Temples in the works of Tatyana Mavrina were “checked” with archival photographs

The artist created drawings during the Great Patriotic War

Any project related to culture and implemented in Moscow over the past two years, in one way or another, reflects the present, even while seemingly telling about the past. So the exhibition of works by the Soviet artist, graphic artist and illustrator Tatyana Mavrina seemed to be a connecting thread running through history. Mavrina created the watercolors exhibited these days in the Pushkin Museum during the Great Patriotic War – she wanted “at least on paper” to preserve unique architectural monuments that could at any moment be destroyed as a result of an enemy air raid.

Probably not everyone knows the garden pavilion of the Moscow Pushkin Museum. To get there, you need to go through the mansion on Prechistenka. Then walk along the alley of a small garden, past the imposing bronze Alexander Sergeevich and find yourself in a house with historical parquet, where a person’s foot is only allowed to step in shoe covers.

It was in this secluded corner that several dozen works of art by Tatyana Alekseevna were placed. Moreover, they all show ancient Moscow churches in comparison with archival photographs of the late 19th – first half of the 20th century: drawing – frame, drawing – frame.

The organizers of the project emphasize that drawings and photographic materials from the collection of Yuri Shmarov (1898–1989), who was a member of the Commission for the Study of Old Moscow from the 1920s and preserved for posterity the handwritten and photographic heritage of the Society for the Study of Russian Estates, are being exhibited for the first time. To one degree or another, all the objects in the exhibition reflect the disappeared capital.

Officially, Tatyana Mavrina created her paintings in order to transfer onto paper architectural monuments, which at any moment could turn into ruins as a result of an enemy air raid. But she worked, as we all understand, already in the “ashes” of the struggle against religion in the pre-war decades.

— In three years, Tatyana Alekseevna painted about a thousand works. But she could not draw only those temples that were destroyed in the 30s – they no longer existed,” explained exhibition curator Alla Rudneva.

“Which of the temples really did not survive, as Mavrina feared?” — I asked Rudneva’s colleague, museum curator Natalya Alexandrova. She explained that the damage in each case needs to be examined personally for each object: somewhere, indeed, damage could have been caused during the bombing, for example, domes were demolished.

But it is important to understand that under the USSR, many “religious buildings” were used for other purposes: they became clubs, cinemas or warehouses – at the time when Mavrina portrayed them.

The original appearance can only be seen in archival photographs, for this reason the exhibition was made “double-fold”: the drawing is a snapshot, often pre-revolutionary.

And in any case, not only the inquisitive mind of a local historian and a history buff may find all this interesting. What is unique is the meeting in one space of the painter’s gaze and a black-and-white, documentary-accurate frame with the ability to present a variety of angles.

In general, it seems incredible that the artist was allowed – even with a “patriotic sauce” – to create a whole gallery of churches: the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos in Fili, the Hieromartyr Antipius in the Kolymazhny Yard, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker in Ilyinka, Gregory of Neocessary in Polyanka, the Nativity of the Virgin in Putinki, the Beheading the chapters of John the Baptist on Kolomenskaya steep, and not only capture the “signature” St. Basil’s Cathedral and the cathedrals and towers of the Kremlin.

And almost everywhere the date of creation is indicated – 1943, a turning point, when German bombers still managed to reach the main city of the USSR.

The war works had to “lie on the table” until 1959, when some of them were shown to the public, and the Union of Artists of the USSR released the “Catalog of Paintings and Graphics by T.A. Mavrina.” The album, where the religious orientation of creativity did not have to be retouched, was published in new Russia in 2001, it was called “Moscow. Forty forty. Works of the war years.”