The Pushkin Museum will engage in swamp science – MK

Next year there will be no contemporary art at the Moscow Pushkin Museum venues, but the regional branches will be different

At the end of the year, the Pushkin Museum summed up its results and announced what to expect next year. In short, a lot was in limbo, including the long history with the museum town, which should unite all the buildings of the Pushkin Museum on Volkhonka into a single quarter. The long-awaited renovation of the Main Building, which was built more than 100 years ago and since then has never been closed for a full-scale reconstruction, has already been postponed several times, and here it is again. It will close for renovations no earlier than 2026. However, there is some good news.

In the office of the director of the Pushkin Museum, Elizaveta Likhacheva, there is a painting with the text: “The museum is people.” And the right hand of the head of the Pushkin Museum, talking about how young people are attracted to the museum, quoted one of the teenage visitors: “I thought that the museum was something old and dead, but it turned out that it is alive and you can communicate with it.” However, not a single project by living artists will happen at Pushkinsky next year. There will be research – the year will open with an exhibition on the restoration of two versions of Claude Monet’s “Rouen Cathedral”, which are stored in the Pushkin Museum. There will be Italian still lifes of the Baroque era, Flemish still lifes of the 17th century, architectural graphics and paintings dedicated to Rome of different eras, an exhibition for the anniversary of avant-garde artist Varvara Stepanova and “Unknown Shchukin”, where the emphasis will be on his collection of Russian and Oriental art, and not on the sensational French impressionists: there are many plans, but there are no plans for contemporaries, whom the viewer was accustomed to seeing in the museum in the era of Marina Loshak.

Another thing is the regional branches of the Pushkin Museum, which were formerly part of the NCCA (State Center for Contemporary Art), where everything is the other way around. In Tomsk, for example, where the historic House of Officers is being converted into a museum building, they promise to hold an exhibition “Swamp Science” in 2025, where modern artists, in alliance with scientists, explore the murky eco-environment. Perhaps this application aroused the most emotions among the assembled art journalists.

By the way, in addition to Tomsk, the Pushkin Museum is engaged in the reconstruction of buildings in other regions, in particular, in Kaliningrad and Vladikavkaz. It is still unclear with the Yekaterinburg branch: they promised to provide another building to replace the previous one, which was sold by the city at auction to a private company, but have not yet decided on the location. The same thing is in St. Petersburg – the issue with the branch in the Northern capital is suspended. Nevertheless, Pushkinsky is developing his distant “fiefdoms” and plans, for example, to bring the “Ancient Egypt” project to Vladivostok and Novosibirsk, which was successfully held in Moscow.

As for Moscow, as the first deputy director of the Pushkin Museum, Daria Parfenenko, told MK, the restoration of the Vyazemsky-Dolgoruky estate, which is located behind the main building, may be completed no earlier than the end of 2025. And this date is quite arbitrary. This is where they plan to move the collection from the main building. Reconstruction of the 18th-century estate began in 2014. They plan to open a gallery of old masters there. While work continues in the historical building, this means that there is nowhere to move the exhibits from the main building. Accordingly, the building on Volkhonka will not be able to undergo repairs yet – at least until 2026.

Before the renovation, they promise to remake the permanent exhibition, which presents paintings from the Italian, Spanish and French schools of the 17th–18th centuries. Marina Loshak entrusted the re-exposition of the halls of art by old masters to set designer and curator Patrick Urcade, but his author’s concept was not a success. The avant-garde stands themselves look interesting, but they interfere with the perception of the works of the classics; moreover, because of it, the permanent exhibition has been reduced by a third. Classic hanging will be returned in four stages, starting in the spring of next year. On the one hand, this is for the better, on the other hand, it is better to experiment and fail in order to redo it better than to completely abandon new practices. Now it is obvious that Pushkinsky, like other museums, is being cautious. However, he hardly has a choice.