Memorable Dates of Russia: Exhibition “Alexey Shchusev. Architect, painter, director. Marking the 150th anniversary” presented in Moscow

The exhibition Alexey Shchusev. Architect, painter, director. Marking the 150th anniversary has opened in the Tretyakov Gallery, in the building on Lavrushinsky Lane (Moscow).

The exposition features over 130 pieces of graphics, over 150 photographs and documents.

The new exhibition of the State Tretyakov Gallery presents the creative heritage of Alexey Viktorovich Shchusev (1873-1949), one of the biggest Russian architects and, most importantly for the Tretyakov Gallery, an excellent painter, whose architectural working sketches and drawings are of the highest quality of execution and have individual artistic value. According to his teacher I. Y. Repin, Schusev was one of the best artists of the era.

The exposition at the Tretyakov Gallery opens a kind of “exhibition marathon” marking the 150th anniversary of the architect, which will be celebrated in 2023. The project is an attempt to look at the figure of the outstanding architect in a new light: the central theme of the exhibition is the Museum, the creation of which was the purpose and meaning that determined the course of Shchusev’s thoughts throughout his life.

The exhibition became possible thanks to the large acquisitions of Shchusev’s drawings over the past 9 years. Specialists of the Tretyakov Gallery selected for their collections about 200 graphic sheets associated mainly with the construction of the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, which once was a branch of the restoration workshops of the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Kazansky Railway Station, in the building of which the architect was planning to open a museum dedicated to its construction.

Alexay Shchusev can rightly be named the creator of museums. He had a lot of experience in museum design, when he was often the ideologist and author of the concept. Both creative hypostases of Shchusev – an architect and a museum curator – intertwined during his work at the Tretyakov Gallery, first as director (1926-1928), and then as chief architect (1928-1929).

The exhibition showcases sketches, drawings and other working materials for Shchusev’s most notable creations of temple and civil architecture in Moscow – the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent and the Kazansky Railway Station.

The exhibition will run until May 14, 2023.