The Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s largest collection of national art, turns 150 on May 22, 2006. On this day, a century and a half ago, Moscow merchant Pavel Tretyakov acquired the first paintings in his collection, which today numbers 140,000 pieces.
Dusty, 19th century homes line narrow, winding streets in Moscow’s ancient Zamoskvoreche (literally, “beyond the river”) region. It would be easy to get lost here. Thankfully, near Tretyakovskaya metro station there is a huge sign in Russian and English, pointing the way to the gingerbread building at Lavrushensky pereulok 10: the State Tretyakov Gallery. But even without the sign, an observant and careful traveler could follow the human trickle that daily leads to the statue of Pavel Tretyakov outside the museum’s entrance.
Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery is often overshadowed by St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, which has a larger collection (over three million items) and a significantly more prominent international face. But the Tretyakov is Russia’s cultural icon. Even the most artistically dormant Russians will stop in at the Tretyakov, if only to check whether the pictures they remember from school textbooks – Savrasov’s Rooks Arrived, Shishkin’s A Morning In The Pine Forest and Serov’s Girl With Peaches – really exist. Less dormant souls will spend days here, marveling in their devotion.
The Tretyakov Gallery got its start when Pavel Tretyakov acquired two paintings in 1856: Temptation, by Nikolai Schilder and A Skirmish with Finnish Smugglers, by Nikolai Khudyakov. (Tretyakov bought some art before this, in 1854, but these two, in his own words, were the start of his collection.) The museum now counts over 140,000 drawings, sculptures and paintings, and six branches: the main exposition at Lavrushensky 10, twentieth century art at Krymsky Val 10, and four monographic studio-museums. The gallery opens over 20 exhibitions each year and public outreach programs include art classes for children, concerts and lectures.
The staff of the Tretyakov is its living soul, caring for the complex and growing collections with as much care and affection as Pavel Tretyakov himself. In fact, some of the staff have been working here since 1956 – the gallery’s centennial – including two Deputy Directors: Lidia Iovleva, and Lidia Romashkova.
“The museum is an institution where people either stay for life or leave right away,” said Romashkova, who is now Deputy Director for Coordinating the Conservation of Museum Assets, and who was the gallery’s Chief Conservator until 2002. “It is lots of work with huge responsibilities and very modest pay.”
Clearly, devotion of staff helped the Tretyakov endure the difficult 20th century and enter the 21st with confidence. Snug and clean after a massive, nearly decade-long reconstruction that ended in 1995, the Tretyakov on Lavrushensky pereulok now boasts high-tech electronic information desks, modern, climate-controlled exhibition halls and lavatories with automatic water taps. But such modern amenities camouflage a long and difficult struggle not just to succeed, but to stay afloat.
“The spirit of Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov is guarding us,” Romashkova said. Indeed, it seems a canon amongst the staff that Pavel Mikhailovich’s good karma helped the museum survive the looting of the Civil War, bombings and evacuation during World War II, Soviet neglect and the recent transition to capitalism. “You can’t go around Pavel Mikhailovich,” she added.
The State Tretyakov Gallery started as a private collection by Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov (1832-1898), a Moscow merchant, who in the mid-1850s began collecting art. His first purchases included both Russian and foreign paintings, but soon he developed a vision for bringing together in one place a collection based on “the Russian school, as it is,” in order, as he wrote in a letter to Leo Tolstoy, to comprehensively represent Russian art.
Tretyakov befriended the Itinerants (Peredvizhniki), a group of realist artists led by Ivan Kramskoy, whose views he shared and whom he supported through donations and acquisitions. By the end of the 1860s, Tretyakov had decided to set up a portrait gallery of Russian “writers, composers and figures of the art world,” apparently influenced by the 1865 opening of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. He purchased many portraits by Kramskoy, Repin and Perov, and he commissioned others, including Kramskoy’s portraits of Tolstoy and Nekrasov. Tretyakov’s collection grew quickly. By 1872, he owned over 150 paintings and had to add a two story annex to his family’s home in Lavrushensky pereulok, previously just a small house surrounded by an orchard. In a few more years, two more annexes were tacked on, turning the house into a suite of rooms surrounding an open yard.
From the earliest days, it had been Tretyakov’s intention to give his art to the people, and he opened the gallery’s doors to the public in 1881. After the death of his younger brother Sergei in 1892, Sergei’s excellent collection of French art was added to the Pavel’s collection. Shortly afterward, Pavel Tretyakov presented both collections to the city of Moscow. At that time, the Tretyakov brothers’ gift numbered 1,287 paintings, 518 drawings, 9 sculptures, 75 paintings and 9 drawings by foreign artists, valued, according to the inventory, at 1.43 million rubles. After Pavel Tretyakov’s death in 1898, the Board of Trustees decided to transform Tretyakov’s house into a museum. Among many changes in 1904, the decision was made to add a distinctive, Russian styled decorative porch, designed by Victor Vasnetsov.
continuity rules the museum’s operation, and the Tretyakov’s conservators, who come and go in generations, embody this notion. Romashkova worked as a conservator for just under 45 years, including 19 years as Chief Conservator. “I came when the older generation was still there, the people who preserved the collection during the Revolution, and who kept it through the wild years of the Civil War, those who evacuated with it during World War II,” Romashkova said. She still admires her teachers, eagerly sharing the stories she heard on what they had to endure.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, the Tretyakov benefitted from having been State Property for nearly two decades already – this may have saved it from looting during nationalization. In fact, the Tretyakov collection had doubled in size by 1922 – as private art galleries were nationalized, most of their collections ended up in the Tretyakov. But revolution back-burnered a 1915 Duma Decree that set forth a plan for the museum’s reconstruction. The plan was not revisited until the 1980s, by which time the walls were leaking and the roof was about to fall in.
During WWII, the Tretyakov was evacuated to Novosibirsk and Molotov (now Perm). Within a month of the war’s start, on July 17, 1941, thirteen rail cars packed with national artistic treasures were heading for Novosibirsk. There, the collection was stored in boxes in the basement and lower floors of the half-constructed Novosibirsk Opera Theater.
Some of the art was impossible to evacuate from the gallery’s building in Moscow, however, such as the statue of Ivan the Terrible (which weighs slightly under a ton), and most of the other large marble and bronze statues. These all stuck out the war in their home at Lavrushensky, covered in sandbags. The Tretyakov Gallery reopened on May 17, 1945.
“The older generation preserved the collection through the war and put it on display again,” Romashkova said. “But my generation didn’t get it easy, either.” Moving house is like living through a fire, as the Russian adage goes. The gallery’s second evacuation in half a century came with the long-needed reconstruction of the building at Lavrushensky 10. Romashkova led the effort as the gallery’s Chief Conservator. “That was yet another evacuation, but even more comprehensive,” she said. “Never before was the entire collection removed from the Gallery.”
Reconstruction was long overdue. In the 1950s, by Romashkova’s account, a gallery visitor – an engineer, warned the administration that one of the walls was about to collapse and that a protective shield had to be constructed. Then a chunk of plaster fell in right next to Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, escaping the painting by a hair. The ceiling leaked, and the staff had to put pails and mops throughout the gallery.
Things got worse when the walls started seeping water. “We kept running, moving the pictures around, from one hall to another, drier one,” Romashkova recalled. “It was horrible! We had to close many halls because they could no longer take visitors.” Since most of the conservators are women, Romashkova had to recruit outside volunteers to save some of the larger pieces of art. She would approach male visitors and ask them: “Can you please move this statue a bit, it is under water dripping from the ceiling.” She was never refused.
Despite the building’s awful state, permission to close down the gallery was not easily won. It took years of complaints and visits to high offices by Tretyakov Director Yuri Korolyov, who took to carrying around in his briefcase a cut out chunk of corroded wiring from the walls, as well as photographs documenting the building’s horrendous conditions.
The gallery was too important a landmark to close down – just unthinkable, the Soviet government insisted. International tourists and high profile visitors had to see the prized collection of Russian national art. But of course the gallery continued to deteriorate and Korolyov persisted.
Finally, in December 1982, the state agreed to close the gallery for reconstruction. But of course all of that art had to go somewhere. And so, in less than a year, a depository was built next door to the Tretyakov, on the site of a 19th century house destroyed during World War II.
With reconstruction, the museum staff could finally dream of getting things right, instead of making do with what they had. At the depository, they designed in larger rooms, huge doors and elevators, pull-out stands for pictures and easy-roll carts for large, self-standing works – all to make work slightly easier for the predominantly female staff. The Tretyakov also became the first museum in Russia to install a climate control system in both the depository and all of its halls – no more sweating walls in summer and iced-over windows in winter. No more exposing the great works of art to the merciless elements.
The depository connects to the main building via the second floor. This was a labor-saving detail during the evacuation – which actually did not take place until February 1986. But it did not help with some of the museum’s bigger works. Alexander Ivanov’s Appearance of the Christ Before the People would not fit through the passageway, and had to be rolled on a drum and carried through the street. But then it wouldn’t fit in the depository’s specially-designed, oversized elevators. So it had to sit on that building’s floor for the entire reconstruction period.
The condition of Surikov’s Boyarynya Morozova did not allow it to be rolled on a drum. It had to be carried out in a specially-made canvas envelope, eight people on a side. But the crew ran into trouble at the door: the painting was too big to go through. “We stopped and just stood there, at a loss as to what to do,” Romashkova recalled. “And I thought, ‘They took it out somehow during the war. It’s the same door.’ We started looking and discovered a covered up opening in the wall that had been made to take the painting out.”
In the end, all obstacles eventually fell away, and construction began. Yet then arose a complication of a different kind: in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Everything changed. “We managed to do a lot. We put in the building, did the ceilings, and we had the decoration left. And that’s where the money ended,” said Romashkova. But somehow the staff struggled on and eventually got the support they needed from the State to finish the job. In the end, instead of the planned five years, reconstruction took just under ten. In 1995, the Tretyakov reopened in a new post-Soviet reality it had yet to digest.
life at the tretyakov today is not easy, but it is more interesting than 15 years ago, said Lidia Iovleva, First Deputy General Director. Freed from the need to march in line with a State Ideology, museums can now work more independently, led by artistic value, and not the Party Line. “The freedom that we now have comes with more responsibility for what we are doing,” Iovleva said, adding that gallery staff now feel even more accountable to society for preservation of the collection and for the projects they launch.
Yet new times have their own challenges, chief among them finding money. “This is not news for American and European museums,” Iovleva said, “but we didn’t have it before.” Under the Soviet Union, the State paid all the bills. Today, the Russian government does cover the staff’s modest salaries, utilities and building maintenance. But the Tretyakov is mostly on its own when it comes to raising money for new acquisitions and temporary exhibitions, where expenses run anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Following the lead of other international museums, the Tretyakov now has a Board of Trustees, chaired by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, as well as a Society for the Friends of the Tretyakov Gallery, made up of Russian and international companies, including DaimlerChrysler, Halliburton and Coca Cola, among others. There is even an American branch, established in 2002: American Friends of the Tretyakov Gallery, which combines fundraising with promotion of the gallery in the U.S. But individual membership is still modest. “Shortly after MOMA’s reopening in New York, I saw people lining up to buy museum memberships there,” Iovleva said. “We don’t have that here yet.” The growth of a middle class and the country’s economic stability may mend this gap soon, along with tax incentives expected to be provided in a forthcoming Law on Art Patronage.
One of the bigger challenges the museum faces is expanding its collection. The State supports some new acquisitions, but purchases are becoming increasingly difficult in the wake of skyrocketing prices for Russian art. “We often have to chip in,” said Iovleva. “Part of the money might come from the State, through the Roskultura agency, and then we find sponsors to cover the remainder.”
Yet it is hard for the Tretyakov to compete at international art auctions, where prices run in the millions of euros. “But we do buy some pieces for several hundred thousand euros every year,” Iovleva said. A recent example is the 2003 acquisition of a landscape by Karl Bryullov, which Tretyakov researcher Yelena Bekhtieva discovered on Madeira, where Bryullov lived from 1849 to 1850. The gallery bought the painting for just over $200 thousand, with monies allocated by a special order of the president. Some of the new art also comes through donations, such as two works by Komar & Melamid and Grisha Bruskin, from the American Friends of the Tretyakov Gallery. Some contemporary artists donate works to the Tretyakov, at the museum’s request, said Irina Lebedeva, Deputy Director and Head of 20th Century Art. It works out well for both sides: it is quite prestigious for the artist to have his or her works in this “National Collection,” and the gallery could not otherwise afford to purchase the art. For its anniversary, the gallery is expecting new additions to its collection, including Julia, a sculpture by Vera Mukhina, from the Russian government, and a collection of 20th century art from the City of Moscow.
in this anniversary year, the Tretyakov is hosting more exhibitions than usual, including ones devoted to Russian Symbolism, 14th century drawings, French art, Whistler and Alexander Ivanov (for the latest information, visit the museum’s website, at tretyakov.ru).
The gallery is also bringing back all of the collection’s art from overseas. Foreign loans help the gallery raise money and the iron is hot. “Russian art is in fashion,” said Iovleva. “On the one hand, this fashion is supported by the political and economic interest in Russia. On the other hand, Russian museums now have more freedom, and they’ve become more active in international exhibitions.”
Some 213 Tretyakov paintings were included in the Guggenheim’s much lauded RUSSIA! exhibit last year (now at the Guggenheim Bilbao). “The impact [of RUSSIA!] was the same as after the first tour of the Kirov Ballet almost three decades ago, which introduced Russian culture to Americans,” said Alexandre Gertsman, president of the American Friends of the Tretyakov Gallery. RUSSIA! attracted some 400 thousand visitors, breaking stereotypes about Russian art. “Generally, from the American perception,” Gertsman said, “there are two main categories of Russian art: Russian icons and Russian avant garde. This exhibition introduced American audiences to the whole stratum of Russian culture, showing the best of Russian art throughout nine centuries.”
The Tretyakov continues to adapt to life in the free world – attracting sponsors, selling gallery-logoed souvenirs, sending exhibits abroad. And, as the Russian economy bathes in the stability brought by higher international prices for oil, the Tretyakov is setting a new, more ambitious goal: construction of a four story building on Moscow’s Kadashevskaya embankment. Still in the planning stages, construction could be completed by the end of 2008, with the building presenting a spacious hall for temporary exhibitions, a children’s studio, an exhibition of Russian sculpture, (currently kept in the depository for lack of adequate display space), and fuller exhibition of the many Russian icons in the Tretyakov’s collection.
The Tretyakov might be sprouting new branches, but it will never leave Lavrushensky 10, its hospitable home for 150 years. This, the long-serving staff say, is simply unthinkable. RL
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