Apollon's Exhibit
The above collage depicts a number of works on exhibit at the Yusupov Palace in 1912
Under the aegis of “Apollon” and the Institut français de St. Petersbourg, an exposition of French art entitled “100 years of French Art: 1812-1912” took place in Petersburg from January 17th to March 18th of 1912. Count F.F. Sumarokov-El’ston (Yusupov), who died in Paris in 1967, hosted the exhibit at his Palace on Liteiny, 42. It drew a crowd of over 34,000 admirers of la peinture française. With 979 works on display, it was the largest showing of French art outside of France at that time. Most works were culled from public museums of France and from private Parisian collectors, although a number of Russian purveyors of the Beaux-arts also contributed to the exhibit, including Nicolas II, who provided pieces from the Winter Palace and Tsarskoe Selo.
“100 Years of French Art” took place in the wake of many turn-of-the-century expositions universelles and art exhibits throughout Europe, among which the 1906 Salon d’automne featuring Russian works in Paris adumbrates its three-month successor in Petersburg. Sergei Diaghilev – known for his work with Petersburg’s Mir Iskusstva and whose Ballets russes were soon to grace the stages of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris – organized the Salon d’automne. Those who visited the salon had the opportunity to view the paintings of around one hundred Russian artists, including such luminaries as L. Bakst, A. Benois, S. V. Serov, M. Vrubel’ and L. Pasternak. The following gallery inclues to portraits by Bakst (Bely and Diagelev) as well as two other works on display at the exhibit: “Two Women” by Paul Gauguin and “The Abduction of Psyche” by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
Open the gallery to view a portrait of A. Bely, 1905 and portrait of S. Diagelev, 1906. Both of these works by Leon Bakst (1866-1924) were featured at the Salon d’automne in 1906.
The Paris-based Gazette des Beaux-Arts called the exhibit “an ephemeral French museum improvised for a few weeks in the snows of the Russian winter” (“un éphémère musée français improvisé pour quelques semaines dans les neiges de l’hiver russe”).
