Timur Novikov’s “New Academy” exhibition at the State Russian Museum was not opened under the pretext of non-compliance with the state task

On Wednesday, July 19, in the morning, in the social networks of St. Petersburg art critics, critics and artists, the news appeared that the vernissage of the exhibition of the State Russian Museum (SRM) “Novikov Wedge. New Academy of Fine Arts”, scheduled for this evening, will not take place. Various reasons were cited, such as the “pornography” or other “sedition” discovered in the exposition. By the middle of the day, the State Russian Museum issued information that the matter was solely in the “identification of numerous violations of the regulations for the preparation of the exhibition” and that it would be opened as soon as they were eliminated. Browser “Kommersant” understood Kira Dolinina.

Judging by the cultural news, the theater has been the most important of the arts for the past year and a half or two. The number of scandals filmed and appointed chief directors, canceled performances and criminal cases against theatrical figures is growing. Self-censorship, as a rule, is ahead of state censorship, and one denunciation of a concerned citizen is enough to ensure that the most classical performance (Rostan’s Cyrano de Bergerac, for example) is withdrawn from the repertoire.

However, museums, although in this top and in second place, are also not left to the care of the authorities and especially attentive citizens. During the year, the directors of three of the four main national museums changed, many exhibitions were closed, and even more exhibitions were not opened due to a possible (that is, as yet undetermined by anyone) inconsistency either with the staples or the moment. The Russian Museum received a new director, the last of the “big four”: Vladimir Gusev, who had been in the chair for almost 35 years changed Alla Manilova, who had never had anything to do with the history of art, until recently the Deputy Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation.

Formally, with the exhibition dedicated to the 65th anniversary of Timur Novikov, a cult figure of the Leningrad/Petersburg art of the 1980-2000s, everything should have been fine. It has been on the museum’s agenda for a long time, curated by Ekaterina Andreeva, the most influential expert on this topic in the world, most of the works have already been exhibited many times at exhibitions in the State Russian Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and in museums abroad. The exhibition is large – 80 works by 23 artists, anniversary, with a thick catalog, information partners in the form of the most state-owned media like the channel “Russia. Culture” and sponsors. And what could be wrong with it: the phenomenon that is presented at the exhibition has been for 20 years as in a textbook on the history of Russian art, Timur Novikov himself died in 2002, and although during his lifetime he was a troublemaker and an influential “trendsetter”, after the past two decades, you can hardly find harmful topical allusions in his “Academy”. And the ideological affinity with Alexander Dugin in the last years of the artist’s life in the current context looks like only a merit.

But what today cannot cause a scandal, the opening of a case or a prosecutor’s check? This is what all interested parties suspected, who learned on the morning of July 19 about the cancellation of the exhibition. Witnesses who refused to give their names said that the director Alla Manilova personally sealed the exhibition halls. Exhibition participant Olga Tobreluts wrote that “the catalog is prohibited for sale.” Another participant in the exhibition, “professor” of the “New Academy” Oleg Maslov, told Kommersant that he had learned that his paintings had become one of the “stumbling blocks” in the history of the exhibition. With the same degree of probability, the reason for the closure could be the work of Olga Tobreluts, and Bella Matveeva, and Georgy Guryanov, and Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, who had little to do with the Academy and did not approve of its postulates, but hung out together and exhibited, of course with them often. And these are only the first names of the composition of the exposition. Perhaps only Novikov himself at the exhibition does not have large nudes, which, in their classical beauty, were so loved by the “new academicians”.

But if naked bodies are considered “pornography”, as observers suggested, then the Russian Museum urgently needs to close its main halls – those where “The Last Day of Pompeii” and “Phryne”: that’s where the expanse of arms, legs, backs, breasts, stomachs and buttocks. Or what was normal in the bashful 19th century has now turned into horror and filth? There is no logic here, just as there is no logic in shying away from the homoerotic culture, to which many artists of the Novikov circle belonged. After all, Tchaikovsky, Dürer or Wilde have not yet been banned, have they?

It turns out that anything can be closed today. Reasons are not needed. And society does not even require them.

Here is the Russian Museum answered the request “Fontanki”that the problem is “failure to fulfill the state task. Also, a violation of the requirements for the preservation of exhibits was revealed, in particular, the lack of showcases for exhibiting costumes.

The state task “also” can explain everything, if such a hunt comes. In this case, there are too many works from private collections at the exhibition. And how could it be otherwise, if in the 1990s museum purchases were modest due to minimal funding? If we follow the logic of this point of the state task, museums cannot hold large exhibitions of contemporary art at all – simply because there cannot be much of it in state funds yet, that’s why it is modern. The museum’s explanations here are hard to take seriously. More informative is that part of the commentary that the exhibition will be “brought into line” and opened a little later. The head of the department of the latest trends, Alexander Borovsky, is called upon to correct everything. But it is difficult to correct contemporary art, which, if it is of high quality, only says that it is “inconvenient” and “dangerous”, today’s state museums with today’s state task cannot cope with it.