Divine Avant-Garde. The History of Russian Women in the Masterpieces of the Hermitage

One-hundred masterpieces are coming to Milan from the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg to tell the story of Russian women from the 1500s to today. Through religious icons and sculptures, avant-garde paintings and precious antique porcelain, an all-woman story will be revealed to the public of the Palazzo Reale, offering a look at the faces of tsarinas and Madonnas, peasants and artists. Among the most highly-awaited, Russia’s most-celebrated painters - Vasilij Kandinskij, Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevič. However, all of the exhibition deserves to be explored. Its first expansive section is dedicated to women as subjects of art and inspiring muses. Looking at artistic production as a mirror of the Country’s history, we come into contact with refined intellectuals and powerful women such as Catherine the Great, without whom the Hermitage wouldn’t exist, and retrace crucial passages such as the admittance of women to schools at the end of the 1800s. The October Revolution represented the dawn of a new age for Russian women and in the effervescent climate of its start, a hardened generation of artists grabbed canvases and brushes to finally express their point of view to the world. Discover the “amazons of the avant-garde” during the second half of the exhibition at the Palazzo Reale, which goes from Neo-Primitivism to Rayonism, from Suprematism to Constructivism, as well as Cubo-Futurism with the dynamic and vivacious colours of artists like Natal'ja Gončarova, Ljubov' Popova, Ol'ga Rozanova.