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, original version modernism in architecture - which managed to leave quite a tangible 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, and today are the subject of debate, close attention researchers and museum projects.

Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum im. A. S. Pushkina, Moscow City Museum 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 relationships"- about the confrontation between the USSR and the USA, the Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction, "New life"- about improving the world Soviet man using the everyday environment, "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 them. 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
"Incision"
1965–1966
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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

Yuri Pimenov. "Running Across the Street", 1963

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

tried to create as much as possible full picture 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, Russian and History museums and the Institute of Russian Realistic Art.

IN Khrushchev's 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 artwork of that time, such as “Auschwitz” by Alexander Kryukov or the 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 private and 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 of the Thaw period are not only about the build-up of the arms race and the escalation of the Cold War between Soviet Union and America, but also cultural exchange, unthinkable during Stalin’s lifetime. In 1955 Soviet musicians for the first time after a thirty-year break, they began to go on tour in the United States, 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 - abstract painting from the studio " New reality"Eliya Belyutina, as a roll call with the Western avant-garde artists invisibly present here.

In the “Development” section we find ourselves among the main characters of the Soviet heroic epic- polar explorers, participants in large-scale construction projects and virgin soil shock workers, and in the neighboring 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 classic plot Soviet mythology in modernist aesthetics, it turns out to be a kind of visual oxymoron and a symbol of a 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 Tretyakov Gallery presents another large-scale conceptual exhibition dedicated to the period national history, traditionally designated by researchers as the “thaw era.” It is no coincidence that the relatively short period of time, which included about 10 years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, received the loud name “era”. The density of time, its saturation with the most important events for all mankind, were incredibly high. The weakening of state control and the democratization of the way culture is managed has greatly revitalized the creative process. The “Thaw” style has pronounced characteristics and represents an original version of Soviet modernism of the 1960s, which was stimulated scientific achievements in the field of space and nuclear energy. Space and the atom - as the largest and smallest quantities determine the range of the “universal” thinking of the “sixties”, looking into the future.

The Thaw exhibition is a curatorial interpretation of the processes that took place in culture and society in the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. The goal of the project is not only to show the achievements of the “thaw”, but also to articulate the problems and conflicts of this era. The comprehensive exhibition includes works by artists, sculptors, and directors who witnessed the decisive changes taking place at that time in the most important areas of the life of Soviet people. Their opinions are polemical on a number of issues, which makes the exhibition more objective.

The pervasive feeling of something great and new happening literally “before our eyes” could not help but be reflected in art. All participants creative process- artists, architects, sculptors, poets, writers worked to find a new language that could express their time. Literature responded first and most vividly to the changing situation. Great importance had the rehabilitation of some cultural figures repressed under Stalin. Soviet readers and viewers rediscovered many names that were taboo in the 1930s and 1940s. IN fine arts a “severe style” appeared. Architecture and design received a new impetus for development.

The exhibition space will be divided into thematic sections, such as “Conversation with Father”, “The Best City on Earth”, “International Relations”, “New Life”, “Development”, “Atom - Space”, “To Communism!”.

The exhibition will be a single installation into which a variety of artifacts will be integrated: works of painting and graphics, sculpture, household items, design samples, video projections with fragments feature films and documentary footage.

The exhibition will include works by such artists as G. Korzhev, T. Salakhov, V. Popkov, A. Zverev, P. Ossovsky, V. Nemukhin, Yu. Pimenov, A. Deineka, O. Rabin, E. Bulatov, F. . Infante-Arana, I. Kabakov, as well as sculptors - E. Neizvestny, V. Sidur.

The era of the “Thaw” is full of contradictions, and the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery represents an attempt to systematically study it cultural heritage.

Address: Krymsky Val, 10, rooms 60-62

The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, film fragments, sets, fabric samples and even a sewing machine. They show the Thaw era as a time of hope, achievement and creative flourishing, as well as problems, conflicts and disappointments.

One of the great utopias of the twentieth century, an entire era that lasted about 15 years, is dedicated to new exhibition in the Tretyakov Gallery. About 500 exhibits from 23 museum collections and 11 private collections are collected in two halls on Krymsky Val. These are paintings, graphics, sculpture, decorative and applied arts, household items, photographs, archival documents and film excerpts.

“This exhibition is an example of a calm, serious, systematic analysis of that era from our present time,” said CEO Tretyakov Gallery Zelfira Tregulova. This is an attempt to look at the thaw with its achievements and problems through the eyes of today's youth. It is no coincidence that its curators are young and cannot remember that era.

On the canvases and frames of the tapes are townspeople at a store window, a Volga bumper, a queue at a newsstand, caricatured abstractionists, behind the glass is a sewing machine from the Podolsk Mechanical Plant and a whole collection of fabrics. Exhibition curator Kirill Svetlyakov explained: “In the Thaw era there was no hierarchy. Each type human activity, not only art, was perceived as creativity.” There is nothing secondary here, each exhibit communicates something important, and the viewer, by collecting these messages, models his own idea of ​​that time.

The exhibition looks like a city: it is built around the so-called Mayakovsky Square - a large white circle with a bust of the poet in the center. “This is a special space - a space designed for meetings, discussions and the most active discussions, expressing one’s opinion. It became the center of an exhibition dedicated to the period when all this became possible and when the main nerve of social, artistic, and intellectual life was in squares, in huge university auditoriums, in research institutes,” Zelfira Tregulova explained the architecture of the exhibition .

The first section of the exhibition, “Conversation with Father,” leads to the “square”—a dialogue between generations in the post-war Soviet world. The conversation is fueled by two topics: the truth about the war and the camps. A silent conversation with the viewer is carried on by Alexander Kryukov’s painting “Auschwitz”, models of the “Broken Ring” memorial by Konstantin Simun and the monument to those killed by bombs created by Vadim Sidur, and a portrait of Varlam Shalamov by Boris Berger. “Modernist language becomes a way of talking about these topics, which were not only forbidden to talk about - yes, it was forbidden - but also difficult to talk about,” said Kirill Svetlyakov.

The second part of the exposition was called “The Best City on Earth.” This is a place where private and public come into contact, where residents have not locked themselves in small apartments or gone into kitchens, as would be the case during the years of stagnation, in the 1970s. Here is the photo “Dawn. Youth at GUM” by Viktor Akhlomov, and etchings by Vladimir Volkov from the series “On the Street”, and the painting “Wedding on Tomorrow Street” by Yuri Pimenov. The latter devoted an entire picturesque series “New Areas” to housing construction.

“International Relations” is the story of the confrontation between the USSR and the USA during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The viewer can see the UN building on a canvas by Yakov Romas, a bronze bust of Fidel Castro created by Nikolai Stamm, a bearded guardsman from the “Cuba” series by artist Viktor Ivanov, a poster for Mikhail Kalatozov’s film “I am Cuba.”

“New Life” illustrates a program for creating a comfortable life. Here are sketches of a collection of clothes for fashionable village women, made by Vyacheslav Zaitsev, cuts of fabric, items from a coffee set. The “Development” exhibits breathe the romance of distant travels and the glorification of everyday work, when young people set off to explore virgin lands, and artists and poets followed them to glorify hard work. This section, for example, includes the paintings “Builders of Bratsk” by Viktor Popkov, “Raftsmen” by Nikolai Andronov and “Constructors” by Ivan Stepanov, and the sculpture “Assemblers” by Yuri Chernov.

The heroes of the Thaw era were students and scientists, to whom the section “Atom - Space” is dedicated. It was the atom and the cosmos, as the smallest and largest quantities, that determined the scale of the universal thinking of the sixties. In addition to the paintings “The Earth is Listening” by Vladimir Nesterov or “Infinity Spiral” by Francisco Infante-Arana, there is a fancy glass wine set that looks like a flask, and a ceramic composition depicting employees of the Institute of Physical Problems and members of the family of Peter Kapitsa, and also a model of a mobile nuclear power plant. power plant and satellite.

Exhibits last section"To communism!" as if they were hovering above the others: they were located on the second floor, where a ramp leads. Here you can see the large canvas “Requiem” by Eliya Belyutin, Arthur C. Clarke’s table “Contours of the Future” with predictions up to 2100, the satirical cartoon about happiness “The Key”, as well as “I Drew a Little Man”, which tells about the kingdom of lies.

The “thaw” in the Tretyakov Gallery will last until June 11. It should be the first part of an exhibition trilogy. It is planned that it will continue to show art from the era of stagnation, and then from the time of perestroika. “The Thaw” is accompanied by lectures, film screenings, poetry readings. Poems by Andrei Voznesensky, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, Joseph Brodsky and Gennady Shpalikov will be performed famous artists. The cycle will open on February 17 by Arthur Smolyaninov, and will close on April 21 by Chulpan Khamatova.

Viewers will be treated to the films “Coach to Vienna” and “Murderers Among Us,” as well as the series of lectures “Breaking Borders,” which will tell about how post-war art developed. And for high school students they prepared an Olympiad dedicated to the art of the 20th century. Part of this program is included in the inter-museum festival “The Thaw: Facing the Future”.

From February 16 to June 11, 2017, the Tretyakov Gallery presents the largest exhibition project dedicated to the period of Russian history referred to as the “Thaw Era.” It covers the time from 1953, when the first amnesties for political prisoners took place after Stalin's death, and until 1968, when the introduction of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia dispelled illusions about the possibility of building socialism with " 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 countries Western Europe and the USA.

Yu.I. Pimenov. We run across the street. 1963. Oil on cardboard. Kursk State Art Gallery named after. A.A. Deineki

It is no coincidence that the relatively short period of time, which lasted 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 greatly 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. All participants in the creative process worked to find a new language that could express time. 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. A “severe style” appeared in the visual arts. 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. Their opinions are polemical on a number of issues, which makes the exhibition voluminous and polyphonic.

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 gone to the kitchens, as will 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 on international exhibitions and in the media. “New Life” illustrates the program for creating a comfortable private life, when the slogan of the 1920s, “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.

"Development" 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. "Atom - Space" demonstrates how mass 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 topics in the world. Soviet culture, affecting not only the picturesque or poetic works, but also design household items and instruments.

In the section "To communism!" it becomes obvious how successes in space exploration and scientific discoveries 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 represents an attempt at a systematic study of 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 within inter-museum festival"Thaw. Facing the future."