In February 2017, to commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the Royal Academy of Arts will present Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932. This landmark exhibition will focus on a momentous period in Russian history between 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and 1932 when Stalin began his violent suppression of the Avant-Garde.

The exhibition will comprise paintings with photography, sculpture, film, posters and porcelain by Avant-Garde artists, such as Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich and Tatlin alongside the Socialist Realism of Brodsky, Deineka, Mukhina and Samokhvalov, amongst others. It will present this unique period in the history of Russian art, when for fifteen years, barriers were opened and the possibilities for building a new proletarian art for the new Soviet State were extensive. With over 200 works, the exhibition will include loans from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow as well as some of the most significant international private collections. Many of the works have never been seen in the UK before.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917 – 1932

Main Galleries

11 February – 17 April 2017

Also opening in February is America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s.

Following the devastating impact of the Great Depression, brought about by the Wall Street Crash, America entered the 1930s in flux; not even art was immune to the major challenges facing the nation. During this period, artists sought to capture those changes as mass urbanisation, industrialisation and immigration propelled the country towards becoming, in the words of James Truslow Adams, ‘the land of opportunity’. From the depictions of the farmland of the mid-West to representations of life in the city, the exhibition will showcase 45 iconic works from the period, drawn from collections across the USA, many of which have rarely been seen together. Works by Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe and Philip Guston will feature alongside Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic, 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago), which will be exhibited outside North America for the very first time.

The exhibition has been organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Établissement public du musée d'Orsay et du musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.

America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s

The Sackler Wing of Galleries

25 February – 4 June 2017