Конструируя историю искусства: современные кураторские стратегии в исследовании символизма стран Балтии

ENThis article is devoted to the analysis of curatorial strategies used in the framework of the international exhibition project "Wild Souls. Symbolism in the Baltic States", which was successfully implemented under the leadership of Rodolphe Rapetti in 2018–2021 at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius and the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. The identification of the originality of the curatorial narrative contributes to the identification of current research directions in the study of the visual culture of the Baltic States of the 19th and 20th centuries. It also contributes to the formation and wide application of methodological approaches that have not previously been applied to the art of these countries. In order to understand the novelty of the chosen strategies, the author analyzes the historiography of the art of the Baltic States in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s. A turning point in the history of the study of culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is the third conference of art historians of the Baltic republics in 1990, at which Boris Bernstein called for taking a meta-position and using metalanguage in the construction of an "internal" description of national culture.In the opinion of the author of this article, such a meta-position, capable of summarizing the accumulated knowledge and offering a new view on the development of visual culture, is the exhibition "Wild Souls. Symbolism in the Baltic States". Using universal approaches to the study of symbolism, Rodolphe Rapetti, together with colleagues from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, demonstrates the transregional commonality of artistic phenomena that took place in these countries, and also convincingly proves the involvement of masters from the Baltic countries in the pan-European artistic process at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Keywords: symbolism, art nouveau, curatorship, art of Latvia, art of Estonia, art of Lithuania, Baltic countries, Boris Bernstein, Rodolphe Rapetti, "Wild Souls".