Treasury of graphics. The engraving room in the first quarter of the 20th century

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is launching a series of exhibitions called "Ars Graphica" and presenting the first project "Treasury of Graphics. The Engraving Cabinet in the First Quarter of the 20th Century". The exhibition was prepared jointly with the Russian State Library and is dedicated to the museum activities of the outstanding Russian scientist and teacher Nikolai Ilyich Romanov. The exhibition includes more than eighty works by Western European and Russian masters of printmaking, including graphic works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth and Daumier. Some of them have not been exhibited for almost a hundred years. The exhibition also presents catalogues of the first Moscow exhibitions of graphics, letters from artists and art historians. The initial project of the exhibition cycle "Ars Graphica" reflects important pages in the history of the Engraving Cabinet of the Rumyantsev Museum - the main graphic collection in Moscow.

From 1910 to 1924, Nikolai Ilyich Romanov headed the Fine Arts Department of the Rumyantsev Museum, which included the Picture Gallery and the Engraving Cabinet, and from 1923 to 1928 he was the director of the Museum of Fine Arts (now the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts). He turned the Engraving Cabinet into a place of attraction for all connoisseurs of graphic art, a unique creative laboratory where projects for the first exhibitions of graphic art by Western European and Russian masters were born, and the foundations of scientific, curatorial and educational activities were laid. Romanov managed to embody in the Engraving Cabinet his ideas about a new type of museum, in whose collection contemporary art harmoniously coexists with the works of artists from bygone eras.

Nikolai Ilyich Romanov’s career began at the Rumyantsev Museum, the largest educational institution in Moscow in the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries. In 1924, after the Rumyantsev Museum was disbanded, the Engraving Cabinet, along with a collection of paintings by Western European artists and a scientific library on art, was moved to the Museum of Fine Arts, of which it remains a part to this day — only it is now called the Department of Graphics of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The library of the Rumyantsev Museum was transformed into the Lenin State Library of the USSR in 1925 (now the Russian State Library).

The letters, exhibition catalogues and reports of the Rumyantsev Museum, as well as the sheets of Durer, Rembrandt, Hogarth and other masters of printmaking, whose works attracted the attention of visitors to the exhibitions held in the halls of the Rumyantsev Museum in the first decades of the 20th century, allow the modern viewer to trace the history of the first Moscow exhibitions of graphic art. One of the sections of the exhibition is dedicated to the legacy of Russian artists whose works were specifically acquired for the Engraving Cabinet. Romanov was friends with many of them and was in constant correspondence. The work of A.P. Ostroumova-Lebedeva, V.D. Falileev, E.S. Kruglikova played an important role in the reorientation of Russian graphic art from reproduction printmaking to authorial printmaking.

The exhibition pays tribute to an extremely important, albeit little-known to the general public, episode in the history of the Museum of Fine Arts (and therefore the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts) — the exchange of gifts between the museums of Moscow and London. Thanks to the collaboration of Nikolai Ilyich Romanov with the British artist Frank Brangwyn, the Museum of Fine Arts received a gift of almost 600 works of printed graphics from the British Museum in 1925. That year, 218 sheets with works by Russian masters were sent from Moscow to the British Museum. The exhibition presents the best sheets by British artists, selected for the Moscow museum by Frank Brangwyn and Campbell Dodgson, the chief keeper of the Print Cabinet of the British Museum. The works reflect the entire diversity of British printed graphics of the first quarter of the 20th century.

The Ars Graphica cycle is conceived as a series of exhibition projects based on works from the collections of the graphic arts department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. The series will also include exhibitions dedicated to 16th-century Dutch engraving, innovative ideas in German graphic art of the late 15th century, and Japonism in Russian color engraving at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. These exhibitions will introduce the viewer to the work of outstanding engravers, lithographers, and draftsmen whose works make up the golden fund of the Engraving Cabinet collection.