RUSSIAN CLASSICS FROM THE CHELYABINSK MUSEUM OF ARTS
The restoration of the Chelyabinsk Art Gallery began in 1946; its second birth took place on February 2, 1952 in a building in the style of rational modernism, built according to the design of architect A.A. Fedorov. It is interesting to note that during the restoration period, the opening of a branch of the State Tretyakov Gallery in Chelyabinsk was seriously discussed, and this building was chosen as the most appropriate art museum for its parameters and location in the city.
Postwar receipts from the center enriched collections of Russian pre-revolutionary and Soviet art. The collection of Western European art has grown thanks to the transfer of works from the GMA. A large collection of paintings and engravings was obtained from the AS Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin. With the work of Japanese artists in it, the Chelyabinsk Museum began the formation of a collection of Oriental art. On the basis of a donation from the State Museum of Ceramics and the “Kuskovo Manor of the 18th Century”, as well as from the Novosibirsk Art Gallery, a collection of arts and crafts was created. Collections of art crafts from the Southern Urals were formed from local sources: cast iron, Zlatoust steel engraving, and folk art. In the 1960s, the collection of the oldest South Ural museum reflected the historical stages, art styles, trends, trends and works of the masters who made up the glory and pride of Russian and foreign art schools, starting from the 16th century. In the following decades there was an expansion of collections. In the 1960s and 1990s, a collection of art from the Urals region was completed. Currently, the collection of the Chelyabinsk Regional State Museum of Art has more than 14,000 works.
For 50 years, the collection of Russian classical painting is the core of the permanent museum exhibition. Each stage of the history of art of the XVIII – beginning of the twentieth century is represented by typical and characteristic works of Russian artists, as well as Russian ones.
Invariably reigns in the exhibition of Russian painting “Portrait of Empress Elizabeth Alekseevna” [1], performed by French artist J.L. Monier in 1805 by order of the President of the Academy of Arts Count A.S. Stroganov for his Petersburg palace. In 1919, paired portraits of Elizabeth and Alexander I were transferred from the Stroganov Palace to the Winter Palace; in 1931, the portrait of the Empress for unknown reasons followed from the Hermitage to the Tretyakov Gallery. In 1960, the journey continued further to the East, to the Southern Urals, where she finally found her refuge and became one of the compositional and stylistic rods of the museum exposition, an example of the ceremonial palace style of the heyday of Russian noble culture. With her irresistible beauty and personal qualities, Elizabeth invariably attracted the attention and love of artists, patriotic reformers, politicians, she was praised by poets, loved by the people, and patronized the arts. With life and mysterious, like Alexander I, the death of the Empress is connected a lot of secret and legendary. The iconography of the images of Elizabeth is vast, but without exaggeration it can be said that the crown of her image in painting is a portrait from the collection of the Chelyabinsk Museum of Art, performed in the style of classicism with elements of romanticism.
Unfortunately, the large size of the portrait and its state of preservation, as well as the large-format canvas of the great student A.A. Ivanov, a Moscow artist S.P. Postnikov’s “Hector’s Farewell to Andromache” (1863), received in 1960 from the State Tretyakov Gallery, did not allow these remarkable paintings to be included in the exposition of the exhibition “The Golden Map of Russia”. But viewers could see other rariters: the self-portrait of D.G. Levitsky and his portrait of his wife N.Ya. Levitskaya; genre portraits – peasant types A. G. Venetsianova and V.А. Tropinin; rare in its plot and motive in the works of I.K. Aivazovsky’s landscape of the famous marine painter; portraits by VG Perov; carefully, with great skill, painted the portrait of an old woman by V.O. Sherwood – author of the architectural project of the Historical Museum; portrait of Baroness S.V., received from the Tretyakov Gallery Staal von Holstein, performed by I.K. Makarov. An unexpected discovery for many were the works of artists of the Makovsky family – Vladimir, Konstantin and Alexandra; the painting “Belated” (1889) N.G. Bogdanov. And what kind of gratifying impressions filled the soul with landscapes, portraits and still lifes created by Russian artists associated with Moscow and French painting traditions: V.D. Polenov, S.Yu. Zhukovsky, P.I. Petrovichev, F.A. Malyavin.
The image of Alexander Nevsky, executed not earlier than 1724, and the cub-futuristic portrait of Tatlin and Pandora (1915), written by V.Ye. Pestel – these are conditional boundaries of the exposition of works from the collection of the Chelyabinsk Museum of Art, which discovered typical and unique phenomena of Russian painting in the collection of the South Ural Museum and could have a symbolic name: “From parsuna to avant-garde”.
