Pushkin Museum of Western Art. Exhibition "Western European Art"

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 century - the beginning of the 19th century 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.

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 Natural History to the Hermitage, which did not have art from the corresponding period in its collections.

The museum popularized its collection by trying to explain to the aesthetically unprepared viewer the meaning and artistic value of the exhibited works through 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:

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 (Bolshoy 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 Orangerie 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 Natural History, 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, due to her advanced years, Antonova 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 who want 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:

Museum of New Western Art

Museum of New Western Art a collection of works of Western European painting and sculpture (mostly French) from the early 60s. XIX century E. Manet, O. Renoir, E. Degas, C. Monet, V. van Gogh, P. Gauguin, C. Pizarro, A. Toulouse-Lautrec, P. Cezanne, A. Matisse, P. Picasso, O. Rodin and others. Based on the collection of S.I. Shchukin and I.A. Morozova. Shchukin's collection was opened in 1918 as the 1st Museum of New Western Painting (Bolshoy Znamensky Lane, 8); Morozov's collection in 1919 as the 2nd Museum of New Western Painting (21 Prechistenka Street). In 1923, both museums were united into the Museum of New Western Art, which since 1925 has become a branch of the Museum of Fine Arts (see Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). In 1928 the funds were concentrated in one building (21 Prechistenka Street), after the liquidation of the museum in 1948 they were distributed between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hermitage.

Literature: State Museum of New Western Art. Illustrated catalogue, M., 1928.