Recreation of the gmnzi: caution, danger! State Museum of New Western Art Pushkin Museum of Western Art.

The mansion of Ivan Morozov in Moscow. Hall with panels by Maurice Denis. Photo

On May 21, 2013, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation hosted an extended meeting of the expert council under the Ministry of Culture, the working group on museum activities of the Public Council under the Ministry of Culture and the presidium of the Union of Museums of Russia. The Museum Areopagus met to discuss the issue of re-establishing the State Museum of New Western Art, liquidated in 1948 (the collection of the State Museum of Historical Art was divided between the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts and the State Hermitage). The question, we recall, was posed directly to President Vladimir Putin by Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin. Passions around the re-creation of GMNZI after Antonova’s appeal to the president boiled over with renewed vigor, although this idea is already quite many years old. The director of the Pushkin Museum at her press conference spoke enthusiastically about the restoration of historical justice. The director of the Hermitage, in turn, defended the inviolability and indivisibility of the museum collections. Museum experts honed their arguments in the press. And finally everyone gathered to carry out the president’s order to “consider the issue.” Looking ahead, we note that during the meeting nothing significant happened on the museum front: no one came up with new arguments for or against, and most experts repeated what was already obvious to the entire museum community. But nevertheless, these arguments were once again “voiced”, and to the whole country: they were spoken under the guns of television cameras, there was a live broadcast on the Rossiya 24 TV channel. And what did they say?

The action consisted of two parts with an epilogue. First, Irina Antonova was bombarded with questions in a blitz mode, followed by speeches from experts, and in the epilogue, the host of the meeting, Deputy Minister of Culture Alla Manilova, quoted the documents received “on the case” and summed up the results. “Artguide” prepared something like a summary of the speeches of the meeting participants.

Director of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin Irina Antonova answers questions from experts. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Part one. Questions and answers

Alexey Lebedev, head of the museum design laboratory of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies: We are talking about transferring part of the Hermitage collection to a new museum, which is planned to be created in the city of Moscow. My question comes down to the legal aspect. In 1996, largely through the efforts of the museum community, the 54th Federal Law was adopted (“On the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation and Museums in the Russian Federation.” - “Artguide”), Article 15 of which directly states: “The museum collection is indivisible.” . Question: how does Irina Aleksandrovna consider it necessary to overcome the obvious contradiction between her proposal and the current legislation?

Irina Antonova: The law that is quoted is the law of the indivisibility of collections. I propose that the collection, divided into two parts, be combined again.

Elena Gagarina, director of the Moscow Kremlin Museums: Is the Pushkin Museum ready to part with its part of the [Shchukin and Morozov] collection for the sake of creating a new museum?

Irina Antonova: We talked about this from the very beginning. We are ready to provide our part of the collection that ended up in our museum after the partition. We are ready because we understand what unification into one museum will bring to the city, and not only to the city, but also to the Russian museum business.

Larisa Zelkova, General Director of the V. Potanin Charitable Foundation: Most colleagues assess the decision to create this museum as an absolutely voluntaristic, political decision. Stalin received him, and he disbanded this museum. Why should we today recreate an institution that was the fruit of arbitrariness?

Irina Antonova: So that there is no further arbitrariness! This seems obvious to me. The works were moved during the revolution and nationalization, but this was a revolution. However, some decisions concerned not only the ruin of museums, but also their enrichment. This was the case with our museum. It was a museum of casts, but it was decided to make it a museum of world art history, including painting. And we received not only from the Hermitage, but also from the Tretyakov Gallery, from the Historical Museum about forty collections. The period from 1924 to 1930 was a period of redistribution, and it was a process of redistribution to enrich the museums of Russia. By the way, this process is still taking place in Western Europe. The Louvre gives part of its collections to the city of Metz, London museums move their collections to other, less rich museums in the UK. And if we look at the museum business broadly, then this process should not be put to a categorical end. Why not? We have many museums in which sometimes, I don’t know, for centuries there are valuables that no one has ever seen, they are not available to anyone. But moving them to museums where they will be accessible... I’ll say right away: it depends on the buildings and conditions in the cities where artistic treasures can be transferred. And there is no crime in this.

Cezanne Hall in the house of Ivan Morozov. Circa 1923. Photograph

Natalia Karovskaya, director of the Rostov Kremlin Museum-Reserve: Aren't you afraid of the domino principle? We fear that the precedent that may now occur will allow other museums to request a return.

Irina Antonova: Your question is very important, and it is heard in many speeches. The most important thing: there is no precedent! I want this to be clear! We are talking about one resolution in which the museum is destroyed for u-beh-de-ni-ya! This is a purely ideological problem! This is not a problem of redistribution of artistic values! This is completely different! If a decision is made to rebuild the museum, there is no danger. No precedent! Therefore, there are no fears that someone will say that this should also be transferred there... They simply do not exist. You cannot show me another such museum that was liquidated like this. (Voices from the audience: “Museum of the Defense of Leningrad!”). But what are the reasons? We need to look at the wording. (Voices from the audience: “Exactly the same!”). Well then we need to consider it, I don’t know...

Alexander Sholokhov, director of the M.A. Museum-Reserve Sholokhov: A question was asked about Law 54. Any decision or resolution must somehow be consistent with current legislation. For ideological, political, or whatever reasons, we will now be forced to circumvent the current legislation. How are we going to do this?

Irina Antonova: Law 54 deals with indivisibility, not unification. These are still different things. Second: I believe that this law... Well, I cannot completely agree with it! Because transfers from museum to museum exist all the time.

Alexander Sholokhov: That is, it is more correct to say that Law 54 is imperfect?

Irina Antonova: I think so, of course.

Elizaveta Fokina, director of the Association of Cultural Managers: Which team can implement this project, what are its stages and deadlines and, finally, financial resources?

Irina Antonova: When we were thinking about this museum project, we had in mind that this is a joint project of the State Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. We meant the reconstruction of the museum, the rehabilitation of the museum - the museum of the repressed. This was the task. We were going to do this together, sort of. And questions about who will be the director there or some other such matters come later, it’s not so important. The most important thing is the reconstruction of the museum itself. Joint.

Part two. Expert presentations

When reading this summary, it is easy to notice that both in the questions asked to Irina Aleksandrovna and in the speeches of the experts, there are leitmotifs and variable repetitions, which we, nevertheless, tried not to suppress, so that the fact of unanimity of the museum community on the issue of recreating the GMNZI in Moscow becomes more obvious.

Director of the State Historical Museum Alexey Levykin says that he is afraid of precedent. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova/Artguide

Alexey Levykin, director of the State Historical Museum: The Museum of New Western Art was created at the level of repression, from confiscated collections. The people who created the Museum of New Western Art in the 1920s operated within a certain historical framework. And returning to this historical framework will no longer turn out to be a museum of new Western art, but something else. And how will this correlate with the creation of the State Museum of Modern Art, which is now being created and for which a location has already been determined? And yet, I will emphasize once again: I am afraid of precedent. Because this could once again raise the topic that we fear most: the topic of restitution. External, because Western museums can also demand “theirs,” and internal. And we will be forced to give things to the countries to which they previously belonged, or to the heirs, or to the church.

The editor-in-chief of the St. Petersburg magazine “Zvezda” Yakov Gordin also speaks about the danger. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Yakov Gordin, editor-in-chief of Zvezda magazine: If you can take an entire floor of a great museum and move it 800 kilometers, then why not? We are thus entering very dangerous ground. And regardless of what happens, the very active discussion of this problem can distort the consciousness of both those who are “for” and those who are “against”, because either there are certain rules and boundaries, or everything or almost everything is possible. Dangerous, in my opinion, dangerous. And we need to think about how this affects the state of public consciousness.

Head of the Department of General History of Art at Moscow State University Ivan Tuchkov on the law of precedent. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Ivan Tuchkov, head of the department of general history of art at Moscow State University: What is being discussed looks very attractive on the surface: we are recreating something and paying tribute to memory. But behind this superficial appeal lies a number of problems that raise serious and complex questions. Are we recreating something that people could never otherwise see? No, all these things are presented in wonderful exhibitions, they can be viewed, they can participate in exhibitions, that is, they are available to viewers. Further, we cannot recreate the Museum of New Western Art in its entirety, since many things from it were sold, and we cannot return what was sold. That is, again, the idea of ​​“recreation” is inadequate. And I will say again about the law of precedent. Once we start dividing something, we will inevitably encounter a situation where this division will continue, and, for example, a new noble idea will arise: let’s recreate the Rumyantsev Museum. Or the Tretyakov Gallery in its entirety, including Western things. And finally, the last thing: a museum is an integral organism. If we remove things from the collection of Shchukin and Morozov from the Hermitage, no matter how blasphemous it may sound, the Hermitage will ultimately survive. But if we remove the complete collection of Western art from the Pushkin Museum, then it will lose its face and cease to be the wonderful museum that it is now.

Advisor to the director of the State Hermitage, Yulia Kantor, quotes a letter from the director of the Pushkin Museum. A.S. Pushkin in 1944-1949 by Sergei Merkurov. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Yulia Kantor, Advisor to the Director of the State Hermitage: It seems strange to me that there are some figures of silence that have been constantly appearing for the past month since the “direct line” with the president. Meanwhile, history is an exact science. And when we say that in 1948 an artificially created museum, consisting of two artificially combined collections, was repressed, we forget about the structure and who initiated the liquidation of this museum before 1948. I have in my hands a letter from the director of the Pushkin Museum Merkurov to the secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Comrade Malenkov, it was written on June 15, 1945 (the original is stored in the Russian Archive of the Social and Political History of Russia, a copy in the Hermitage). This letter gave an impetus, as was customary in Stalin’s times, to raise the issue “directly”, to the country’s top leadership. It is proposed to transform the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts into the Museum of World Art of the USSR. And the first point of this document: “To replenish the exhibition of Western European art, we consider it absolutely necessary to transfer the collections of the Museum of New Western Art to our museum.” Three years later, the famous decision was made. Therefore, it seems to me incorrect, when talking about rehabilitation, to forget about the historical continuity of these two events. If that repressed museum, disbanded in 1948, was a monument, then it was a monument to Bolshevik robbery or, if you prefer in civilized terms, nationalization. If we create a legal precedent, then where is the guarantee that Western countries will not contact us, as has already happened in the case of Poland, and heirs (and there have already been cases with heirs)? We ourselves cut the branch on which we sit.

A wall with paintings by Vincent Van Gogh in the State Museum of New Western Painting in the former mansion of Ivan Morozov on Prechistenka in Moscow. Bottom row, center: Van Gogh's Night Cafe, sold in 1933 to Stephen Clark (now Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven)

Natalia Sipovskaya, director of the State Institute of Art Studies: For me, it is indisputable that the State Museum of New Western Art is the largest event in our artistic history, we need to talk about it, and talk about it seriously. But I can only think of this in terms of a powerful intellectual project that should enrich our museum practice. Shifting the conversation into an administrative direction immediately deprived this project of its intellectual component. We embarked on the path of mutual grievances and memories. I can’t help but say: Merkurov’s letter was caused by the fact that they were already planning to repress the museum, and Merkurov thus tried to leave these works in the collections of the state museum fund. Therefore, there is no need to distort and declare the Pushkin Museum the initiator of the ruin of the Museum of New Western Art. Let's get back to being professional. We haven’t had serious convertible exhibition programs in our country for a long time. To show what our 1920-1930s were from the point of view of museum construction (and in the history of the creation of modernist museums this is really the first and, perhaps, unique experience), to show the program that Ternovets and Efros carried out, to show the contribution of Moscow collectors, St. Petersburg colleagues who restored and saved works, in general the history of the formation and popularization of the modernist tradition in Russia - that should be the goal.

Gauguin's Hall (Great Dining Room) in the house of Sergei Shchukin on Znamenka in Moscow. 1913. Photography

Vasily Tsereteli, director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art: When a new museum opens or is created, a new architectural solution is created and a collection for this museum is purchased. In this way, public funds are replenished, and the country becomes richer. We do not in any way replenish the wealth of the Russian Federation by moving valuables from one museum to another. Plus, it’s currently under construction and should be developed. Therefore, my proposal is to replenish the collections by purchasing new works, and not to cause destruction.

Director of the Moscow Kremlin Museums Elena Gagarina that it is unfair to deprive museums of sources of income. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Elena Gagarina: As a former employee of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, I am very familiar with what the exhibition of the Museum of New Western Art was like and what its concept was. It makes no sense to recreate the museum in the form in which it was, also because from the point of view of a modern viewer, the concept of a museum would now be simply quite funny. But besides those aspects that have already been discussed today, there is another important aspect. The fact is that museums have parts of collections that are important to them from a material point of view. We know that organizing exhibitions is an extremely expensive process. But there are collections, the display of which brings serious income to the museum. And these are precisely the collections of the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage that we are talking about. And it seems to me unfair to deprive both museums of such a significant commercial component, since our museums are not so well funded by the state. And combining these collections to create some kind of separate structure is absolutely impractical.

Alexey Lebedev, head of the museum design laboratory of the Russian Institute of Cultural Studies, speaks again about the danger. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Alexey Lebedev: When we “restore historical justice,” we must understand for what year we are restoring it. It turns out that it was 1937. The second thesis, in which I agree with my colleagues, is that the domino principle will work. Claims of various levels will begin to pour in from the former countries of the Soviet Union, from museums to each other, from private individuals both in our country and abroad, and this is extremely dangerous.

General Director of Sotheby’s Russia and CIS Mikhail Kamensky on the creation of an avant-garde museum. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Mikhail Kamensky, General Director of Sotheby’s Russia and CIS: I don’t think it’s right to recreate a museum, I think it’s right to create a museum—a museum of the avant-garde. We need a museum that logically continues the fundamental exhibitions “Moscow - Paris”, “Moscow - Berlin”, dedicated to the avant-garde art of the 20th century and fully reflecting the artistic connections of Western and Russian culture. In domestic education and upbringing there is a noticeable gap in the spiritual connection with modern European culture. Our society does not understand the visual codes of modernity, does not understand the language of modern culture and art. To bridge this gap, we need a museum dedicated to modern twentieth-century culture. We need a museum in which Russian art of the 20th century will show itself as an integral part of the history of world art. We need a museum in which Chagall, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Malevich, Rodchenko, Klyun, Popova, Shterenberg, Falk, Tyshler, Pirosmani, Goncharova, Larionov, Tatlin, Zdanevich, Grigoriev, Yakovlev, Shukhaev, Deineka, Samokhvalov, Pimenov, Williams, Labas will be on a par with the masterpieces of world art. Museums should and are obliged, from my point of view, to participate in the creation of this new direction on the principles of inter-museum partnership. This, from my point of view, should be a national project, a line item in the budget, hardly inferior in importance to the Olympics. Why can hundreds of millions be found for the construction of stadiums and ski slopes, but not for the creation of such a collection? Why was almost $150 million found to purchase the Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya and Lobanov-Rostovsky collections, but comparable funds were not found to create a museum of the world avant-garde? In the era of the global economic crisis, there is everything on the market. You can buy almost any masterpiece. Today, all over the world there is a process of creating new important museum institutions. Of course, these are mainly BRIC countries, primarily China, and the Middle East like the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. That is, those countries in which the museums being created will play the role of innovative social mechanisms. We need such a museum in the country, we need such a museum in Moscow. It will contribute to a public rethinking of Russia’s place and role in the world and will redraw the existing cultural and political map.

Epilogue

After all this, Irina Antonova looked, frankly, somewhat upset and even confused. However, she tried to answer the above. The laconic Mikhail Piotrovsky also spoke a few words.

Irina Antonova: I was very surprised that you didn’t invite anyone who supports this project - for example, Professor Sarabyanov, or the magazine “Our Heritage”, or other comrades - I could make you a whole list. This fear and horror of some kind of restitution, the emergence of all kinds of claims in this regard seem to me absolutely unjustified and simply have no reason! Here they tried to call the attempt to rehabilitate this museum a political gesture. Well, what kind of political gesture is this? We are talking about recreating the great museum of the 20th century, by the way, the first museum of modern art in the world. It's simply ridiculous to talk about political gestures here. Any indication that this will cause confusion, that this is a “genie out of a bottle,” is due to the incorrect formulation of the issue both in the press and even here: there is only one side here, there are no people here who support this museum.

Alla Manilova: The Ministry and the Department of Cultural Heritage invited to today's meeting members of the expert council - one, members of the working group on museum activities of the Public Council under the President of the Russian Federation - two, and members of the presidium of the Council of Museums of Russia. Information about today's meeting was posted in advance on all information resources, including ministerial ones. And there was not a single case where any of the cultural figures or media representatives who wanted to take part in the meeting were refused. We didn't close our doors to anyone.

Director of the State Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky is ready to show super things throughout Russia. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage: There is still a provision on particularly valuable state objects. The transfer of valuables between museums is carried out with the consent of both museums. And there are many ways to share. We are ready to participate in creating a program of exhibitions of these super things throughout Russia. Of course, this requires super money, super transport, special planes, government insurance guarantees - and then we will show exceptional things, super things, and it will be an explosion of the cultural space. And I support the wonderful project of creating exhibitions about the artistic life of the 1920-1930s, about those initiatives that were born, about those museums that were born, disappeared, and floated one into another, including the Museum of New Western Art.

Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky says that we underestimate the population's interest in culture. Photo: Ekaterina Allenova / Artguide

Vladimir Medinsky, Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation: There is great benefit in all this. You see how many cameras there are, how much they write about it. At a minimum, Russians will finally know who Shchukin and Morozov were - these are people who, more than a hundred years ago, sensed the trend of modern art and created the best collection of modern art in the world. And we should honor this and be proud of it. Frankly speaking, I am convinced that a big mistake was made back then, in 1948, and there was no need to liquidate this museum. But I'm not sure that fixing this mistake won't make it an even bigger mistake. In general, correcting mistakes is a very painful thing, very difficult. The problem that Irina Aleksandrovna raised highlights an important aspect: public discussion, tens of thousands of signatures that are collected for and against, the publicity that quite unexpectedly began to surround this seemingly internal museum issue - this suggests that people have a huge interest in culture. We underestimate this interest. Preserving cultural heritage is only one of the functions of a museum. Another function is popularization and education. And we will evaluate the effectiveness of museums not only from the point of view of preserving heritage, but also from the point of view of interaction with society - with universities, schools, kindergartens. Because people should go to the museum. I don’t want to anticipate the ministry’s position on this issue now, but it seems to me that the greatest result of our public activity should be that tens, hundreds of thousands of people will want to go to the Hermitage, the Pushkin Museum, and our other museums.

In conclusion, Deputy Minister of Culture Alla Manilova read out an excerpt from a document entitled “Protocol of discussion by the Presidium of the Union of Museums of Russia and the Council of Representatives of the Union of Museums of Russia on the feasibility of re-establishing the Museum of New Western (Contemporary) Art in Moscow.” Here is a quote from there: “The proposal to recreate the Museum of New Western Art in Moscow is devoid of any historical, cultural and legal grounds; its implementation could provoke a massive redistribution of museum collections, which will lead to a sharp decrease in the efficiency of museum activities in the country, creating a threat to safety and integrity Museum Fund of the Russian Federation".

The mansion of Ivan Morozov in Moscow. Hall with panels by Maurice Denis and statues by Aristide Maillol. Photo

Alla Manilova also reported on an expert legal opinion, according to which “there are no rules in the current legislation that would allow the seizure and redistribution of museum objects from indivisible museum collections that are under the operational management of state museums.” The executive secretary of the Patriarchal Council for Culture, a member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Culture, Archimandrite Tikhon, also sent his conclusion: “In our opinion, the creation of a new museum on a restitutionary basis does not make any sense, since this path is fraught with museum chaos,” the letter says. — In addition, we must not forget that the State Museum of New Western Art was created in 1923 by merging the 1st and 2nd Museums of New Western Art. Each of them was in its own building and preserved the integrity of the collections - S.I. Shchukin and I.A. Morozova. So, maybe we need to restore historical justice to the collectors who compiled two wonderful collections? We think this is a dead end."

Exhibition halls on the 1st floor
State Museum of A.S. Pushkin. Prechistenka, 12/2

Western European art
in the collection of the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin
(Painting, graphics, sculpture)

“Do you want to be an expert in the arts? -
says Winkelmann. - Try to love the artist,
look for beauty in his creations.”
A.S. Pushkin - ABOUT CRITICISM.

The exhibition opening in the halls of the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin, for the first time presents the collection of Western European art, which has been actively formed by the museum in the last decade. About 120 exhibits - works of painting, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied art, more than 50 names of artists who worked in the 2nd half of the 17th - 19th centuries - this is only a small part of the collection collected by the museum. Much is presented in permanent exhibitions - on Prechistenka, in the Memorial Apartment of A.S. Pushkin on Arbat, in the Museum of I.S. Turgenev on Ostozhenka.

The beginning of a collection of Western European art, which is typical for our Pushkinmuseum, put gifts. In 1968, as part of the collection of the Moscow collector A.S. Golovina received two paintings: “Landscape with Ruins” (late 17th - early 18th century) by the Austrian painter A. Faistenberg and “Peasant House” by an unknown Flemish master of the 17th century - “Flemish school of motley litter”. INIn the 1970s, works of so-called escheated property poured into the collection of the then very young museum, as if from a cornucopia.transferred by the State Museum Fund: works by the landscape and animal painter of the Dutchman S. van der Doye (1653/1654‑1718), the famous French painters C. Couvasseg (1802‑1877), J. Courbet (1819‑1877), genre painters - the Austrian K. Schleicher (1855‑1871) and the German artist K.E. Forberg (1844 -1915) and other masters.

In the 1970s–1990s, a collection of graphic portraits of A.S.’s acquaintances and contemporaries was actively developed. Pushkin.The museum collection received more than 50 works by Russian masters, foreign artists who worked in Russia or abroad inRussian orders: A. Molinari, C. Perrgo, A. Lagrene, C. Bardou, E. Rossi, F. Kruger, K. Mather, T. Wright, L. Fischer, M. Zichy and others. Many of them are presented at the exhibition.

Many rare genre and landscape graphic sheets entered the museum's collection as part of albums. So, among the 60 works in the album that belonged to P.P. and E.A. Bakunin, which began to be filled at the end of the 18th century -drawing by the famous Italian portrait painter S. Tonchi, sepia by the French architect, draftsman and painter J. Thomas de Thomon, watercolor by the artist and traveler French J.B. Leprince, a beautiful drawing of a woman's head, made in the style of English masters of the last quarter of the 18th century, possibly the work of the famous English portraitist T. Lawrence and other sheets that require further study.

Among recent acquisitions, of particular interest is the drawing “The Cupid Trader” (1803) by the French artist P.M.K. Barais de Caumagne. The plot, which became popular in the 2nd half of the 18th - early 19th centuries and has been interpreted many times, is based on a fresco,found in 1759 during excavations at the Villa of Ariadne in Stabiae.

In the last decade, the museum has acquired not only paintings and graphic works of Pushkin’s time, but also works of the 18th and 2nd half of the 19th centuries. First of all, this is due to the opening of our branches - museums dedicated to J.S. Turgenev and V.L. Pushkin. Unlike Alexander Pushkin, both of them were “traveling”, especially Turgenev, who spent most of his life abroad. The exhibition presents picturesque views of Western European cities and portraits of the writer’s contemporaries, which will later be exhibited in the Museum of I.S. Turgenev.

Acquisition, including works of Western European art,is also associated with the expansion of the topics of exhibition projects, in particular foreign ones, the number of which is steadily growing. Currently, the museum has the opportunity to exhibit at such exhibitions works by foreign artists that were previously not in demand.

The leitmotif of the exhibition, offered to the attention of visitors, is Pushkin, his life and work. The exhibition features portraits of the poet’s acquaintances: Princess V.F. Gagarina, Princess Z.A.Volkonskaya, Countess E.P. Ricci, Count V.A. Sollogub, His Serene Highness Prince G.A. Gruzinsky, Princess E.A. Clary-and-Aldringen,among which are images of two emperors - Alexander I and Nicholas I; his contemporaries: A.R. Tomilov, Baron A.K. Tipolta, A.I. Overa, D.D. Shepelev, Baron N.P. Nikolai. A special place in this portrait gallery is occupied by images of William Shakespeare And Pushkin's contemporaries - Friedrich Schiller and Heinrich Heine.The poet was well acquainted with their work; each of them, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced the development of his talent.

Pushkin’s inexhaustible creativity reflected the history, culture, nature of many countries, the life and customs of the peoples inhabiting them - be it Spain, France, Germany, Italy... That is why the exhibition of works by Western European artists is so natural and harmonious in the halls of the Pushkin Museum.

The decoration of the exhibition are a few objects of decorative and applied arts, made in the styles of Rococo, Classicism, Empire, Historicism and presented by such famous names as K.M. Clodion, and P.F. Tomir, anonymous craftsmen, as well as talented model makers of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory. The exhibition displays works by sculptors of the late 18th - 19th centuries. Among them, the portrait of I.V. deserves special attention. Goethe by H.D. Rauch, an outstanding German master of the era of classicism, founder of the Berlin school of sculptors, a portrait of Emperor Peter I, made in the 1770s by M.A. Kollo, a talented student of the great E.M. Falcone; portrait of the notorious Countess M.Zh. DuBarry (1858). This is a beautifully executed copy by an anonymous Western European master based on the original by the talented French sculptor O. Pajou (1773).

The museum is currently preparing for publication the album “Western European Art in the Collection of the State Museum of A.S. Pushkin”, where about 200 of the most interesting works of painting, miniatures, graphics, including editions - unique sheets of the 18th - early 19th centuries will be presented.

State Museum of A.S. Pushkin expresses gratitude to his colleagues - employees of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkina L.Yu. Savinskaya, V.A. Mishin, V.A. Sadkov; experts of the All-Russian Artistic and Scientific Center named after Academician I.E. Grabar A.R. Kiseleva, O.S. Glebova, A.A. Makhotina; expert of the State Research Institute of Restoration M.M. Krasilina; art critic R.M. Kirsanova, historian A.M. Valkovich; Moscow collector S.A. Podstanitsky, Irakli Kupatadze - who provided assistance in the attribution of works.

Museum of New Western Art(Also GMNZI; - March 6) arose in Moscow as a result of the merger of the 1st and 2nd Museums of New Western Painting. The museum is based on collections of paintings by famous merchants Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov.

Story

Base

First Museum of New Western Painting created on the basis of the collection of Sergei Shchukin and was opened in 1918 in the former house of the collector (Bolshoi Znamensky Lane, No. 8). Its collections consisted of works of Western European, predominantly French, painting and sculpture from the 1860s onwards, which included Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Camille Pizarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin.

Second Museum of New Western Painting created on the basis of the collection of Ivan Morozov and was opened in 1919 in the building of his city estate (Prechistenka Street, 21).

None of the museums, not one of the private galleries, except perhaps in Philadelphia, gives such a varied and rich picture of the development of French painting over the past 50 years. The significance of the museum lies not only in the completeness of its collections, but also in their unusually high level; most of the leading masters of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Derain and others, are represented in the museum with first-class, sometimes even central works in their work; hence the brightness, the concentration of impressions that envelops the visitor and keeps him in unremitting artistic and aesthetic tension.

Time of crisis

At the dawn of its existence, GMNZI received high praise and support from the authorities associated with the general revolutionary upsurge, when experimentation and innovation were welcomed in all spheres of public life, including art. In the 1930s, there was a sharp change in policy regarding art and museum affairs. The new official position of the authorities was formulated in 1930 at the First All-Russian Museum Congress, affected all museums and threatened the existence of the GMNZI, which is why the concept of the museum underwent significant changes.

In 1932, on the pages of the magazine “Soviet Museum,” museum director Boris Ternovets presented a different program corresponding to the new stage of Soviet history: “Moscow... the citadel of the world revolution, the capital of the world proletariat. Within its walls there should be a museum where, in contrast to the powerful construction and grandiose successes of the socialist state, the decline, crisis, decomposition, and hopeless dead ends of bourgeois society should be shown.” However, this did not save the museum from liquidation.

In 1933, the American Stephen Clark acquired Cezanne's Madame Cezanne in the Orangery and Van Gogh's Night Cafe from the Morozov collection, as well as Renoir and Degas. The deal, which brought the USSR 260 thousand dollars, was concluded before the official establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States in order to avoid claims by the former owners and their heirs.

Liquidation

Natalya Semenova, an art historian and biographer of Sergei Shchukin, writes: “In 1930-1931, the Hermitage received 79 paintings as the first “portion” of new art. He got the second one completely by accident: more than seventy paintings were selected for sale from the State Museum of Historical Art, but no buyers were found. Nobody cared that the paintings were issued from Moscow: in order not to bother with packaging, the impressionists and post-impressionists were sent from Germany along with the old paintings straight to Leningrad. Well, for the third time, the Hermitage received the best and most of the masterpieces of the GMNZI solely because of the indecisiveness of Moscow curators, who were afraid to leave the formalistic masterpieces of Picasso and Matisse in the capital, right next to the walls of the Kremlin.”

Recreation idea

The former director of the Pushkin Museum, Irina Antonova, presented a project for recreating the State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and proposed using a building belonging to the State Museum of Fine Arts for it. The reconstruction of the museum involved the return to Moscow of part of the GMNZI collection transferred to the Hermitage. Director of the Hermitage Mikhail Piotrovsky sharply criticized this project. Residents of St. Petersburg supported Piotrovsky and organized a collection of signatures against the transfer of part of the Hermitage collection to Moscow. In April 2013, following the results of the “direct line”, Vladimir Putin submitted to the Government a proposal to consider the feasibility of rebuilding the Moscow Museum. A few months later, Antonova, due to her advanced years, gave up the director’s chair to Marina Loshak, who no longer lobbied for the idea of ​​returning part of the collection from the Hermitage.

This is not a private museum of I. A. Antonova or M. B. Piotrovsky - it should be a branch of two state museums, the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. The last consideration allows not only not to violate the law on the indivisibility of museum collections, but also to maintain financial control over the circulation of famous works, because it is no secret that masterpieces allow the operating museum to earn money not only by attracting tourists, but also by moving around the world when they are handed over to rental for other exhibitions.

In May 2013, Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky announced that the collection would not be transferred, but a virtual museum would be created

NEWEST ART
(program for young artists)

The NEWER ART course is a one-year program designed for young artists wishing to develop in the field of contemporary art. The school provides an opportunity for artists who already have a certain technical base not only to develop intellectually in the context of contemporary art, but also to join the professional community.

The School does not offer applied classes in painting, sculpture or other media. Course students complete practical assignments outside of class time. However, in class there is a discussion and analysis of the work done. The mandatory program includes courses on the history and theory of art, various media, lectures and seminars on the philosophy of art, workshops on portfolio design and self-promotion, interaction with institutions. Master classes are required with famous artists, curators, and cultural figures who share their experiences and answer questions from course participants.

The main objective of the course is to show the ways of development and demonstrate to the author the possibilities of artistic language, immerse in the theory and philosophy of culture, and let into the community.

Teachers from leading humanitarian universities in Moscow (Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry named after S.G. Stroganov) were invited as lecturers, and also practicing specialists - researchers of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art from various departments (scientific, exhibition, collections department), artists, institutional and independent curators, media editors.

During the academic year, personal consultations are held with the School’s teachers on the creation and implementation of personal and group projects.

THEORETICAL COURSES:

PRACTICUMS:

After the October Revolution, at the end of the collection, they were nationalized by decrees of the Soviet government and turned into state museums, which were combined into one. Thus, GMNZI also became the world's first museum of modern art, ahead of the famous New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by five years. The uniqueness of the situation was that both Shchukin and Morozov became interested in the works of the Impressionists, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and early Picasso before French museums and museums in other countries appreciated this art and began to acquire it - collectors often go ahead of museums. Russian collectors thus managed to bring to Russia the most characteristic works of the most famous masters. “(...) None of the museums, not one of the private galleries, except perhaps the Barnes Museum-Institute in Philadelphia, gives such a varied and rich picture of the development of French painting over the past 50 years,” wrote the director in 1933 museum Boris Nikolaevich Ternovets, - The significance of the museum is not only in the completeness of its collections, but also in their unusually high level; most of the leading masters of the 19th and 20th centuries, like Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Derain and others, are represented in the museum with first-class, sometimes even central works in their work; hence the brightness, the concentration of impressions that envelops the visitor and keeps him in unrelenting artistic and aesthetic tension.” The influence of works from the GMNZI on the creative development of Soviet artists was great; many considered the museum their professional school. Those who were older saw many of the paintings even before the revolution in the house of S.I. Shchukin, who opened his collection to the public. The museum was widely known abroad, as the collections of Shchukin and Morozov were known before the First World War, and therefore was visited by foreigners coming to the USSR.

Decoration of the museum building for the 19th anniversary of the October Revolution
1936

To justify its name, the Museum of Contemporary Western Art had to develop and replenish its collections, keep abreast of new phenomena in the art of Europe and America, but the state museum could not dream of those annual large-scale acquisitions that Shchukin and Morozov could afford: in the country there was physical famine and monetary famine. In museums and libraries, the authorities selected the best works of art, ancient manuscripts, unique books, and crown jewels of the Russian royal dynasty for export to finance the construction of socialism. And GMNZI suffered during this campaign, losing some of its masterpieces. All that remained for the museum was to replenish its collections with paintings and sculpture from private collections nationalized during the revolution, in which, however, there were also very significant works, through purchases from exhibitions, through gifts, as well as by receiving paintings and graphics by contemporary European artists in exchange for works by Soviet artists. At the same time, the reverse process was underway - by order of the People's Commissariat for Education, a portion of the paintings, including the best examples, were transferred from the State Museum of Historical Art to the Hermitage, which did not have art from the corresponding period in its collections.

The museum popularized its collection, trying to explain to the aesthetically unprepared viewer the meaning and artistic value of the exhibited works in an accessible form, using explanations placed under the paintings, in conversations with visitors and in brochures dedicated to individual artists. However, in accordance with the requirements of Soviet ideology and the international political situation, the museum had to transform from a purely artistic museum into a museum of revolutionary art of the West, serve election campaigns and political holidays and dates, and at the same time, the GMNZI was forced to constantly defend its right to exist. Until the end of 1928, the museum’s collections retained their original ones - mansions, adapted by their owners for the convenience of exhibiting (there was no talk of constructing new buildings for museums in those years). In 1928, one of the buildings was selected, and the collections were concentrated in the premises of the former Morozov mansion on Kropotkinskaya Street, which was cramped for the museum. (now Prechistenka), 21.

During the Great Patriotic War collections. After returning to Moscow in 1944, the exhibition was not restored. In 1946, the era of the “Iron Curtain” began in international politics, and soon the struggle against cosmopolitanism began in the USSR. The issue with GMNZI was resolved at the very top - it was liquidated by resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR dated March 6, 1948, No. 672. In this decree, the museum’s collections, meaning the most valuable and striking part of them, mainly what Shchukin and Morozov had once acquired, were called “a breeding ground for formalistic views and sycophancy before the decadent bourgeois culture of the era of imperialism” and it was argued that they “caused great harm to the development of Russian and Soviet art." The collection, which was characterized as “an exceptional collection of great European masters”, which “due to its high artistic value has national significance in the matter of public education” was now declared socially harmful and socially dangerous.

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Sheet one

Text of the “Resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR on the liquidation of the State Museum of New Western Art” dated March 6, 1948
Sheet two

The repressions that have been going on in the country, waxing and waning since the 1920s, claiming many hundreds of human lives and erasing Yesenin, Shostakovich, Akhmatova and Zoshchenko from the national culture for ideological reasons, have now affected this art museum. The paintings, sculptures and objects of applied art of the GMNZI were divided between and and went into storage; The building of the State Historical Museum on Prechistenka went to the newly created Academy of Arts of the USSR - the main ideologist and promoter of the method of socialist realism in the fine arts. Works that would have done honor to any museum were shelved due to ideological prejudices and, perhaps, not without the help of some influential Soviet artists, who, out of fear and envy, hated any manifestation of free creativity. This suggests a comparison with the fate of the works of the Russian avant-garde, which were removed from the exhibitions of the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum back in 1936 and for many decades.

Thus, Moscow lost a museum whose famous collections once originated in its cultural environment, a museum unique not only on the scale of one country. Fortunately, this fact remains unique in the history of Soviet art museums. Today, Yesenin, Shostakovich, Akhmatova and many others from the “black list”, including the art of the Russian avant-garde, have long been restored to their rights. The time has come to remember the Museum of New Western Art and its dramatic fate and try to understand how and why it was destroyed during the reign of the totalitarian regime in the USSR, think about the future fate of divided and ideologically “stigmatized” works of art and that nothing this could not happen again in the future. The State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow must be brought out of obscurity and finally rehabilitated.

Documentary about history
State Museum of New Western Art (1918 - 1948)

Interview with I.A. Antonova, President of the State Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin:

Interview with M.B. Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage: