Soviet Art at Tretyakovskaya Gallery

Poster by Alexander Rodchenko

When I was in Moscow I visited the famous Tretyakovskaya Gallery, or to be precise, its part for modern art. The original Tretyakovskaya Gallery founded in 1856 contains Russian art from several centuries. In 1985 it was merged with a gallery for contemporary art in an ugly building at the banks of River Moskwa.

The Modern Tretyakovskaya at Krimsky Val

I am a big fan of Soviet Avantgarde Art of the 1920s. At that time, many people still believed that Socialism could work, and a spirit of innovation and change for the better was expressed in new art forms such as cinema, poster design, photography and constructivist painting by artists like Sergey Eisenstein, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin or El Lissitzky. The work of the latter was shown in a special exhibition when I was there.

El Lissitzky: Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge, 1919

Poster for the documentary Man with a Movie Camera by the Stenberg brothers 1929

Kazimir Malevich: Black Square, 1915

There was a lot of really cool Soviet Art of the revolutionary era to be seen at Tretyakovskaya. This is a construction by Vladmir Tatlin:

Soviet Revolutionary Art inspired many contemporary artists at its time. Here you see the famous German artists Georg Grosz and John Heartman at a Dada exhibition in Berlin, claiming that "Art is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art!"

I was suprised that Tretyakovskaya also contains another, less respected part of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism. This rather cheesy art style with its heroic images of workers, peasants and Soviet leaders replaced the innovative art of the 1920s when the Soviet Union was ruled by Stalin.

The Worker and Kolkhoz Woman by Vera Mukhina, a sculpture for the USSR Pavillon at the Paris World Expo in 1937.

In the museum garden behind Tretyakovsakya you see many more of those sculptures: lots of Lenins, Stalins and Brechnevs, which formerly decorated the streets and squares of Moscow and are now banned in this graveyard of bad art.

Lenin sculpture at the Museum Garden.

It's an interesting way to deal with history. It would be hard to imagine a German museum publicly showing sculptures of Adolf Hitler and giant Swastikas.