Museums near The Bookplate Museum

Art · since 2015

The AZ Museum

significant

A one-artist museum, Anatoly Zverev, grown out of a private collection. Its value is not scale — the rooms are few and the works small — but the way of showing: an exhibition here is built as a statement, with sequence and light, rather than hung along the walls, and in Moscow that is rare. About Zverev himself an honest word is owed: an uneven artist, part of whose legacy rests on the speed of the hand rather than on depth, and his best things have to be picked out. The museum does not conceal this, which is why it is believed.

Painting and drawing by Anatoly Zverev from Natalia Opaleva’s collection. Exhibitions setting Zverev beside other artists of his circle. Work by Vladimir Nemukhin and other nonconformists.

2.2 km from here · 2nd Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street 20–22 · ·

· No. 73

House museums · since 1922

The Scriabin Museum

significant

A flat from which nothing was carried out: Scriabin rented it for his last three years and died here in 1915, and it became a museum in 1922 — almost without a gap. Furniture, books, piano and the fittings of the study are the very ones. But the chief thing is another: Scriabin conceived music together with light, and the trace of that conception survives in the flat — the colour score of Prometheus and the light apparatus. No other composer’s museum in Russia shows the idea and not merely the domestic life.

The Bechstein grand at which the last works were written. The study and the library with the owner’s markings. The colour score of Prometheus and the colour-light apparatus assembled to his design. A concert hall in the same house.

2.4 km from here · Bolshoy Nikolopeskovsky Lane 11

· No. 76

Literature · since 1957

The Pushkin Museum on Prechistenka

significant

There is no memorial Pushkin house in Moscow — he did not live here. The value is not authentic walls but a complete age: objects, books and portraits from which the Pushkin era can be reconstructed whole. For relics go to the Moika in Petersburg; for the era, here.

The permanent displays Pushkin and His Age (fifteen rooms of the manor house) and Pushkin’s Fairy Tales; first editions, portraits of his circle, everyday objects of the early 19th century.

2.5 km from here · Prechistenka 12/2 ·

· No. 2

House museums · since 1911

The Tolstoy Museum on Prechistenka

significant

The largest manuscript fund of any single writer in the world. The value is scholarly: you see how the text was made — Tolstoy rewrote a sentence ten times, and you can watch it happen. For the house he lived in, go to Khamovniki.

Manuscripts in Tolstoy’s hand, first editions, portraits and photographs of the writer and his family. The display follows the books, from Childhood to Resurrection.

2.6 km from here · Prechistenka 11/8 · ·

· No. 7

Architecture and estates · since 2020

The Narkomfin Building

significant

The 1930 house by Ginzburg and Milinis is the transitional commune-house with which any conversation about twentieth-century housing begins: two-level units, a corridor every second floor, kitchen and laundry taken out of the flat. Le Corbusier knew this building and leaned on it in the Unité d’habitation at Marseille — the ribbon window, the pilotis and the interlocking sections are all here first. But expectations must be squared honestly: the restoration of 2017–2020 gave the house back to its residents, and the museum here is one restored unit, not a building. Looking is done from outside and in a single flat, by appointment.

A restored type F unit, furnished to Ginzburg’s drawings. The building itself: the residential block on columns, the communal block, the bridge between them.

2.7 km from here · Novinsky Boulevard 25, block 1 · ·

· No. 74

Art · since 1969

The Tropinin Museum

significant

The Moscow portrait of the first half of the 19th century is nowhere else so densely gathered. The value is also in the origin: Vishnevsky’s private collection given to the city, a model of how Russian museums came to be.

Portraits by Vasily Tropinin and his Moscow contemporaries, work by serf artists, Russian Biedermeier. The quiet Zamoskvorechye lane and the house itself are half the pleasure.

3.0 km from here · Shchetininsky Lane 10, bldg 1 · ·

· No. 31

Art · since 1986

The New Tretyakov

world-class

The Russian avant-garde is the one Russian artistic system to enter the world canon on equal terms, and its largest collection is here. MoMA and the Pompidou show Malevich and Tatlin torn from their setting; here they hang beside what they rebelled against, which changes the reading.

Malevich’s Black Square, Petrov-Vodkin’s Bathing of a Red Horse, work by Kandinsky, Chagall, Goncharova and Larionov, the model of Tatlin’s Tower. Next door: the Muzeon park of dismantled Soviet monuments.

3.2 km from here · Krymsky Val 10 · ·

· No. 5

Art · since 1947

The Rublev Museum

outstanding

The third collection of Russian icons after the Tretyakov and the Russian Museum, and the only one built as a museum of one subject: here the icon does not stand in a row of Russian art but is explained in itself, from the board and the gesso to the iconography. The holding was formed from things brought out by the museum’s expeditions from closed and ruined churches, and its value is the completeness of the line rather than single stars: famous names are almost absent, but the sequence runs unbroken from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth. In Britain icons are met in ones and twos, in Byzantine rooms and in the trade; a museum where the subject has a building of its own does not exist there. The monastery’s Saviour Cathedral, in which all this stands, is the oldest surviving building in Moscow.

Icons of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, gathered by the museum’s own expeditions. Royal doors and whole iconostasis sets. Fragments of wall painting. The Saviour Cathedral of the 1420s — the oldest building in Moscow, with remains of ornamental painting associated with Rublev.

3.2 km from here · Andronyevskaya Square 10 · ·

· No. 61

History · since 2012

The Jewish Museum

significant

Come for two things at once: the Bakhmetevsky garage by Melnikov and Shukhov, a building of world significance, and the history of Russian Jewry told from inside as nowhere else. The holdings of originals are modest, and that is worth knowing beforehand.

The building itself — the Bakhmetevsky garage of 1926–1927, one of Konstantin Melnikov’s principal works with steel structures by Vladimir Shukhov; the Café on Basseynaya, a reconstruction of shtetl life.

3.3 km from here · Obraztsova 11, bldg 1a · ·

· No. 47

History · since 1896

Museum of Moscow

significant

A city museum — an ordinary genre in Europe — but the material is unique in scale: a million objects about one city. The value is also the Provision Warehouses by Stasov, a model Empire building rarely accessible from inside.

The permanent display History of Moscow: the archaeology of Moscow soil, town life, plans and views of the city by century. And the Provision Warehouses themselves, an Empire monument after Vasily Stasov.

3.3 km from here · Zubovsky Boulevard 2, bldg 7 · ·

· No. 56