Translated material
No trump card
Nizhny Novgorod Museum in the Tretyakov Gallery
The excellent collection of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum arose as a result of the right alliance of culture and business. After all, the opening of the museum was timed to coincide with the All-Russian Industrial and Artistic Exhibition of 1896. His collection reflects the merchant tastes of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.When you walk through the halls of the museum in Nizhny Novgorod, you create a quite definite catalog of impressions. The beautiful iconography of the Volga masters of the Middle Ages adorned the museum thanks to the Gorodets Old Believers merchants of the early 20th century, Pyotr Ovchinnikov and Grigory Pryanishnikov. Then another large and rich section of the collection appears in memory. The Academy of Arts became the patron of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum. Thanks to the diligence of the chairman of the Society of Artists of Historical Painting, Andrei Kaverin, the museum acquired large and luxurious historical paintings, such as: “The Last Days of Dmitry the Pretender” by Karl Wenig, “The Boyars at the Window” by Konstantin Makovsky. Makovsky painted a giant canvas “Minin’s Appeal” especially for the Nizhny Novgorod fair. Nowadays, multimillion-dollar films are being made with such scope and care at Hollywood film studios. The size of the painting is 42 sq. m. The plot was selected from the Time of Troubles: an episode of the appeal of the Nizhny Novgorod headman Kozma Minin to the people demanding the creation of an anti-Polish militia is captured. At the 1896 fair, the painting was received with triumph. The Ministry of the Court bought it specifically for Nizhny Novgorod. A room was then built for the painting in the mansion of the Nizhny Novgorod head of Sirotkin. The painting is still on display there today. The tastes of academic painters, royal officials and Volga merchants largely coincided. That is why the museum has such an abundance of not only historical paintings in an academic manner, but also pretty female portraits and scenes of fairy tales, often created by the same masters, staged in the aesthetics of modernism and symbolism (the most famous is “The Flying Carpet” by Viktor Vasnetsov).
The third fundamental section for the museum and impressions about it is the Silver Age, the traditions of the World of Art and Symbolists: paintings by Borisov-Musatov, Somov, Kustodiev (Kustodiev was given by a native of Nizhny, Maxim Gorky), late, mid-20s, but very spicy, orientalist Roerich's series about Buddha Maitreya.
The fourth section is a magnificent collection of avant-garde collected with the participation of Alexander Rodchenko, with masterpieces by Malevich, Goncharova, Larionov, Rozanova, Kandinsky.
It’s interesting that after visiting the “touring” exhibition of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum in the Engineering Building of the Tretyakov Gallery, that same image, memorable from the Volga impressions, is not assembled. The Old Russian section is completely absent. Historical paintings were not brought for objective reasons (giant size) and subjective reasons (fireworks of foreign exhibitions of Russian art in different countries of the world, where all the best is brought, and Russians see empty walls). Avangard also tours the world. True, Moscow still got something from him. We were lucky only with symbolism, the Wanderers and ceremonial portraits of the 18th century. As a result, the image of another museum was drawn - without a bright and unique history, without the own destiny of the collections. They presented a general “report” set of paintings, which in a similar combination (Rokotov - Levitsky - Bryullov - Shishkin - Kramskoy - Aivazovsky - Nesterov - Serov - Korovin - Konchalovsky - Mashkov) with slight variations brings the majority of participants in the “Golden Map of Russia” project.