Museums: Large-scale exhibitions, devoted to 100th anniversary of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow

On May 31, 2012 it turns 100 years starting with the opening of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. New large-scale projects of the Museum are devoted to this date.

April 27, 2012 opened an exhibition “The Pushkin Museum turns 100”. The exhibition covers all pages of the history of the Museum: from the discussion of the idea of its establishment in letters of professor of the Moscow State University I. V. Tsvetaev, the fund-raising for its construction, which became possible thanks to Y. S. Nechaev-Maltsev and other Russian patrons, before the opening of the first permanent exhibition of moulds, new original acquisitions from the SMNWA dissolved by Stali (The State Museum of New Western Art); from the innovative exhibitions “Moscow-Paris” and “Pablo Picasso” before the creation of “museum town” on Volkhonka with the participation of renowned architect Norman Foster.

In one exhibition space there are displayed paintings, drawings, sculpture, numismatics, and decorative and applied art, from the collection of the Pushkin Stat Museum. Besides, the exhibition features unique photographs, documents and newsreel footage, as well as two large layouts: the building of the State Museum of Fine Arts which houses an exhibition of the New Western Art and a layout of “museum town” on Volkhonka, proposed by N. Foster. Special sections of the exhibition placed on the colonnade are devoted to different areas of activity of the museum: promotional work, research and development work, development of archaeology, restoration, exhibition and innovative music projects, as well as working with children.

The conceptual design of the exhibition space with the use of the latest multimedia technologies is performed by the Museum staff in cooperation with the famous designer of Moscow Yury Avvakumov. In the course of the exhibition the photo project “Museum. Photographers’ view” is also exhibited, where the works of famous photographers of the 20th century, depicting the history of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts are presented. 

Also, April 27, 2012 opened an exhibition “Imaginary Museum” – the most ambitious and unusual project of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in the year of its centennial. Having borrowed for the exhibition title the name of the work by French writer and culture expert of the 20th century, Andre Malraux, the museum enriched its permanent exhibition with the missing masterpieces from the collections of major museums in the world and private collections with which the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has long-standing friendship and partnership. These are the art collections from Dresden and Berlin State Museums, the Louvre Museum, Musee d’Orsay and centre Pompidou, Tate Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, the Prado Museum and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the State Hermitage. These are also museums with which the partnership has been established recently: Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna, the Museum of the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Carrara Academy in Bergamo, the national Museum in Stockholm, the national Museum in Warsaw, the Royal Museum of fine arts in Brussels, other museums and private collections.

According to I. A. Antonova, the director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, “inviting our colleagues to participate in the exhibition, we would like, first of all, to present our Museum as the collection of monuments of the world art, as a place of meeting and a dialogue of cultures. Therefore, we have placed monuments not in the same space, but in the halls of the Museum, corresponding to them by time and origin. Special efforts were made to show the era and artists missing in our collections”.

In total, the project “Imaginary Museum” presents 46 masterpieces from 27 states and private collections of the world. These works enrich the permanent collection of the two buildings of the Museum and allow the viewer to evaluate the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in a global context, take new look at the history of Fine Arts, presented at the Museum.