Among the interesting exhibitions currently on, I would visit "Avant-Garde

Among the interesting exhibitions currently on, I would visit "Avant-Garde. By Cart into the 21st Century" in Yekaterinburg. It is a joint project of the Yeltsin Centre and the "Encyclopaedia of the Russian Avant-Garde", devoted to displays of contemporary art in the provincial towns of Russia. This is precisely a case where museums such as the Vyatka Art Museum, the Yaransk Local History Museum and the Slobodskoy Local History Museum astonish us with their holdings. The story is a simple and old one, and you have surely heard it already. In the early years of Soviet power, the canvases of the avant-gardists were bought up en masse for the enlightenment of the people, thousands of paintings were dispatched to small museums across the country, and exhibitions were mounted. In the town of Sovetsk they even organised a travelling exhibition of 320 paintings by some fifty of the greatest names in the art of that time. The exhibition was to be carried round seven towns of the province, quite literally on carts: Sovetsk, Yaransk, Tsarevosanchursk, Malmyzh, Urzhum, Nolinsk, Vyatka. But in the town of Yaransk, by a concurrence of circumstances (or by decree of the impassable roads), the treasures of the avant-garde stuck fast for many long years. Part of these works will now be shown at the Yeltsin Centre in re-created conditions of the exhibitions of those years, some of them for the first time in a hundred years.