 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Arts |
ANCIENT RUSSIAN PAINTING STATE TRETYAKOV ART GALLERY PUSHKIN MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS |
Ancient Russian Painting TOP
| Moscow is the center of the ancient Russian monumental (frescoes) and easel (icon) paintings. The second third of the 14th century is generally associated with the birth of the Moscow school of Icon painting. It was from this time on that the characteristic features of the Moscow masters became clear. Their painting was in a mild and philosophical manner, quite different from the Byzantine prototype or that of the Kiev or Novgorod Schools. At the end of the 14th century a galaxy of Moscow icon painters came out on stage. Among this group of artists were Prokhor from Gorodets, Daniil the Black and the renowned Andrew Rublev. Later Rublev's works became the official standard for several generations of artists. Such artists included Dionicious and his son Phedosious, and in the 18th century Simon Ushakov and Joseph Vladimirov. The latter two artists became well known for their ability to bring spiritual and secular painting close together, more so than any other artists before them. |  |
A unique and impressive sample of ancient Russian paintings has been preserved in the cathedrals of the Kremlin. The Assumption Cathedral houses many beautiful ancient icons by Dionicious and other artists of the XII - XVII centuries.
The Cathedral of the Annunciation contains icons by A. Rublev, Prokhor, Theophanus the Greek. The Tretyakov Art Gallery possesses the largest icon collection in Moscow. The worxs of A. Rublev are well represented here: the famous Trinityand The Savior ofZvenigorod. Here is found the well known icons Our Lady of Vladimir (12th cent.) and The Ustjuzskoye Annunciation(12th cent.). This collection includes pieces from Dionicious, Simon Ushakov and frescoes from demolished churches.
Another museum is located on the premises of the ancient Saviour-Andronik Monastery where Andrew Rublev lived. It contains 3 000 pieces of ancient Russian art dating from the 14th through 17th centuries.
 |
You can see many frescoes and icon sets of the 15th-18th centuries in many churches of Moscow. Following is the list of the most significant ones: The Trinity Church in Nikitniky (The Nikitniky Lane, metro station Kitaygorod) containing the beautiful frescoes of the 17th century, icons by S. Ushakov and his pupils, and fresco fragments from the demolished Moscow churches, The Cathedral of the Sretensky Monastery (Bolshaya Lubyanka str., metro station Kuznetsky Most) containing a fresco ensemble from 1707, The Church of Saint John the Warrior (Bolshaya Yakimanka str., metro station Oktyabrskaya) containing icons from the end of the 17th century from the Church of the Resurrection in Kadashy, The New Saviour Monastery (The Square of the Krestyanskaya zastava, metro station Proletarskaya) containing a fresco ensemble from the 17th century Resurrection Cathedral. |
Excellent examples of iconic paintings are also well preserved in The Church of The Prophet Elijah Obydenni (The Obydensky Lane, metro station Kropotkinskaya), The Church of the Apparition of the Virgin (metro station: Rizhskaya), The Church of the Resurrection in the Uspensky Vrazhek (Nezhdanov str., metro station Okhotny Ryad), The Resurrection Cathedral in Sokolniky (metro station Sokoiniky), the Church of Saint Nicholas in Khamovniky (Komsomolsky prosp., metro station Park Kultury), the Danilov Monastery (metro station Shabolovskaya).
The most significant collections of icons are available in the Trinity Sergius Monastery (Sergiev Posad), in the museum of the New Jerusalem Monastery (Istra town), and in the museums in the towns of Zvenigorod, Dmitrov, Volokolamsk, Kolomna and Serpukhov.
State Tretyakov Art Gallery TOP
MORE INFORMATION
State Tretyakov Art Gallery, the pride of Moscow, is the largest world famous museum of Russian pre-revolutionary and multinational Soviet art. The collection enjoys popular love and is well-known abroad.
| The
origin of the Gallery is linked to the name of Moscow art collector,
outstanding Russian patron of art Pavel Tretyakov (1823-1898). Having inherited a large fortune Tretyakov spent it buying paintings. He began collecting them in 1856. Tretyakov became interested in national Russian art influenced by the ideals of democratic Russian intellectuals. Their main goal was the development of national culture based on realism for the purpose of education and moral upbringing of the people. In his will , written in 1860, Tretyakov outlined the goal of his activities: |
 |
the creation in Moscow of an art museum for the people.I should like to set up a national picture gallery and leave it to the city of Moscow. I genuinely love painting and cannot long for anything else but for the establishment of an accessible public museum useful to many people and bringing joy to everyone.
 |
The basis of Tretyakov's collection is made up of paintings that reflect not only the poetical side of Russian life but its contemporary contradictions. Tretyakov frequents studios and exhibitions and buys everything that seems worth buying, tirelessly looks for antiquities in private collections and antique shops. He considers it to be his civil duty to create a portrait gallery of Russian writers, musicians, composers, actors, scientists. He commissions these portraits to the leading Russian painters such as Perov, Kramskoy, Repin and some others. He collects the works of peredvizhniki ( members of the Traveling Art Exhibition society). United under one roof they demonstrate the unique character and artistic power of the Russian national artistic tradition. |
Tretyakov was one of the first among art collectors to appreciate an icon as a remarkable monument of Russian art. He collected over 50 first-class icons of Novgorodian, Moscow and Pskov schools of icon painting dating back to the XV-XVI centuries. In 1872 Tretyakov's collection numbers over 500 paintings and he begins building the first halls of the future museum adjoining them to the house where his family lived. In 1881 no charge was taken to see the collection. By that time over 8000 visitors had visited his gallery and by 1898 the figure had been around 100 000. In 1892 Pavel Tretyakov took a decision to donate his and his brother Sergey's collections to the city of Moscow. His gift numbered over 1200 paintings and 500 drawings. Since that time the museum was called Moscow city gallery of Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov. Pavel Tretyakov was its patron until his decease on the 4 (16) December 1898.
| After the death of Pavel Tretyakov the Gallery was run by the Council headed by the Moscow city governor. In 1905 Ivan Ostroukhov was nominated its patron, the same year sees the reconstruction of the facade in the Russian style by painter Vasnetsov, in 1913 Grabar became the patron. After 1917 the Gallery acquired many nationalized collections, Rumiantsev museum's collection that used to hold collections and gifts from many noble and merchants' families, confiscated items from country estates, exhibits from the Museum of icons and paintings. |  |
Beginning from 1920ies the museum began to acquire works of Soviet multinational art. State Tretyakov Art Gallery is a museum that reflects the development of Russian art from the XI century to the present day. The number of its exhibits is well over 45 000 now.
 |
The names and the images of the Tretyakov Gallery settle in our minds in the childhood and accompany us the whole life. This is the icon The Virgin of Vladimir, Andrey Rublev's The Holy Trinity, poetic images of the Russian women - Lopukhina, Dyakova, Struiskaya - painted by Borovikovsky, Levitsky, Rokotov, paintings by Venetsianov and Tropinin, Kiprensky and Brullov, landscapes by Vassiliev and Shishkin, Levitan and Savrasov, The morning of the execution of streltsi(rebel troops) and Menshikov in Beresovo by Surikov, Christ in the desert and An unknown lady by Kramskoy, The swan princess by Vrubel and A girl with peaches by Serov, quietude and serenity of Nesterov and many , many others... |
| The new premises of the Tretyakov Art Gallery in Krymsky Val feature a unique exhibition of the Russian art of the 20th century: from avant-garde of the 1910s to the works created in the 1980-90s. Walking through the exhibition halls is like taking a time travel. A spectacular, contradictory, at times dramatic and even tragic, panorama of the Russian culture of the last century unfolds itself before the visitor. The beginning of the century was fraught with the expectation that something new and out-of-the-ordinary was to happen. The true symbol of the time found its expression in Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s painting “The Bathing of the Red Horse” (1912). Contemporaries perceived it as an embodiment of the changes to come. |  |
On the threshold of the unknown new world, art strove to find a new artistic language and new expressive means. In the Russian painting of the 1910s, there was place for cubism and futurism, neoprimitivism and late symbolism, neoimpressionism and neoclassisism, along with the first attempts at non-figurative art. Abstraction came as a crucial watershed in the development of art. The exhibition halls of the gallery present works by the pioneers of the trend.
 |
Vassilij
Kandinskij, the creator of expressionist abstract painting, dreamed
about an unheard of impact of art on the life of society. He compared
the saturated intensive colours of his compositions with sounds, and
the painting itself with “the sound of a huge orchestra”. Kazimir Malevich’s suprematism irrevocably broke all associative ties between painting and the real world. The exhibition features the legendary “Black Square”. The author himself called it “an icon of the new time”. |
Pavel Filonov was one of the most outstanding Russian artists of the first half of the 20th century. In his paintings the world shatters into colourful fragments and is then synthesized anew in complicated images charged with symbolic meaning.
Marc Chagall, already in his early works, manages to magically transform the routine of everyday provincial life into a poetic and phantasmagoric reality.
“The revolution” in painting proved to be a forerunner of the political revolution. In 1917, many thought that their expectations had finally come true and that a new world had been born. Never has the artistic life in Russia been so booming as it was in the first ten years of Soviet power. Antagonistic positions collided; heated debates went on and on. Everybody wanted to bring out the spirit of the time and accelerate the oncoming of the new life. It is not accidental that later the period between the mid-1910s and mid-1920s was called “the great utopia”.
| The early 30s put an end to this boom. Up to the mid-1950s the only officially recognized creative method that throve was the so-called socialist realism. Today we look upon works created in that period as the epoch’s documentary records rather than artistic achievements. The dreadful accusation of “formalism ” had a tragic impact on the lives of some artists and made others belie their artistic ideals. |  |
The short period of the so-called “thaw” (late 1950s-early 60s) was of crucial importance in the country’s spiritual life. These years saw a slow gradual, but irrevocable expansion of the artistic freedom limits.
The exhibits on display fall into two distinct groups, which allow to see the alternative trend,
underground art, gaining momentum parallel to the official art. This new trend was later called “another art” or “the second Russian avant-garde”
 |
n the 1970s and, particularly, in the 1980s, artists succeeded in breaking through “the iron curtain” and strove to integrate Russian art into the global artistic processes. National traditions of postmodernism, conceptualism, social art, action, etc. were established in that period. The dramatic changes in the countries public and political life removed the problem of ideological censorship. |
Russian art enters the 21st century after wining the right of self-expression and of a persistent search for the new.
"Do you want to learn more about Russia? Come to the Tretyakov Art Gallery.
The museum is open daily, except Mondays, from 10.00 to 19.30;
ticket sale and admission till 18.30.
Address:
10,Lavrushenskij Pereulok
(Tretyakovskaya metro station)
10, Krymskij Val
(Oktyabrskaya and Park Kulturi metro stations)
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts TOP
The museum of fine arts was open in Moscow on the 31st of May 1912. The creation of the museum was a noteworthy event for Russia because there had not been such a precedent before. The new museum accumulated the democratic traditions of Russian enlightenment and the experience of European culture.
| The idea of creating a foreign art museum in Moscow goes back to the middle of the XVIII century. It originated among Russian intelligentsia; architect Bazhenov , Moscow University professors Pogodin and Shevyrev, Pushkin's muse Zinaida Volkhonskaya dreamed about such a museum. But it became possible only after the Tretyakov brothers had donated their gallery to Moscow at the end of the XIX century. Influenced by this event a campaign started for the collection of donations for the construction of the first Moscow museum of classical foreign art. |  |
Moscow University professor Ivan Tsvetayev was the soul of this noble enterprise. The Russian people are thankful to him for his selfless labour. Architect Roman Klein and the chief patron Yuri Netchaev-Maltsev worked alongside with Tsvetayev and also deserve our admiration and gratitude.
The original collection of the museum was comprised of plaster casts from the fine arts and antiquities study room of the Moscow University. A large architectural and sculptural collection of plaster casts (porticoes of Greek temples, portals of medieval cathedrals, reliefs of Pergam altar, «Paradise gates» by Giberti, equestrian statues by Donatello and Verocchio, Michaelangelo's «David», Venus of Milo, flying Nike) is ordered abroad for the museum. «None of the visitors will forget the corner of the Parthenon and the portico of caryatids», wrote Tsvetayaev. The collection of ancient Egyptian rarities collected by Russian Egyptologist professor Golenischev which can be compared to the best existing collections has become the most valuable part of the museum. Thanks to him the museum possesses 6000 original items of ancient Egyptian art: papyri, stellae, reliefs, statues, articles of decorative handicraft, Fayum portraits.
In 1909 Tsvetayev accepted the donation of Italian-Greek icons and Protorenaissance paintings from the Russian consul Schekin in Triest. Among them was «The Crucifixion» by Senya di Bonaventura, a rare Italian icon that became the decoration of the XIII-XV centuries hall of Italian art now.
 |
This donation became the first one - the picture gallery in the museum was set up only 12 years later. The basis of the picture gallery was formed by the paintings of the former Rumyantsev museum and the masterpieces of the Moscow private collections. Moscow museums owe their resplendence and variety to the merchant families of the Schukins, Tretyakovs, and Morosovs. Schukin's collection became a valuable contribution to the treasures of the museum. «There is no other collection arranged in such a knowledgeable and meticulous way», wrote his contemporaries about the collection. Avercamp's «Winter scene with skaters», Kalf's «Mother-of-pearl goblet and fruits», Ter Borch's «Music lesson», Guardi's and Rober's landscapes, Cranach's paintings decorate the museum halls. |
The collection of French paintings of the XIX century stems from the collections of Sergey Tretyakov, younger brother of Pavel Tretyakov, and Botkin. Landscapes by Millet, Daubigny, Corot, Bastien's «Countryside love» belonged to them.
Some paintings came from Moscow country estates , namely, Ostafyevo, where an interesting collection of paintings and drawings had been accumulated by a number of generations of the Vyasemsky family: «Mountain landscape», drawings by romantic painter Friedrich and other German masters rarely found in our museums.
The pride of the museum is the collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists represented by the paintings of all the leading artists of these movements. Moscow art collectors started acquiring these paintings before Impressionists and Post-Impressionists began to enjoy European fame ; they demonstrated amazing artistic flair and the feeling of contemporaneity. The collections of Sergey Schukin and Ivan Morosov, the most well-known art collectors, form the basis of the museum's new part of the collection. All the famous paintings of this period originate from their collection: «Luncheon on the Grass», «Rocks» by Claude Monet, «The Nude» by Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh and Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Maurice Denis, «The Mediterranean Sea» by Pierre Bonnard, bronze statues by Mayol and sculptures «A Kiss» and «Eternal Spring» by Rodin. Sculpture «Eva» by Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas' pastels and Renoir's «Portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary» were purchased by Morosov.
One of their contemporaries wrote that these collections «boast of the cream of the most advanced European school of painting».
| pre-Revolutionary Moscow possessed the richest collections of art dating back to the 2nd half of the XIX - beginning of the XX centuries, but did not have earlier works. The works of art collected in the Hermitage and Petersburg mansions of the nobility reflected the general European trend of art collecting of the XVIII - beginning of the XIX centuries and made up enormous collections. Many works of art that appeared in Russia in the 2nd half of the XVIII century purchased by Catherine II traveled from the Palace embankment in St. Petersburg to Volkhonka street in Moscow. |  |
Among them two works by Rembrandt: the early master is represented by «The Incredulity of St. Thomas» and the latest Rembrandt by «Ahasuerus, Haman and Esther», «The Death of Virginia» by Simon Vouet, several beautiful paintings from the Paris collection of Crozat - «The Portrait of Cardinal Pallavichini» by Sebastiano del Piombo who experienced the influence of Rafael ( the painting was in Van Dyck's collection) and Domenico Fetti's «David with the Head of Goliath» that at one time belonged to English king Charles I Stuart. Veronese's «Minerva», Poussin's «Rinaldo and Armida» noted for its superb color scheme, Rubens' «Bacchanalia» that deserves the visitor's attention and «Apotheosis of Duchess Isabella», enormous canvas by Jacob Jordaens «Satyr visiting a peasant's home», three portraits by Van Dyck remarkable for their deep penetration into the inner world of the characters - all these canvasses came from the Hermitage.
Paintings by Snyders, a typical Flemish master of still-life , are the pearls of the museum. The same is true of Canaletto's «The Betrothal of the Venetian Doge to the Adriatic Sea», Pannini and Bellotto's landscapes and Guardi's melancholic townscapes. The Stroganovs', Yusupovs' and Shuvalovs' collections from St.Petersburg contributed a number of well-known paintings to the museum. The name of the Stroganovs has long been associated with the Russian artistic life. «Madonna and Child» by Perugino, Botticelli's «The Annunciation», Bronzino's «The Holy Family», Leonardo da Vinci's disciple Boltraffio with his «St. Sebastian» from their collection have become treasures of the museum. French paintings of the XVII-XVIII centuries from the Yusupovs' and Shuvalovs' collections have greatly enriched the museum. Russian publicist Gertsen in his book «The Reminiscences about the past» wrote that «Yusupov was blessed with an artistic flair...» Among his 150 canvasses of special mention are the paintings by Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, David, Bouchet, Claude Lorrain's «The Morning» and «The Evening», huge equestrian portrait of Yusupov by Antoine-Jean Gros, paintings by Hubert Robert, a favourite landscapist of the Russian art collectors.
The Moscow museum of Fine Arts is the result of an almost bicentennial development of Russian enlightenment. Its creation crowns the titanic efforts of a number of generations of scientists, collectors, patrons of art, enthusiasts who believed in the great impact of art on the human thoughts and souls.
The museum has undergone numerous changes since its inception. Its collections have increased 50 times over thanks to the donations of contemporary art collectors and regular purchases. The museum carefully preserves the atmosphere of a temple of arts. Being a living entity it looks for new ways of acquainting viewers with art inviting Muscovites and guests of Moscow to expositions, round table discussions and concerts of classical music.