The Decades Project: 1910-1919

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

The Decades Project: 1910-1919 is the second in a planned series of installations organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra designed to bring together visual art and music to reveal how artists and musicians expressed dynamism, tension and instability of their times.

This spring visitors will have the opportunity to view The Bridge (1914) by Russian painter Natalia Goncharova while listening to Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913) by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. These artists pioneered new approaches to landscape painting and musical composition, radically transforming Russian folk traditions with highly fragmented structures.  These works were made in the second decade of the 1900s, a period when Europe and especially Russia experienced catastrophe, upheaval and change: think of the devastating effects of chemical warfare during World War I, the political shifts brought about by the Bolshevik Revolution, and Russia's connectedness to the rest of the world as a result of the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In addition to this multisensory gallery experience, join us in Walker Court on June 12 for a related performance of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat (The Soldier's Tale) (1918) by The TSO Chamber Soloists. On June 10, Kenneth Brummel, the AGO's Assistant Curator of Modern Art, is slated to participate in an intermission chat with the TSO's Tom Allen on art and music in the 1910s.

We also invite you to attend the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's performances of Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) at Roy Thomson Hall on June 9, 10 and 11.

This exhibition is included with general admission.