53,000 works from the collection of the abolished International Confederation of Artists Unions will join the museums of Russia

An extensive collection, which was owned by the now-abolished International Confederation of Artists' Union (MKSH), along with the building of the Central House of Artists, was transferred to state ownership after scandals and decisions of the court. Now the Ministry of Culture is engaged in its distribution to subordinate museums. The collection includes 53 thousand works of painting, sculpture and other types of art, which since the 1940s were acquired by the Union of Artists of the USSR. After 1992, the collection was not replenished, and then sales went off altogether - this was how private paintings by Alexander Deineka, Georgy Nissky, Yuri Pimenov, Vladimir Stozharov and other artists fell (for example, from Sotheby's auction in 2014, where about £ 2 million).

All remaining exhibits are subject to distribution. Their artistic level is different. Some items were purchased at the end of the year, just to close reports. Others that came from the republican and all-Union exhibitions, from the workshops of prominent artists, can now stand in a row of modern classics.

In recent months, employees of the State Tretyakov Gallery were engaged in the inventory of these works, a catalog was compiled. The ministry created a special commission for the distribution of newly acquired property. This process oversees the ROSIZO Museum and Exhibition Association. The commission also included art historians from the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the State Theater Museum. A. Bakhrushin, the Russian National Museum of Music and the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature. V.I.Dal The program includes 68 museums, mostly regional.

Natalia Chechel, deputy director of the department of museums of the Ministry of Culture, who oversees issues related to the Museum Fund, and heads the commission for the distribution of the collection, told our publication that the Russian Museum modestly asked for only about 200 works, selecting them to a point. The Tretyakov Gallery, however, expects to receive much more, about 2 thousand - as a kind of compensation for the analysis and description of the collection. But the largest array of exhibits, more than 3 thousand, will go to the Kaliningrad Museum of Fine Arts, which is experiencing a great shortage of Soviet-era works. According to Chechel, curators select small thematic collections for each museum. The museums themselves send representatives, they study the electronic catalog and leave the application. Preferences are very different. For example, the Ulyanovsk Museum wanted to receive works by the laureates of the Lenin Prize. Someone asks for the work of local natives, others seek to fill the chronological lacunae in the exhibition.

Natalia Chechel says that this work on distribution turned out to be really pleasant: “It’s great happiness that so many things can be transferred to the regions. It is bad when museums in large cities are half empty due to the lack of exhibits. For example, the museum of the Krasnoyarsk millionth city - for it we have allocated a very large collection. ”

At the festival “Intermuzey” in early June, the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation Vladimir Medinsky already handed over the first eight orders to the directors, distributing more than 3 thousand items. The largest of this number of exhibits - more than 2 thousand - received the Moscow State Museum-Reserve Tsaritsyno. 650 items are transferred to the Belgorod State Literary Museum, to the Voronezh Regional Literary Museum named after I.S.Nikitin - 278, in the Omsk State Literary Museum. F.M.Dostoevsky - 62, in the Orenburg Regional Museum of Fine Arts - 499, in the Samara Literary-Memorial Museum of them. M. Gorky - 77, in the Smolensk State Museum-Reserve - 221, in the Tver State United Museum - 191 exhibits. It was the first portion, the next will be allocated in a month. ROSIZO has already started issuing the “gift packages” to the lucky ones.