Exhibitions in all museums: what's on now
21 exhibitions at the museums of all museums from our list — with dates, venues and what each is worth seeing for.
Victor Borisov-Musatov. The Harmony of the Image
Over 140 works from twenty collections: The Pool, The Emerald Necklace and studies almost never shown. Russian Symbolism is one of the summits at which art lifts a person beyond himself; a retrospective this full comes once in a generation.
For the seventy-fifth year since the first Novgorod letter, found on 26 July 1951 in the Nerevsky dig. More than 1250 have been found since; among them the school exercises of the boy Onfim, with drawings that have no equal in medieval Europe. What the Vindolanda tablets are to Roman Britain, these are to medieval Rus — the writing of ordinary people, kept by wet ground. In the State Rooms, one month only.
A century of the country’s largest photographic service, which shot the news on the day it happened. Shown in two spaces of the Historical Museum: the Resurrection Gate and the Artillery Yard.
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.
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.
Work by the sculptor who carved quebracho and algarrobo: in his hands wood holds shapes impossible in marble.
The first large exhibition of the new Kadashevskaya wing: the flower in Russian art from the icon to the 20th century.
More than 150 sheets that almost never leave the store: pastel sheds under light and movement and is rarely shown. Halls 49–54.
Money in The Master and Margarita: ancient Judaea and Moscow of the 1920s–30s, set object against object. For Bulgakov’s 135th anniversary.
For the three hundredth year since the death of Peter the Great: the inheritance of the first Russian emperor and his chief reforms. A short run — check the dates before setting out.
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.
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.
What convenience is paid for: where trust in the digital world ends and the defence of one’s own data begins. The museum marks it 12+.
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.
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.
The count is known as a historian, a publisher and a friend of Alexander III; here is shown the side scholars have hardly reached — Sheremetev the landowner and master of estates. Of them all, Kuskovo is the one he came to throughout his life. Painting, furniture, photographs and documents from the Ostankino and Kuskovo holdings; in the Swiss House.