masters of modern art from the hermitage, art gallery nsw

They came all the way from St Petersburg, Russia. Art Gallery NSW informed me months ago about it. So, I knew they were coming. I knew how they were going to stay. What did I do? Waited till the last day of the exhibition to go and see it. Again! Missed my chance of getting the exhibition catalogue because they ran out. Again!

Art Gellery of NSW (above)

The Hermitage Museum (The State Hermitage Museum, to be precise) is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky.

Masters of modern art from the Hermitage exhibition at Art Gallery featured quite a few notable artists such as Monet, Kandinsky, Matisse, Gauguin, Pissarro and Cézanne. It was a completely different set of paintings we didn’t see anywhere else.

My favourite one was Sketch for ‘Composition V’ by Wassily Kandinsky (below).

Kandinsky exploited colours as ‘visual music’, liberating it from its descriptive or imitative role and treating it as an autonomous compositional element. His shift away from landscape painting towards abstraction was paralleled by a change in the character of his titles, which became impersonal and non-specific, derived from musical terminology. In 1910 he created the first of his Compositions, which he regarded as the culmination of his artistic vision, describing them as consciously created expressions of a ‘slowly formed inner feeling, tested and worked over repeatedly and almost pedantically’. The disassociation of line and colour in this painting makes figuration almost illegible, despite the picture’s genesis in earlier studies exploring the apocalyptic theme of the Last Judgement.

Here’s the other Kandinsky paintings that were part of the Hermitage exhibition:

Here’s a gallery for the Pablo Picasso paintings:

Here’s a gallery for the Paul Cezanne paintings:

The photo gallery below contains paintings of the following artists: Giorgio Murnadi, Alfred Sisley, Amadee Ozenfant, Camille Pissaro, Henri Rousseau, Chaim Soutine, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Edouard Vuillard, Eugene Carriere, Francis Bacon and Gauguin. Some of the paintings have their names within the gallery and if you want to know those names please go to my travel blog.

After not being able to buy the exhibition catalogue, we headed off to Bodhi to have vegan yum cha. We were lucky as they had a table outside for us even though we didn’t have a booking. And, as usual, the yum cha was delicious. Here’s what we had: