A remarkable event happened in Tashkent. Twenty or thirty years ago neither experts, nor amateurs of art could even dream about it. On the 12th of September the Fine Arts Gallery of Uzbekistan (FAGU) opened an exhibition of Max Ernst, one of the most prominent 20th century artists and a brilliant representative of Dadaism and surrealism. William S. Rubin, Chief Curator of the New York Museum of Modern Art, was the first one who remarked so well on the significance of Max Ernst’s art for the global artistic process: “‘In the extraordinary variety of his styles and techniques, Max Ernst is to Dada and Surrealism what Picasso is to 20th-century art as a whole”.
The exhibition titled “Max Ernst. Books and Graphics” was highly professionally prepared by the Institute for International Relations (Stuttgart, Germany) and organized by Goethe Institute in Tashkent and the FAGU. The exhibited 196 graphic works and 26 books give an idea about the most important stages of Max Ernst’s art. Among them are the early books of Dadaism, collage novels of the epoch of surrealism, and individual sheets belonging to a later period, which are marked with cubistic and geometrical elements.
A well-devised agenda of the exhibition included presentations made by Dr. Ludger Derenthal “Max Ernst, Dadaism and Surrealism”, “Technique in Max Ernst’s Graphics”, and “Non-European Cultures as Understood by Max Ernst”. There was also a program of films: “Max Ernst. My Wanderings, My Discontent” (Director Peter Schamoni, Germany, 1991) – a documentary produced to mark a hundredth anniversary of the artist; a famous surrealistic 17 minutes long film “Le chien andalou” by Luis Bunuel (screenplay by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, Spain, 1928), and a film made by Dada artist and film critic Hans Richter – “The Dreams You Can Buy” (USA, 1947) that consists of surrealistic episodes presented by Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder.
The exhibition remained open to the public until the 12th of October.