Exhibition thaw in the Tretyakov Gallery opening hours. Exhibition “Thaw. What are the most interesting exhibits at the exhibition?

In the May 1954 issue of Znamya magazine, after Stalin’s death, Ilya Erenburg published the story “The Thaw,” which gave its name to an entire era of Soviet post-war history. The period, which lasted only fifteen years, was able to accommodate such important events and phenomena - the rehabilitation of the repressed, the emergence of some freedom of speech, the relative liberalization of social and cultural life, discoveries in the field of space and nuclear energy, an original version of modernism in architecture, which managed to leave quite a noticeable and vivid mark. The then “Khrushchevite” political course and significant transformations taking place in the first post-war decades in the Soviet Union and Europe are still the subject of discussion, close attention of researchers and museum projects today.

Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkina, Museum of Moscow teamed up to hold a joint festival "The Thaw: Facing the Future". The trilogy started at the Museum of Moscow at the end of last year with the exhibition “Moscow Thaw”. Now with the project "Thaw" The Tretyakov Gallery joins the festival.

The exhibition, including works by Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Yuri Pimenov, Viktor Popkov, Geliy Korzhev, Ernst Neizvestny, Vladimir Sidur, Tahir Salakhov, Oscar Rabin, Anatoly Zverev and many other artists and sculptors - witnesses of the era, will be divided into seven thematic sections, illustrating the “thaw” phenomenon itself: "Conversation with Father"- about the dialogue of generations in post-war Soviet society, « Best city Earth"- about the city as a place of contact between private and public life, « International relations» - about the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction, "New life"- about improving the world of Soviet people with the help of everyday objects, "Development"- about the “romance of distant travels”; "Atom - space" And "To communism!" will complete the exhibition opening in the halls on Krymsky Val.

Yu. I. Pimenov
"Run across the street"
1963
Kursk State Art Gallery named after. A.A. Deineki

V. B. Yankilevsky
"Composition"
1961

T. T. Salakhov
"At the Caspian Sea"
1966
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

T. T. Salakhov
"Gladioli"
1959
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

E. V. Bulatov
"Cut"
1965–1966
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

V. E. Popkov
"Two"
1966
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

As you know, every presentation begins with a free buffet, where there is something to drink and snack.

The exhibition was visited by high authorities. Here Olga Golodets is with the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova and a representative of Russian Railways.

A few words before the ceremonial cutting of the red ribbon.

Organizers, patrons and sponsors of the exhibition are on the improvised stage.

The guests listen carefully. Among them, professor of Moscow State University and Stroganovka Vladimir Borisovich Koshaev was noticed.

The first section of the exhibition "Conversation with Father". The tense dialogue between generations in post-war Soviet society was fueled by two topics that many preferred to remain silent about: the truth about the war and the truth about the camps. The history of the Thaw is the history of rehabilitation processes that began immediately after the death of I.V. Stalin.

The next section is “The Best City on Earth”. The city in the Thaw era is the main “scene of action”, the place of contact between the private and public spheres: the inhabitants of this city have not yet locked themselves in small apartments in front of the TV, have not gone into the kitchen (as would happen in the 1970s), and the city fulfills They function as a public forum or “big house” - a space for feasts in the courtyard, dancing and reading poetry in squares and parks.

Next - "International Relations". The confrontation between the USSR and the USA determined the political picture of the world in the second half of the 20th century. Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation had a decisive influence on the cultural thinking of this time. The two superpowers competed not only in the arms race, but also in promoting their way of life at international exhibitions and in the media.

Festival:

Next - "New Life". The promise to provide each family with separate housing that meets the requirements of hygiene and cultural life was enshrined in new program party of 1961. The society, which in 20 years was supposed to live under communism, had as one of its main goals the creation of a comfortable private life. The slogan of the 1920s, “The artist goes to production,” has regained relevance: the world of Soviet people must be improved with the help of the everyday environment, and artist-designers need to educate citizens in the “correct” taste as opposed to “philistinism.”

The organizers called the open space in the center of the exhibition Mayakovsky Square.

Section "Atom - space". Atom and space - as the smallest and largest quantities - determine the range of thinking of the sixties, looking to the future, which will come tomorrow. Massovization higher education and the development of scientific institutions give rise to new heroes of the time - students and scientists. Since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, space has captured minds and become one of the main themes in Soviet culture, affecting not only paintings or poetry, but also the design of household objects and appliances.

Employees of the Institute of Physical Problems - members of the Kapitsa family:

Section "Mastering". The propaganda campaign that accompanied the development of virgin lands exploited the “romance of distant travels” and the desire for self-affirmation and independence. Development was also associated with the idea of ​​“massification” of the heroism of hard “workdays” at all latitudes of the Soviet Union, at large-scale construction sites, on the virgin lands of Kazakhstan, in the forests of the Urals and Siberia. Artists and poets went on creative trips to construction sites and virgin lands to capture the “young romantics.”

The final section "Into communism!" In 1961, at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, in his speech N.S. Khrushchev promised that “the current generation of Soviet people will live under communism.” Advances in space exploration and new scientific discoveries stimulated the imagination, and in the culture of the 1960s one can find many futuristic predictions similar to those made during the first revolutionary decade. The ideas of robotization of production processes were partially implemented in practice, and this made it possible to think that people of the near communist future would be able to afford to engage only in self-improvement and creativity in a variety of areas.

With communism, I didn’t quite understand what the organizers wanted to say. Apparently the exhibition requires a more careful and thoughtful reading.
Several general, panoramic views:

Time to go:

Yuri Pimenov. "Running Across the Street", 1963

The curators, who have been preparing the exhibition for several years,

tried to create as complete a picture as possible of a polyphonic time, with its artistic searches, uncomfortable questions about war, euphoria from scientific discoveries and the first man in space, virgin romance and the arms race.

The exhibition included about five hundred exhibits from more than two dozen public and private collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian and Historical Museums and the Institute of Russian Realistic Art.

In the Khrushchev Thaw it is impossible to identify clear dominants of artistic, intellectual or political life. The Thaw is an entire era and state of mind, and therefore cannot be reduced to a few names or phenomena - this is exactly how the curators, who have done enormous work, look at it research work. That is why there is no single center in the exhibition architecture. More precisely, it exists, but it is an open space - “Mayakovsky Square”, around which there are six thematic sections: “Conversation with Father”, “The Best City on Earth”, “International Relations”, “New Life”, “Development”, “ Atom - space", "To communism!".

The opening of the exhibition, “Conversation with Father,” touches on two sore topics of that time, which were not accepted to be discussed: the truth about the war and the camps. This section presents not only artistic works of that time, such as “Auschwitz” by Alexander Kryukov or a portrait of Varlam Shalamov by Boris Birger, but also footage from iconic films: “Silence”, “Nine Days of One Year”, “The Cranes Are Flying” , as well as photographs of performances of the Sovremennik Theater, which became one of the voices of the era. The second half of the 1950s was a time of rehabilitation processes for political prisoners, which began immediately after Stalin's death, but began to gradually fade away in the early 1960s. Thus, Grigory Chukhrai’s 1961 film “Clear Sky,” about a pilot in German captivity who receives a government award after several years of obstruction and public censure, would have been impossible in the late 1960s.

The section “The Best City on Earth” is dedicated not so much to Moscow (although, undoubtedly, it is its main character), but to the city as a public space in which the private and the public intersect. The city of the Thaw era wants to meet world standards; it abandons the strict hierarchy and pomp of the Stalinist Empire style in favor of a free layout and vast spaces (the Palace of Congresses in the Moscow Kremlin, the Moscow swimming pool, Kalinin Avenue). And artists - like, for example, Vladimir Gavrilov and Yuri Pimenov - watch with interest the life of ordinary people unfolding on the street.

“New Life” complements the urban theme with artifacts and illustrations privacy Soviet people, among which there are many designer interior items (and they, by the way, would rightfully decorate a modern home today).

International relations during the Thaw period represented not only an increase in the arms race and an escalation of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and America, but also a cultural exchange unimaginable during Stalin’s lifetime. In 1955, Soviet musicians began to go on tour in the United States for the first time after a thirty-year break, and George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess” was brought to Leningrad, performed by the African-American troupe Everyman Opera. A little later, the Soviet capital will enthusiastically welcome the artist Rockwell Kent and pianist Van Cliburn. In 1959, the American Exhibition will be held in Moscow, where for the first time in the USSR the works of Georgia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper and many others will be shown. Works in this section of the exhibition include views of New York by Oleg Vereisky and watercolors by Vitaly Goryaev from the series “Americans at Home.” And a little further on is the abstract painting of the studio “New Reality” by Eliya Belutin, like a roll call with the Western avant-garde artists invisibly present here.

In the “Exploration” section we find ourselves among the main characters of the Soviet heroic epic - polar explorers, participants in large-scale construction projects and virgin lands shock workers, and in the adjacent section “Atom - Space” - surrounded by students and scientists, in the atmosphere of the famous dispute between “physicists” and “lyricists” . Here are photographs of huge demonstrations in honor of the first man in space.

Eric Bulatov. "Cut", 1965-1966.

Section “Into communism!” ironically opens with Eliya Belyutin’s large-scale painting “Lenin’s Funeral” (“Requiem”). Interpreting the classic plot of Soviet mythology in modernist aesthetics, it turns out to be a kind of visual oxymoron and symbol social project, doomed to remain a utopia.

Walking through the “districts” of the city built in the exhibition halls, you invariably return to the central square - a space of free expression, artistic experimentation and new meanings that the thaw takes on from a historical distance.

Details from Posta-Magazine
The exhibition is open February 16-June 11
Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val
St. Krymsky Val, 10
https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/

The guests of the “Museum Chambers” program on Saturday, March 4 are the general director of the Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova and the curator of the “Thaw” exhibition Kirill Svetlyakov.

The “Thaw” exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery is part of a large inter-museum project dedicated to the period from 1953 to 1968 (from the death of Stalin to the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia).

The Tretyakov exhibition includes about 500 exhibits: paintings, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied arts, household items, archival documents, photographs, film fragments. In addition to items from the Tretyakov Gallery's own collections, there are also works provided by 23 more museums and 11 private collections.

The Tretyakov Gallery tried to cover all possible spheres of life and divided its exhibition into seven parts. The first, “Conversation with Father,” is the theme of war. From the traditional Korzhev to the “military” sculptures of Vadim Sidur.

The “Best City on Earth” section was mainly embodied in the works of Yuri Pimenov (one of which became the emblem of the exhibition as a whole).

The sculpture by Oleg Komov, presumably, is intended to reflect the new construction - in the most literal sense, those very “Khrushchev buildings” that are now being tried to demolish everything.

Another section is “International Relations”. Confrontation with the USA, the “island of freedom” – Cuba, as well as all kinds of festivals.

Next is the “New Life” section. Here, in addition to “Gladioli” by Tair Salakhov and “Constructors” by Ivan Stepanov, they included, for example, Andrei Goncharov or such nonconformists as Mikhail Roginsky, Boris Turetsky and Oscar Rabin. As well as fashion designers, fabric sketches and tea sets.

The “Exploration” section suggests “the romance of distant wanderings.” Mostly representatives of the “severe style” landed here - Nikolai Andronov, Viktor Popkov...

The section “Atom and Space” is dedicated, of course, to the development of science. Above Ernst Neizvestny’s “Cosmonaut” hangs a life-size model of the first satellite.

A “microradio receiver” from the mid-60s was also presented to the public. The entire box is the size of a pack of cigarettes.

Somehow, this is where abstract painting was placed - in the subsection “Scientific Revolution and Abstraction”. Indeed, the authors of a new movement for the USSR (like Yuri Zlotnikov, Leonid Kropivnitsky, Boris Turetsky, Alexander Pankin) sometimes gave their works - perhaps out of caution - names such as “Geiger Counter” or “Synchrophasotron”.

Well, the main “thaw” trend in painting is represented here by the studio “New Reality” by Eliya Belutina. Here is the actual Belyutin work – “Lenin’s Funeral”. It seems that this is already the section “To communism!” - where, among other things, you can watch fragments of the recording of Khrushchev’s speech at the congress.

The exhibition takes place in the State Tretyakov Gallery building on Krymsky Val and will last until mid-June.

Well, besides, the exhibition “Moscow Thaw” is now taking place at the Museum of Moscow. Participation in the program of the Pushkin Museum is also expected. Pushkin and the Garage center.

From February 16 to June 11, the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val will host the largest exhibition project dedicated to the period of national history referred to as the “Thaw Era.”

The era covers the time from 1953, when the first amnesties for political prisoners took place after the death of Stalin, and until 1968, when the introduction of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia dispelled illusions about the possibility of building socialism with a “human face.”

This period is the most important political, social and cultural project in the history of the USSR, one of the “great utopias” of the 20th century, which was carried out in parallel with democratic transformations and cultural revolutions in Western Europe and the USA.

It is no coincidence that a relatively short period of time, lasting about 15 years, received the loud name “epoch”. Density of time, its saturation the most important events were incredibly tall.

The weakening of state control and the democratization of cultural management have significantly revitalized creative processes. The Thaw style was formed, which is an original version of Soviet modernism of the 1960s. In many ways, it was stimulated by scientific achievements in the field of space and nuclear energy. Space and the atom - as the largest and smallest quantities - determined the range of “universal” thinking of the sixties, looking into the future.

The pervasive feeling of something great and new being created literally before our eyes could not help but be reflected in art. Literature was the first to react to the changing situation. The rehabilitation of some cultural figures repressed under Stalin was of great importance. The Soviet reader and viewer rediscovered many names that were taboo in the 1930s and 1940s. IN fine arts a “severe style” appeared. At the same time, some artists turned to the heritage of the Russian avant-garde, and active searches began in the field of non-figurative representation. Architecture and design received a new impetus for development.

This exhibition presents the curatorial interpretation of the processes taking place in culture and society. The goal of the project is not only to show the achievements of the Thaw, to demonstrate the explosion of incredible creative activity that the new freedom gave, but also to articulate the problems and conflicts of the era. The exhibition includes works by artists, sculptors, and directors who witnessed the changes taking place in the most important areas of the life of Soviet people.

The exhibition is a single installation into which various artifacts are integrated: works of painting and graphics, sculpture, household items, design samples, video projections with fragments of feature films and documentary footage. The exhibition space is divided into seven thematic sections demonstrating the most important phenomena of the era.

The section “Conversation with Father” examines the dialogue between generations in post-war Soviet society. It was supported by two topics about which it was customary to remain silent: the truth about the war and the truth about the camps.

The section “The Best City on Earth” reveals the theme of the city as a place of contact between the private and public spheres, when residents have not yet locked themselves in small apartments in front of the TV or retreated to the kitchens, as would happen in the 1970s.

The section “International Relations” examines the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, which determined the political picture of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation had a decisive influence on the cultural thinking of this time. The two superpowers competed not only in the arms race, but also in promoting their way of life at international exhibitions and in the media.

The “New Life” section illustrates the program for creating a comfortable private life, when the 1920s slogan “Artist to Production” regained relevance. Artist-designers were given the task of instilling in citizens the “correct” taste as opposed to “philistinism”, and improving the world of Soviet people with the help of the everyday environment.

The “Development” section offers a conversation about the “romance of distant wanderings”, about the desire of young people for self-affirmation and independence, about the glorification of difficult “workdays”, that is, on those topics that were used in propaganda campaigns that accompanied the development of virgin lands, calls for distant construction sites Artists and poets went on creative trips to capture young romantics.

The section “Atom - Space” demonstrates how the mass character of higher education and the development of scientific institutions gave birth to new heroes of the time - students and scientists. Since the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, space has captured the minds and become one of the main themes in Soviet culture, affecting not only paintings or poetry, but also the design of household objects and appliances.

In the section “To communism!” It becomes clear how advances in space exploration and scientific discoveries have stimulated the imagination of artists. In the culture of the 1960s one can find many futuristic forecasts similar to those made during the first revolutionary decade.

The Thaw era was full of contradictions. The exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery is an attempt to systematically study its cultural heritage. It is planned that the project will become the first part of an exhibition trilogy, which will be continued by showing art from the 1970s - the first half of the 1980s, the so-called era of stagnation, and after that - the time of perestroika.

A unique publication dedicated to the Soviet era of the 1950-1960s has been prepared for the exhibition. The book contains scientific articles on painting, sculpture, architecture, design, fashion, cinema, theater, poetry, literature, and also discusses issues of sociology, political science and philosophy of this time.

The project is accompanied by extensive educational program, including lectures, film screenings, poetry readings, and an Olympiad for schoolchildren. Part of the program is organized as part of the inter-museum festival “Thaw. Facing the future."