The Perm Gallery showed its gods at the Tretyakov Gallery: the treasures of the Kama

Savior in prison and forbidden outpost

The exhibition “From Icon to Avant-garde” opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Perm State Gallery and the 300th anniversary of Perm. However, the true reason for the arrival of treasures, which previously almost never left the city on the banks of the Kama, is different. The museum closes at the beginning of October in order to eventually acquire a new building, which is still under construction – it is promised to open on the territory of the Shpagin plant in a year. The Transfiguration Cathedral, which the museum had occupied since 1933, was returned to the church. Instead of letting the exhibits gather dust in storage rooms, they decided to show them to other cities.

The Perm gallery has something to be proud of – the museum showed its best exhibits in Vladivostok in August, and now they have arrived in Moscow. In short, they traveled thousands of kilometers before reaching the capital. It is a pity that after such an adventure, for the sake of masterpieces from different eras and styles, they did not come up with any special exhibition solution, although the presented works deserve it. The exhibits were placed without any artifice against the backdrop of white walls on two floors of halls No. 80–82, connected by a staircase.

The exhibition opens with skillful facial embroidery and icons from the 17th century. This is Russian baroque. Among them, it is worth highlighting the icon of the Great Martyr Barbara with a difficult fate. The icon was painted by order of the Stroganovs for the Church of the Annunciation in Solvychegorsk. Over time, the temple began to deteriorate, and in order to raise money for repairs, the Synod decided to sell 200 icons. So they ended up with the merchant and Old Believer Nikolai Papulin, who bought them for the chapel in Sudislavl. A few years later, during the campaign against the Old Believers, Papulin was exiled to a monastery, and his fortune and icons were confiscated. Having learned about this, Count Sergei Stroganov filed a petition for the return of “monuments of the Christian deanery of our ancestors” to him: he managed to return the icon and place it in a new church at the Ochersky plant. After the revolution, the image of the martyr Varvara ended up in a museum, and later, during restoration, it was discovered that the middle part of the icon was painted in the 15th century (Rostov school), and the painting in the margins was dated to the 19th. Each exhibit at the exhibition has its own complex history. They have one thing in common – at one time they all survived persecution, and every thing is a masterpiece.

The first section is the most modest. The extensive collection of icon paintings of the Perm Gallery is represented by only five images, including two by the master of the Armory Chamber, Semyon Khromy. Only five icons of his writing are known, four of them are kept in Perm. There is also a stunning Old Testament “Trinity” by icon painter Ilya Filippov, who was also in the Armory Chamber. This is the only work of his that has survived.

The central part of the exhibition is devoted to unique wooden temple sculpture of the 17th–18th centuries. There are only 36 carved painted figures, among which the most famous is “The Savior in Prison.” The style of the sculptures is revolutionary for its era. It contains echoes of Western European baroque and pagan culture. At the beginning of the 18th century, the church banned three-dimensional images of saints, but it failed to eradicate the tradition of carving gods from wood. Some of these images were miraculously saved. First from the persecutors of the 18th century, then during revolutionary times.

The lower floor of the exhibition presents no less beautiful and suffered “icons” of the Russian avant-garde. Here are works by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Robert Falk “Landscape”, Lyubov Popova, Ivan Klyun, Alexander Rodchenko, Vasily Kamensky and David Burliuk. Some of them appeared in Perm during the years of traveling exhibitions of avant-garde artists, others were transferred during the redistribution of museum funds. Amazingly, when avant-garde art began to be persecuted for “formalism,” the museum staff managed not only to preserve these masterpieces, but to leave them on permanent display in the gallery, which now had to leave the familiar walls of the Transfiguration Cathedral.