Зритель и «Восточный джаз»

Abstract

The article is based on the author’s impressions of the East West Jazz exhibition in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in the fall of 2019. The exhibition was quite notable, and especially attractive due to the fashionable way of exhibiting the works of art, deliberately erasing the established boundaries between genres, styles and trends. The originality of the exposition was manifested in a paradoxical comparison of two artistic traditions, standing far from each other in all respects — chronologically, territorially, ethnically, religiously, and culturally. But the main and interesting feature was the opposition of two types of arts — decorative and applied art pieces and easel painting. The first are the artifacts of folk art of Central Asia of the 19th — early 20th centuries in the form of magnificent examples of oriental silk-weaved traditional robes (from the private collection of Alexander Klyachin); the second — a number of paintings and drawings by European abstract artists of the mid-20th century (from the collections of the Jean Claude Gandur Foundation in Geneva, the Pompidou Center and the Applicat-Prazan Gallery in Paris). The samples selected on both sides, located in the exposition side by side in “pairs”, clearly demonstrated ornamental and coloristic analogies in dressing gowns and abstract paintings. However, the idea of the organizers of the exhibition (according to the catalog) was not simply to compare them, but to show different types of abstraction, equally expressing the “idea of freedom”, which in the West is often symbolized by jazz music. The author of the article develops this idea, believing that the underlying cause of these similarities is the use of the main (“jazz”) principle — improvisation within the canon, originally inherent in any sphere of both ancient, and modern “oral” pieces, not only musical, but also visual.