All-artistic headman – Newspaper Kommersant No. 223 (7424) dated 01.12.2022

The Engineering Building of the Tretyakov Gallery is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Igor Grabar, an art historian, artist, restorer, and functionary. About the facets of the biography of one of the main figures of the national artistic culture of the first half of the last century tells Alexey Mokrousov.

There are times when the ability to safely sit on two chairs becomes a particularly sought-after talent. As an artist and scientist, Igor Grabar (1871-1960) reached the heights of both Imperial and Stalinist Russia. An academician of two academies of arts, imperial and Soviet, and also of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, he was famous for still lifes and studied art history, built as a professional architect and organized restoration work, saving icons and frescoes from churches and monasteries. At a large-scale retrospective in the Engineering Corps, they show his paintings, created over more than half a century, and icons and copies of them, made by his order for display abroad, and paintings purchased when he was the head of this very Tretyakov Gallery. He led for a long time, from 1913 to 1925: under the tsarist regime he was called a trustee, he himself believed that in Moscow “after the mayor there is no more prominent figure”, under the Bolshevik regime he was actually called the director; discontent caused serious rather under the first rulers than under the second. In one of the letters, Grabar remarked about the Tretyakov Gallery: “Not a museum, but a shed, almost the Shchukin Museum,” in the sense that they show without a scientific plan, Serov is scattered over seven halls, Repin – nine, Vasnetsov – ten. He started with a re-hangout, with a rejection of the exhibition principles of the founder of the gallery, ended (to the indignation of those who preferred the Wanderers) with the purchase of modernists, from Lentulov to Falk – on the second floor of the Engineering Corps they remind of his purchasing policy, here is Boris Grigoriev’s Concierge, and Still Life. Camellia” by Ilya Mashkov.

Innovations were outraged, the Moscow City Duma was already involved in the issue of hanging; colleagues were divided – “for” were Surikov, Shekhtel and Tatlin, against – Arkhipov, Korovin and Pasternak Sr. Grabar resisted, he generally managed to get out of the water dry. Maybe the breed had an effect: Grabar’s parents were so actively involved in the political life of Hungary that they were persecuted, but they did not deviate from their principles. Education also helped: like many people of art at the turn of the century, from Diaghilev to Kandinsky, Grabar studied to be a lawyer and, unlike the same Diaghilev, went to classes and studied logic. Carried away by painting, he went to Repin, fled from him to Paris and Munich. In Bavaria, he became a student, then a headman, and then a co-owner of the school of Anton Azhbe, studied with Yavlensky and Verevkina, but still preferred teaching in Russia. As a critic, he published in the “World of Art”, as a publisher – he tried to continue it with the journal “Herald of Art” (so, alas, it did not come out), as a scientist – he edited the first multi-volume “History of Russian Art”, as “just an artist” – became late adept of impressionism. He created excellent still lifes and landscapes, especially winter ones, such as “February Blue” and “March Snow” (both 1904), and could remain the author of a limited number of memorable works.

But to his misfortune under Stalin, he became a big boss, a headman of scientific and artistic life. He founded and directed many things, including the creation of the already new, Soviet “History of Russian Art”; the hall, which recreates the atmosphere of his study, is intimate and touching, although only a tiny part of Grabar’s works is shown here. What a contrast to the twists and turns of art politics: his canvases, looking more and more lifeless, were widely distributed throughout the USSR as a new artistic norm. Let us suppose that Grabar succeeded in pretty girls, in his Svetlana (1933) there is something that today you perceive as a pure and emblematic “style of the 30s”. But much of the later work causes a feeling of awkwardness.

And the portraits of contemporaries, from the harpist Dulova to the academicians, are mostly the icy Stalinist Empire style. Orders were chronically unsuccessful for him, which is proved by the portraits of the leaders: the author could only work by inspiration. Against the backdrop of books, Lenin was frankly dull, and “Lenin at the Direct Wire”, which was written six years later, is so tortured that the picture is now only reproduced in the catalog. In addition, attempts to vacillate along with the party line had an effect, and were sometimes grotesque. Thus, in Lenin at the Direct Wire, a bearded telegraph operator hands Ilyich a telegraph tape. Initially, the character was beardless, Grabar copied him from Lenin’s secretary Nikolai Gorbunov, who became the rector of the Moscow Higher Technical School and an academician, was arrested and shot in 1938. At some point, Grabar gave him a beard – perhaps it was the timely advice of Trotsky’s wife Natalya Sedova, who after the revolution was in charge of the museum department of the People’s Commissariat for Education and with whom he was friends, but after Gorbunov’s rehabilitation he did not “shave off” her. And fluctuations have limits.

The exhibition does not deal with problematic topics either, for example, the vague role of the protagonist in the history of the sale of museum heritage or, for example, his relationship with Petrov-Vodkin, also a tragic short story about friendship and the ability to sacrifice it.

At the same time, the curators selected works from many collections, including private ones, the catalog is full of unique photographs from the Tretyakov Gallery and remarkable details of the museum’s history. In the late 1920s, Grabar complained in one of his letters that there was only one of his things in the Russian Museum, while there were so many in the Tretyakov Gallery! Now about a dozen of his works have been brought to Moscow from St. Petersburg, including Delphinium (1908), which came from the Ryabushinsky collection to the Tretyakov Gallery, and from there transferred to Leningrad in 1930. Grabar himself in the early 30s quit where he could, became almost a hermit, and then returned to public work. It was then that his cherished dream came true. Back in the 20s, he, a sincere workaholic, dreamed of an Academy of Arts that would pay salaries to 50 selected artists, and then the best of the chosen ones for the year would be selected for museums, government organizations and workers’ clubs. In 1947, the academy was finally formed, Grabar was immediately elected to its membership, and he immediately painted himself in a fur coat as if in the yard of 1913.

It is not clear how with the clubs, but it was the self-portrait of the lordly Grabar in a fur coat that was reproduced in 1972 on a postage stamp in a multi-million circulation. Did he dream about it too? The USSR Post will no longer respond.