Moscow · Museums · Observations · Heritage · Humour
I hear on the Kultura news that vandals have defiled the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Russian History. I think: well, blimey! I watch the report, and what they show is a tiny bit of graffiti beside a mascaron of a disgruntled lion. Good heavens, what a desecration! The
Archive · Art · Moscow · Mores
The Russians bought so much Matisse that admirers and friends even asked him whether his pictures would soon be visible only in Moscow. Shchukin commissioned Dance as a large panel for a staircase landing, together with a second large canvas, Music. A touching correspondence passed between patron and painter: on
Archive · Art · Moscow · Museums
The calling card of the Shchukin collection: Henri Matisse's Dance. Matisse's canvases occupy a special place in Shchukin's collection, just as the artist himself does in the life of the collector. As for Shchukin's place in the life of Matisse, the reformer
Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations · People · Saint Petersburg
Henri Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso: Sergey Ivanovich Shchukin devoted 20 years of his life to acquiring paintings from the finest French artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Fauves cost the merchant 1 million francs; today its value is estimated at
Moscow · Museums · Observations · Education
I am greatly impressed that the main building of RSUH on Miusskaya Square has opened a museum-workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, with models of his inventions that one may not merely touch but test: every mechanism is in working order, except, of course, the bombard on a worm gear
NB! · Art · Moscow · Observations · Society Pages · Humour
Well, the Cosmoscow opening was a success. There are plenty of splendid things, but their prices are more splendid still
NB! · Architecture · Moscow · Science
The eight-petalled dome of GUM, incidentally, was created by our greatest engineer, Vladimir Shukhov. So GUM is a relative of Shukhov's television tower, of the Pushkin Museum with its glass roof, and of the Kiyevsky Railway Station with its arched covered train shed
Moscow · Museums · Observations
GUM is hosting a rather curious exhibition devoted to archery. What struck me was that many of the instruments on display, Soviet ones at any rate, are handmade. Native archers were left to fashion by cottage-industry methods the holders they needed, rulers for the brace height and the tiller,
Moscow · Observations · Mores · Society
On the way to the dacha I was told an interesting theory as to why the Rublevo-Uspenskoye Highway has not been resurfaced for the last 15 years and is still in perfect condition. Suslov, it seems, had a bad back and could travel only at 50 km/h, and
Moscow · Observations · Mores · Humour
⚡️1 KILOGRAMME OF STURGEON CAVIAR!!! Have you ever seen the like? A menu fit to be served in the hereafter to Major General Pavel Afanasyevich Afrosimov. Sorry that this post is not quite on the channel's theme, it is just that I have not seen anything so astonishing
Art · Moscow · Museums · Observations · Heritage
Speaking of cultural heritage, an appeal to help save the museum of the sculptor Anna Golubkina keeps turning up in my Instagram feed. The most curious thing is that the appeal comes from the Tretyakov Gallery, hardly a destitute institution, which in theory ought to have the money for this
Aristocracy · Architecture · Moscow · Observations · Nature
When I wrote that Arkhangelskoye has nothing in common with Versailles, I was slightly mistaken. Prince Nikolai Borisovich Yusupov, great-grandson of the first baptised Yusupov, Abdul-Murza (Dmitry Seyushevich in baptism), who was himself a great-grandson of the founder of the line, the ruling sultan of the Nogai