Life after Serov: Tretyakov Gallery will please art lovers once again

The excitement around the exhibition of artist Valentin Serov, during which lovers of Russian portraiture taken outdoors at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, has made experts talk about the cultural deficit in Russia. We are not talking about the process of door takings, which became the apogee of pandemonium, but about the lack of large-scale exhibitions. Everyone, in virtue of their professional abilities and talents, interpreted the collisions around the exhibition in different ways. Sergey Shnurov enriched the song 'At the Exhibition' with a verse about the exhibition of Serov, the Ministry of Culture connects the success of the exhibition with Vladimir Putin's visit, and the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova, stated that the museum is considering the introduction of ticket sales on sessions for those events, which are expected to enjoy extraordinary success with the public.

According to Tregulova, the first major exhibition that will open on March 22nd is the exhibition of Gely Korzhev: "The museum has been preparing this exhibition for 2.5 years. Before this, repeated attempts had been made to hold a retrospective of this quite surprising, unique, very powerful, very complex artist. And this is one of the most important projects, in my opinion, because here we do want to try to change society's attitude to the art considered to be official Soviet art. We have just opened an exhibition of Salahov. When I was the director of ROSIZO we showed a small retrospective of Viktor Popkov, which changed the attitude to the artist. With this exhibition we want to show that in the second half of the 20th century, in the framework of the official art sphere, artists were living and working in the country who, with their works, were talking about the times, like so many of their colleagues in the West and the rest of the world were talking about, and very accurately reflected the times, then it came to their relationship with the official ideology, but now we understand that it was not actually the same," she stated.

"Just come to the exhibition of Salakhov, who was elected the First Secretary of the Union of Artists three times, and look for something that is a reflection of the official Soviet ideology. You will not see anything, because all the pathos that is presented there is the pathos of all mankind, not the pathos of ideological statements," director of the Tretyakov Gallery stated.

Among the most anticipated exhibitions of the year is the project ‘English portraiture of the 16th to the 20th centuries from Elizabeth to Victoria.’ "It is very important for the Tretyakov Gallery, it's a project that we have worked on over for many years. This is an exchange with the National Portrait Gallery. In March we open an exhibition of a brilliant selection of portraits of the Russian intellectual elite, made by the best artists. And we will get exactly the same level of exhibition in Moscow. This is a very important part of the Year of Russian Literature in the UK, and of British Literature in Russia," Tregulova stated.

49 portraits of the most famous people in the history of Great Britain will arrive in Russia, including William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Walter Scott, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Burns. Among the authors of portraits are Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds and John Singer Sargent. At the same time, in London, you can see portraits of Russian writers, painted by Vasily Perov, Nikolai Ge and Mikhail Vrubel.

Ivan Aivazovsky's exhibition, dedicated to his 200th birth anniversary, which will be opened at Krymsky Val on July 28th, will also attract art lovers. With regard to Aivazovsky, resounding popularity coexists with snobbery. "There is quite a snobbish attitude to the artist as completely commercial and salon, here, too, we would like to dot the i’s, as much as is possible to do today, to dot the i’s. And to present him in a somewhat different way, in order to bring to this exhibition people whose attitude to  Aivazovsky was previously quite indifferent or even skeptical," she said.

In April, on Krymsky Val, the Tretyakov Gallery will open the exhibition ‘Basil Kondinsky. Counterpoint. Composition 6, Composition 7’. "We are doing it together with the Hermitage. The Tretyakov Gallery has Compostion 7, and the Hermitage has Composition 6. At the beginning of this exhibition ... The last time these paintings were exhibited together in 1989. At the beginning of the exhibition it will be shown at the Tretyakov Gallery at Krymsky Val, it will be accompanied by a special multimedia program and then it will be shown in the State Hermitage," the director of the Tretyakov Gallery explained.

Finally, in the autumn, the gallery will present the exhibition ‘Roma eterna – the treasures of the Vatican pinacotheca: Bellini, Raphael, Caravaggio', "which is also a partner exchange project. In exchange for this exhibition, in 2017 in the Vatican we will present an exhibition based on 85% of the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, an exhibition that represents the wing of Charles the Great, Saint Peter's Basilica, the way the Russian artists of 19th century and the early 20th century entered into a dialogue with the Holy Bible and worked with evangelical and biblical scenes," Tregulova stated.