The Tretyakov Gallery showed the death masks of great people

Life in the footprints of death

For the first time, the Tretyakov Gallery shows one of its most closed collections – a collection of death masks of great people. Before us are casts from the faces, often made from the still warm bodies of those who played an important role in history and culture, and next to them – for comparison – their portraits or sculptures. Here we come face to face with Peter I and Pushkin, Surikov and Tretyakov, Tolstoy and Gorky, Lenin and Stalin, Vrubel and Mukhina, Chkalov and Eisenstein. The exhibition in the Engineering Corps was called “In memorial. Stopped time.

The first sensation from the “vault” the size of two floors – dumbfounded. It is calm here, like in a cemetery, and the color of the sea wave, in which the walls are painted, makes you remember the catchy Latin phrase – memento mori. Here it is impossible not to think about the fact that we are all perishable, and yet after death a memory remains about a person, which, sometimes, is rewritten and mythologized. At the exhibition, you can see this on “natural” examples. The exposition allows not only to see how historical characters actually looked, but also to evaluate the work of the masters who made the casts. For example, the death mask of Peter I is gold and decorated with a wreath of laurel leaves. The emperor was supposed to remain great even after death. And the king died hard – the agony lasted 8 days, which is read in the cast, which fixed the swelling of the face.

Here is the death mask of Vladimir Mayakovsky – from her goosebumps. More precisely, two masks. The first was made by the sculptor Konstantin Lutsky, but unsuccessfully. He tore off a piece of skin from the poet’s left cheek, and the cast came out expressionless. But Sergei Merkulov, who ended up in Mayakovsky’s room a few hours after the tragedy, made a very skillful and accurate cast. Each wrinkle is reflected in the sculpture. By the way, it was Merkulov who brought the art of the death mask to perfection (unlike Lutsky, Merkulov smeared the skin of the deceased with Vaseline before applying the plaster-impregnated fabric on the face). In the cast, post-mortem injuries of the cheek were also imprinted, but the nose rolled to one side is more shocking. This mask was first shown in the 1990s and became a sensation – many thought that the injury was indicative of a violent death. In addition, the gun was found in the right hand, although it was believed that the poet was left-handed. Subsequently, it was proved that Mayakovsky owned the right hand no worse than the left, and his nose was broken, because after the shot he fell face down on the floor.

Another striking mask was removed by the same Merkulov from the face of Vera Mukhina. It has a completely different energy. A thin Greek nose, a calm face, there are even natural eyelashes on the mask, so Mukhina resembles a sleeping beauty, albeit not young (she died at 64). But the future author of the legendary sculpture “Worker and Collective Farm Girl”, a 22-year-old girl, got into a terrible accident: she crashed into a tree on a sled at full speed. “The eyes were filled with blood, it seemed that the skull was cracked. I ran my hand over my forehead and face. The hand did not find the nose. The nose was torn off,” she recalled. Mukhina was given ten stitches, then she went to Paris to get plastic surgery and “return her face.” She underwent 7 operations (according to other sources – 9). One of the most famous portraits by Mikhail Nesterov shows that the nose is crooked. That, however, did not prevent her personal happiness. The main thing is that that difficult experience tempered the character of the girl, and even in Paris she was able to visit the workshops of sculptors, learn, and absorb the innovative trends of French art. So, if it were not for the story with the nose, maybe there would not have been a great Mukhina. But by the end of his life, there was almost no trace left of his youthful trauma. Husband, doctor-innovator Alexei Zamkov did his best? By the way, it is believed that it was he, the creator of the world’s first industrial hormone therapy drug “Gravidan”, which helped almost all diseases, was the prototype of Professor Preobrazhensky from Bulgakov’s story “Heart of a Dog”.

The face of Valery Chkalov, who died as a result of a terrible accident, is noticeably different from the photographs and looks unnaturally stretched, and the death mask of Maxim Gorky is unusually neat and peaceful. The artist Vasily Chekrygin occupied a special place at the exhibition – his death mask was donated to the Tretyakov Gallery last year by art critic Andrei Sarabyanov. The name of the author of the cast is unknown, and there are many white spots in the biography of the artist himself, who tragically died at the age of 25, hit by a train. Only recently, specialists began to show and comprehend his mystical graphics, rediscovering the genius of the artist, who combined avant-garde ideas with classical European traditions in his drawings. Chekrygin’s mask is shown among black and white graphics depicting distorted faces and bodies of people. In the 1920s, he wrote the pangs of life – a second before death.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29026 dated May 11, 2023

Newspaper headline:
Life in the footprints of death