A worthy question – Newspaper Kommersant No. 25 (7470) of 02/10/2023

General Director of the State Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova, who held this post for eight years, since February 2015, was dismissed. The official reason is the expiration of the contract, which was last extended in 2018. Elena Pronicheva, a MGIMO graduate, former executive director of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (2013–2020) and director of the Polytechnic Museum (since December 2020), has become the new director. comments Sergey Hodnev.

The Tretyakov Gallery is not only a patterned building in Lavrushinsky lane with an adjoining Engineering building. This is the former Central House of Artists on Krymsky Val: under Zelfira Tregulova, the gallery received the building at its disposal completely, as part of a large rebranding it called it the New Tretyakov Gallery and initiated its large-scale reconstruction according to the project of the famous architect Rem Koolhaas and his bureau OMA. And a new building on Kadashevskaya Embankment: the idea itself appeared back in the 2000s, but only under the outgoing director did the construction get off the ground, and in 2024 they promised to open a new building. And the regional branches established under Mrs. Tregulova – in Samara (almost ready – the first exhibition is scheduled for the spring of 2023), Vladivostok, Kaliningrad (under construction at full speed). And the so-called small museums – the old house-museums of famous artists (suddenly it turned out that they are not only a venerable ballast, that they can also be presented interestingly) plus the newly created Museum of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov.

Here are simple numbers: in 2014, the attendance of the museum was approximately 1 million 400 thousand people. In 2015, when Mrs. Tregulova came to the State Tretyakov Gallery, more than 1 million 600 thousand. In 2017, this number exceeded 2 million. Already in the pre-pandemic 2019, it approached 3 million (2,835,836 people, to be exact) .

But it is impossible to reduce the history of the Tretyakov Gallery of the last seven years naked to quantitative indicators, even triumphant ones. How impossible it is to measure it with scandalous incidents – the vandal attack on Repinsky’s “Ivan the Terrible” (2018), the abduction of a painting by Arkhip Kuindzhi from the Russian Museum (2019), a roof leak in the building of the New Tretyakov Gallery (2020).

Let us take the incidents of other museum institutions. Here are the Moscow Kremlin Museums: a conservatively solemn showcase institution, well-known to everyone, but for decades attracting mostly tourists. Since 2003, everything suddenly began to change – museums of the Louvre level, Dresden’s “Green Vaults”, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum began to come to the Kremlin with absolutely dazzling tours, and the museum itself began to create spectacular and smart exhibitions on key historical topics (say, “Faith and power. The era of Ivan the Terrible”, 2007). Did it just happen that way? No, thanks to the same Zelfira Tregulova, who in 2002-2013 was the deputy director for exhibition work and international relations in the Kremlin museums. Here is the Rosiso Museum and Exhibition Association: there, in the 2010s, after a deep lull, there was a series of huge and resonant international projects. “Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde” (Amsterdam, Bonn and London, 2013-2014), a subtle exhibition about Andrea Palladio and Russian Palladianism (Venice and Moscow, 2015), a blockbuster “The Birth of the Space Age”, where science, technology, Russian cosmism intertwined and Russian avant-garde (London, 2015). All this, too, did not arise by itself – in 2013-2015, Tregulova headed Rosiso.

It’s not even that she is an excellent art critic: scientists do not always make ideal leaders. And not because she is a curatorial professional, of which there are terribly few in Russia: one noisy temporary exhibition is one thing, the daily routine of a massive state museum is another.

In her directorship there was a large and, it would seem, completely convincing educational mission.

The grandiose exhibitions of the main Russian artists are only one part of it and, moreover, quite predictable. Although no one could have imagined that this practice would also arouse such a rush of interest – with records and memes (“girl-girl, the queue for Serov turns into your street” – remember?).

Exhibitions in the Tretyakov Gallery showed – for the first time in its history – the treasures of the first museum collections in Europe (London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Vatican Pinakothek). The seemingly hopelessly textbook names of the history of Russian art were illuminated in a new way. They dissected Soviet cultural history (The Thaw, 2017, and the exhibition dedicated to stagnation, Never Forever, 2020). We studied the psychological, political, religious, literary circumstances of European romanticism using German and Russian material (the exhibition “Dreams of Freedom”, 2021, made jointly with the State Museum Collections of Dresden). And all this with busy parallel programs, lectures, film screenings, inclusiveness, music festivals and so on.

And yes, contemporary art was integrated into all this on an equal footing – the gallery accepted as a gift works from the collections of Marat Gelman (recognized as a foreign agent) and other collectors, made relevant exhibitions, participated in major international initiatives – the last of them, the project “Diversity. Unity”, which represented the main names of today’s European art, is a matter of the very recent past: the exhibition opened in the fall of 2021 and ended in February 2022.

But it seemed that it could not be otherwise: in the end, the founder of the Tretyakov Gallery also got from public opinion for his love for the scandalous and unreliable Wanderers. That all innovative ideas were patiently and thoroughly explained.

That attacks on the director and campaigns in social networks are one thing, but here is the result: a museum that equally succeeds in the role of a national treasure and a fashionable, open, modern institution, where young people go not at all under pressure.

Moreover, Zelfira Tregulova was by no means an inconvenient rebel, and there are also many compromise decisions on her account as a director – up to the most desperate compromise: the removal of the “Trinity” attributed to Andrei Rublev to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra for worship in the summer of 2022 (followed after this voyage, changes in the state of the icon were not presented to the general public).

It turned out, however, that all the arguments – even from statistics, even from science, even from administrative smoothness, even from common sense – no longer work.

Was a world-class authoritative specialist fired (the directors of the main museums of the Old World will confirm this reputation today) with excellent international connections? But who today needs a world class and especially international connections.

Was a person appointed to this position without a specialized education and without experience in a full-fledged art museum? Well, what to do, in the history of the Tretyakov Gallery, the following happened: in 1993, architect Valentin Rodionov was made the general director, so that he, as another “strong business executive”, would solve urgent repair and restoration issues.

I remember that once the Ministry of Culture announced that the heads of museums would be appointed according to a public procedure with the submission of applications and concepts from applicants and their public consideration – this is how it happens all over the world. The change of power in the Tretyakov Gallery was carried out almost completely non-publicly. “Almost” – because in January there was a strange story with a visitor’s complaint about the incomplete compliance of the gallery’s permanent exhibition with spiritual and moral values. There have always been many such complaints (and anyone who has taken the trouble to leaf through the book of reviews at some large exhibition knows how bizarre they can be), but for some reason this one leaked into the public space and sounded quite shortly before the current events in the leadership of the State Tretyakov Gallery . How exactly these events are connected – on this score, there are no official comments either from the Ministry of Culture or from the Tretyakov Gallery. Be that as it may, it is possible to predict with full thoroughness that now the Tretyakov Gallery will not be limited and that we are waiting for changes in the leadership of large federal museums, starting with the Pushkin Museum and the Russian Museum. True, there are no ready-made personnel, competitive procedures are also not expected.