigo”: the artist presented his work to the memory of a friend – the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, a witness and participant of many events in the Paris art life of the 1910s-1950s.

The painter Fernand Leger worked in printed graphics, although it constitutes a small part of his vast heritage. The favorite technique of the master was lithography, mostly colored; but the artist tried his hand at woodcuts, in engraving with a dry needle and in aquatint.

In different years, Fernand Leger created carpet designs and tapestries. He sought to change the art and make his work accessible to all. Therefore, like Picasso, he worked with ceramics. At the exhibition you will see several samples of earthenware plates created in the 1960s at the ceramic plant in Salin-les-Bains in Franche-Comté.

Continuing the idea of ​​the artist about the accessibility of art, the exhibition will be complemented by two tactile models for blind and visually impaired people based on decorative reliefs. Color, an integral element of Leger’s art, will be displayed in tactile layouts, taking into account the needs of people with visual perception.

The State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin is a museum complex possessing one of the largest art collections of foreign art in Russia, storing artifacts created by masters of different epochs – from Ancient Egypt and ancient Greece to the present day. Today, the museum’s collections have about 700,000 works. The pearl of the collection is one of the most famous in the world collections of works of French impressionists and post-impressionists.

Curator of the exhibition: Varvara Zamahaeva.

The cost of the full entrance ticket is 150 rubles.
Preferential (for students, schoolchildren, pensioners) – 110 rubles.

The exhibition will last until July 29, 2018.