One of my favorite places in the neighborhood where I live. When I go out for walks my autopilot takes me right here, to the Tretyakov Gallery on Lavrushinsky Pereulok, or Lane, almost 80% of the time. The whole surrounding area is beautiful, but the gallery and the short street it stands on are especially so. Just a few hundred yards northward is the marvelous Bolotnaya Square, with its imposing Ilya Repin statue, about which I wrote a month or so ago. The Tretyakov is one of those incredible structures that oozes Russianness. I would hazard to say that the only other building I know like it is the stunning St. Basil’s Cathedral, about which I’ll get around to showing and telling-about some day. Pavel Tretyakov, who is the individual emerging from the chaos of granite here, was one of the great Russian philanthropists and supporters of the arts. He was an avid, not to say obsessive, collector of art, with a particular interest in Russian work (as opposed to his brother Sergei Tretyakov, who collected much European art). Even when he began collecting in his 20s he had the thought in mind of creating a national gallery of Russian art.
Indeed, Tretyakov – and the curators to whom his collection was bequeathed – put together one of the most astonishing collections of Russian art ever assembled (the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg is the only competitor, and, as one who has spent many hours in both museums, I come down on the side of the Tretyakov as the leader). There are painters here of genius that almost no one in the West, sometimes even among specialists, has any notion of. The large collection of pieces by Karl Bryullov is a self-contained treasure in its own. The room dedicated to several huge (and small) works by Mikhail Vrubel is magical. My beloved Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Alexander Ivanov are well represented. The downstairs room of icons takes you on a breathtaking, unexpected journey through centuries of Russian spirituality. Interestingly, Alexander Kibalnikov’s statue of Tretyakov, which stands in the courtyard of the museum entrance, has only been in place since 1980. From 1939 to 1980 the position of “greeter” was held down by a large statue of Joseph Stalin, and before, that, Vladimir Lenin. Take a look at these pictures and just imagine what that must have looked like.
Russian Culture in Landmarks 