Art : Exhibitions in Moscow

Father and son: with Alexei the Russian village and its people, with Igor a language of signs continuing the nonconformist line. A retrospective of work made in different years and different countries. Curated by Marina Gurevich, a scholar of the Leningrad underground.

A hundred artists, designers and makers from across Russia, chosen by the project’s curator. This year’s theme is the image of the future held by those who work with the inheritance of their forebears. In the exhibition complex on Revolution Square.

For the seventy-fifth year of Viktor Neplyuev, chief artist of the Gzhel works from 1984 to 1989. Small genre figures in series: porcelain with underglaze painting, made by a man who knows the limits of the craft from inside.

Allegory as the language of the eighteenth century: what the figures meant that Pyotr Borisovich Sheremetev ordered for the palace and the park. A small show in the Portrait Room, and the key to what stands along the avenues at Kuskovo.

Iranian painting of the 18th and 19th century, recently acquired by the museum. A small show in the main building on Nikitsky Boulevard.

The whole Zverev holding laid out at once, with no route built through it: the line between store and display has been removed on purpose. The museum’s first project in its rebuilt space and the sum of ten years of Natalia Opaleva’s collecting.

Praskovya Kovalyova-Zhemchugova: daughter of a serf blacksmith, singer of the Sheremetev theatre, later the wife of Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev. Portraits of different years and things from her rooms; a summer show in the palace.

Work by the sculptor who carved quebracho and algarrobo: in his hands wood holds shapes impossible in marble.

Tretyakov bought icons in the nineties, a few years before his death. Of this part of his collecting least is known. Sixty-odd panels of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, many of them shown for the first time: the Novgorod «Predsta Tsaritsa» of the fifteenth century, the Igorevskaya Virgin of Tenderness from the beginning of the sixteenth, work of the tsars’ and the Stroganov masters, got together with the help of dealers and of men who knew old things. Apart from these it is told how the icons came into the rooms of the Gallery and how they travelled Europe in 1929–1932; second floor of the Engineering Building.

Fyodor Pryanishnikov, a Petersburg postal official, and Kozma Soldatyonkov, a Moscow merchant and Old Believer, were collecting Russian painting before the Tretyakovs began. Both collections went to the Rumyantsev Museum, and when that was broken up in the twenties they were scattered among the Tretyakov Gallery and fifty-four museums besides. They cannot be put together again. The hang follows the one made before the revolution by Nikolai Romanov, keeper of the Rumyantsev Museum, and a route through the permanent display leads to other things out of the same collections: Tropinin’s Lacemaker, Fedotov’s Breakfast of an Aristocrat, Kiprensky’s Readers of Newspapers in Naples — third floor of the Engineering Building.

Over seven hundred objects: sculpture and painting of Russian Buddhism, almost none of it shown before. More than a hundred sculptures were conserved for the opening.

More than 150 sheets that almost never leave the store: pastel sheds under light and movement and is rarely shown. Halls 49–54.

The first large exhibition of the new Kadashevskaya wing: the flower in Russian art from the icon to the 20th century.

A hundred and forty-odd works by Viktor Borisov-Musatov, brought together out of twenty collections. The Pool and The Emerald Necklace hang side by side; beside them the studies that are ordinarily kept in the reserves, and by these one sees how many attempts the painter made before he arrived at the picture. Singly he is shown often enough. Together, almost never. The Kadashevskaya building holds no collection of its own; in November what has been gathered will go back to its museums.

Danish porcelain from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the second half of the twentieth — a monographic project the museum has never attempted before. The core was gathered by the Museum of Ceramics from the 1920s, when the things of Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish princess Dagmar, were handed over from the Armoury. In the Great Stone Orangery.

No separate ticket is asked for. Nor were rooms set aside: the route is laid through the permanent display in Lavrushinsky, and nothing was brought here for the occasion — the work has been done in the labels, where beside Savrasov's "The Rooks Have Returned" and Fedotov's "The Major's Courtship" it is now said out of whose hands the picture came into the gallery. The collections of Pryanishnikov and Soldatyonkov are shown whole next door, in the Engineering Building, where the ticket is paid for separately; here in Lavrushinsky only what entered the permanent display is left of them. Those pictures hang beside the ones Tretyakov bought himself.

The plant world of the estate in the second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century: what the Kuskovo orangeries and parks were proud of under Pyotr Borisovich and Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev. Beside it, drawings and applied art of a time when artists took botanical atlases for their model. In the loggia of the Italian House.

Over 160 pieces by Nina Malysheva (1914–1983), sculptor at the Dulevo works: from her student years to the late work. Porcelain ornaments, frames, studies from life, pieces on themes of literature, theatre and ballet. In the Hermitage pavilion.