Time.news – The Royal Palace of Milan celebrates May Day by remembering female work and the condition of women. The ‘Divine e Avanguardie’ exhibition (reservations required only for Saturdays, Sundays and holidays) is an overview over the centuries on the condition of women in Russia.
The exhibition, in which approx 90 masterpieces from the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, largely never exhibited before in Italy, “certainly restores – explain the curators – an idea of Russian art of the 14th-20th centuries but also the fundamental role of women in this country”.
The world of female work is also widely represented with iconic works such as the Operaia in Malevich or the textile workers of Deineka, or the Futurist Factory of Goncharova. Women were also protagonists of the revolution with the great strike that the workers of the Filo Rosso factory put in place.
May Day is an important holiday in Russia, which lasts several days and is known by various names: International Workers’ Solidarity Day, Spring and Labor Day, Labor Day. In Soviet times, most Russians called this day simply a May Day holiday.
© The State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
Textile workers by Aleksandr Deyneka
At the time of the USSR it was one of the most important celebrations, but even after having lost its ideological content, it remains an excellent important occasion of celebration with various holidays.
Several sections of the exhibition: The sky. The Virgin and the saints ?, with ancient and precious icons of the Mother of Christ, protector
of Russia and venerated throughout the country, and of some saints. “The Throne. Zarine of all the Russias” with six of the fourteen empresses who reigned from the end of the seventeenth
century to 1917 and again, “The land. The horizon of the peasants” and then “Towards independence. Women and society” This section features the wives and children of artists, together with the faces of women who are important to the history of the country, such as the poet Anna Achmatova and Nadežda Dobičina, first Russian gallery owner, later head of the Soviet art section at the Museum
Russo.
© The State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
Girls in Kazimir Malevich’s camp
“The family – Rituals and conventions”. In this section there are some works of denunciation. “Mothers – The dimension of love”, “The body – Unveiled femininity” with the theme of the female nude, “The artists – Realism and amazons of the avant-garde” on the struggle for emancipation and women’s rights.
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