Friends of Te Papa and Te Papa Foundation, in conjunction with Arts Society Wellington, are delighted to offer you this very special opportunity to here from renowned Courtauld Institute of Art lecturer and BBC contributor Dr Natalia Murray.
In this talk we will take 1910 as a starting point – the year when the term avant-garde was used for the first time in Russia and when art freed itself from the need to represent reality or observe academic convention. And for this liberation of Russian art, artistic developments in Paris were crucial. Many Russian avant-garde artists, including Mark Chagall, Petr Konchalovsky, Aristarkh Lentulov and David Shterenberg had lived and studied in Paris. For Marc Chagall, Paris was his chosen city, and thanks to the avant-garde movements of the 1910s, it provided the young painter with a pool of experimental work, which he enriched with his own cultural references. He lived and worked in Paris most of his long and eventful life – here he accomplished such important commissions as the ceiling of the Paris Opera theatre.
Ticket includes a glass of wine.
Dr. Natalia Murray was born in St Petersburg where she gained BA and MA in the History of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts before taking the PhD course at the Hermitage Museum. In 2015 she has been awarded PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. At present she works as an independent curator and an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she teaches her MA course on the role of the exhibitions and private collections in Europe in 1863-1930. In 2017 she curated a major exhibition Revolution. Russian Art. 1917-1932 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She is currently working on several exhibition projects in London, Paris and US. Her latest exhibition The World as Non-Objective. The Birth of a New Art, which traces the development of the new abstract art from Chagall to Malevich, opened with high acclaim at the Jewish museum in Moscow in November 2022. Her books and articles extend across the wide field of 19-20 century European art, and she has featured in films and art programmes on BBC 4, BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. Natalia is also trustee of the Avant-Garde Art Research Project – a UK-based charity which shares one of her aspirations to reduce the number of fakes on the art market.
Image credit: Artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985); Birthday.