Real and virtual masterpieces

The exhibition “Seeing the Unknown. Painting and Sculpture of the 17th – 21st Centuries from the Funds of the Tretyakov Gallery”. More than 120 works from the gallery’s collection are presented. The idea of ​​the exhibition came about thanks to the My Tretyakov Gallery project, a digital educational platform that provides everyone with wide access to the museum’s collection. The online project provides an opportunity to see the familiar masterpieces of famous artists from an unexpected perspective and discover new works that are usually kept in the museum’s storerooms.

The exhibition “Seeing the Unknown…” is a continuation of the project “My Tretyakov Gallery. From virtual to real”, the first part of which ended in February 2023. “My Tretyakov Gallery” is a large-scale digital project that provides everyone with wide access to the museum’s collection. It was launched in 2021 to promote works of fine art stored in the collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. Today, the project brings together more than 12,000 registered users who are expanding their knowledge of Russian art, forming their own digital collections, and discovering unknown masterpieces online.

The large-scale exhibition invites art lovers to “see the unknown” and get acquainted with the works of painting and sculpture by outstanding artists and little-known authors of the 17th-21st centuries. Most of the works included in the exhibition project are kept in the museum’s funds: they cannot be found in the halls of the main exhibition, they rarely participate in exhibitions.

Some of the presented works are shown for the first time. The works are selected according to the genre principle: architectural views and images of cities; interior, household and historical genres. Using the method of comparison, viewers will see how the same motif was developed by artists of different eras. The exhibition side by side works of Fyodor Alekseev and Wassily Kandinsky, Carl Baudry and Aristarkh Lentulov, Natalia Goncharova and Alexei Venetsianov. Pictures that are close in plot, due to time differences, differ in plastic language and color scheme. These comparisons help to take a fresh look at famous works. Of all types of pictorial art, the everyday genre most accurately conveys the character of the era. The choice of theme or the artist’s response to certain historical problems determines his attitude to his time.

The exhibition presents a wide variety of genre themes: starting with the theme of childhood, presented in the works of Dmitry Levitsky, Vasily Perov, Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky, or family relationships, displayed in the paintings of Nikolai Nevrev and Vasily Pukirev, including festive festivities at Konstantin Makovsky and Alexander Shevchenko, and ending with acutely social stories created by Geliy Korzhev and Irina Shevandronova in the second half of the 20th century. Historical paintings by artists Andrei Ryabushkin and Grigory Sedov immerse the viewer in the life of Moscow in the 17th century, and the work of Karl Hun – in the tragic events of Europe in the 16th century. One of the important characteristics of the era, a kind of portrait of the time, has always been the work of the interior genre.

At the exhibition, he is represented mainly by the works of such iconic artists of the twentieth century as Konstantin Istomin, Nikolai Andronov, Illarion Golitsyn, Mikhail Roginsky. For the first time, unique photographs of Art Nouveau interiors, designed by the artists of the World of Art association Alexander Benois, Konstantin Korovin, Lev Bakst, Alexander Golovin and Igor Grabar, are shown. The sculptural section of the exposition consists of works by artists of the 18th – 20th centuries – from Fedot Shubin to Igor Shelkovsky. Porcelain compositions by Alexei Sotnikov, marked by numerous international awards, are shown among works rarely seen at exhibitions.

Irina Shvedova.

Author’s photo