The Perm Art Gallery is touring the New Tretyakov Gallery with the exhibition “From Icon to Avant-Garde”

The Perm Art Gallery is touring the New Tretyakov Gallery: on the occasion of its own 100th anniversary and the 300th anniversary of Perm, it is showing the exhibition “From Icon to Avant-Garde” in Moscow. This is a rare opportunity to see, among other things, the “Perm gods” – a wooden church sculpture of the 18th–19th centuries. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

Titles like “From Icon to Avant-Garde” have always gone well with export exhibitions of Russian art, which is why, unfortunately, it is mostly associated abroad only with these milestones. Now, however, it is not allowed to travel abroad at all, but the catchy name can also work within the country. Only in the case of the touring digest of the collection of the Perm Art Gallery, behind this “from… to…” there is no need to imagine some kind of forward movement, development, art history. As well as supernatural treasures in terms of the avant-garde.

Strictly speaking, the exhibition has three sections. Firstly, pre-Petrine – icons, church utensils, gold and silver embroidery starting from the 16th century, when the upper reaches of the Kama River began to be actively developed by salt industrialists, primarily the Stroganovs. Now it would be more correct to call it colonization, because they developed and appropriated lands historically inhabited by Finno-Ugric peoples, and converted the local population to Christianity. The Stroganovs built churches, established the production of church paraphernalia in their estates – the same facial embroidery, of course, according to capital samples, and orders for especially important icons were sent to the masters of the Armory Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin – such, for example, “The Trinity of the Old Testament” (1675) by Ilya Filippov, who opens the exhibition.

In complete contrast to these church delights are the famous human-sized wooden sculptures, which have become a characteristic decoration of Orthodox churches in this region, even despite the repeated ban of the Holy Synod on their use in worship. The “Perm gods” of the 18th–19th centuries were discovered during times of severe godlessness: in 1922, several such “images” were discovered in an abandoned chapel in a cemetery by local historian Nikolai Serebrennikov. Further – more: over three years, 280 such sculptures were collected during expeditions to remote villages. The unexpected array of painted wooden angels, Saviors, apostles, and saints turned out to be so enchanting that People’s Commissar Lunacharsky stood up for collecting the sculptures, and in 1928 the first catalog of these monuments was published. The museum began to store them, later the collection was replenished more than once, and currently there are about 500 wooden sculptures in the collection of the Perm Art Gallery. Until recently, part of this collection was exhibited in the most spectacular way, and for this it was worth visiting Perm: in the under-dome space of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, where the museum was located from 1932 to the present (in October of this year it began to export its collections, since The cathedral building was transferred to the church).

In the New Tretyakov Gallery they also tried to place the sculptures so that the saints, apostles and angels would look down on the viewer. But, oddly enough, when you meet their gaze, you don’t feel the proper edification: not only do the Christian characters resemble pagan idols, but they also have the faces of local residents, and clothes in the fashion of the 18th century, and naive echoes of baroque theatricality in gestures and poses. It is a pity that entire ensembles have not been preserved, and now we only have to imagine how, say, the decoration of the temple was maintained by the Passionate Angelic Rite (composition “The Crucifixion with Those Awaiting”, second half of the 18th century): the spitting image of village teenagers with clear faces, in bright long robes , belted with sashes, except that they have wings; some with a nail, some with a spear, some with a column – symbols of the last sufferings of Christ. And it was probably easier for parishioners from the remote corners of the Perm region to recognize themselves in them than in liturgical texts or the severity of icons.

A rather modest part of this unique collection is presented on Krymsky Val, but it is worth seeing, because even in Perm it will not be accessible to the public while the art gallery is moving. At least for a year: it is assumed that the new huge gallery building designed by Sergei Tchoban should open in the fall of next year.