"The Avant-garde Museum" - curator's tour in English with Agnieszka Pindera

The exhibition The Avant-garde Museum is the first project in the world whose aim is to trace the story behind four extraordinary initiatives: the Russian network of Museums of Artistic Culture, the Hanoverian Kabinett der Abstrakten, the Société Anonyme, Inc. founded in New York, and the International Collection of Modern Art of the “a.r.” group from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Behind each of these initiatives were artists united in the rejection of the traditional concept of the museum, namely, it being “a temple” where one is supposed to cultivate the past. Acting independently, they tried to develop a new formula, thanks to which the museum was now to become “a laboratory” where new art and new ways of communing with art would be created.

The exhibition consists of two types of spaces. The first, presenting valuable archival materials, allows us to become acquainted with the assumptions of particular avant-garde initiatives, as well as with their history. The second type of space is used to display the works of artists connected with these initiatives. Among them there are works by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine S. Dreier, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso and Alexander Rodchenko, to name just a few. They were borrowed for the Łódź exhibition from such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the State Museum of Modern Art in Thessaloniki, the National Gallery in Yerevan and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. The choice of works presented and their arrangement were inspired by historical exhibitions, including the first permanent exhibition of the collection of the “a.r.” group at the City Museum of History and Art in Łódź and the International Exhibition of Modern Art organized by Société Anonyme, Inc. at the Brooklyn Museum (1926). The exhibition also includes a reconstruction of the famous Kabinett der Abstrakten, which was designed by El Lissitzky in 1927 for the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover.