“Century of Sports” Exhibition. New Tretyakov Gallery in Krymsky Val, from September 14 to January 14, 2024
On the site of the New Tretyakov Gallery there was once a stadium, almost the first in the USSR: in summer the Moscow Torpedo played here, in winter there was a skating rink. Now speed skaters, football players, swimmers and gymnasts have settled on the third floor of the western wing of the New Tretyakov Gallery, where the “Century of Sports” was opened – a project dedicated to the centenary of the Moscow sports organization created in 1923 by decision of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.
“We have collected something like short stories about teams and fans, about hairpin turns, about the art of fighting, about how it all began,” Tretyakov Gallery deputy general director Tatyana Karpova said when opening the exhibition.
And I want to read and read these stories, collected from the masterpieces of Russian artists, at the exhibition. Chapter “Duel”: the powerful bronze “Judo Fighter” by Ashot Gasparyan, confident in his strength, the trembling girl with a canvas racket “Tennis” by Alexander Samokhvalov, “DOSAAF Shooting Range” by Sergei Bazilev – shooters with headphones , facing the targets, raise their rifles. In the center of “Grace and Plasticity” is Vladimir Gavrilov’s “Sports Master Elena Tyazhelova”, stretching the twine across the entire canvas, but here is a large-scale story on one canvas: “Relay race in the Garden Ring.” By Alexander Deineka.
The artists who wrote about sports knew this firsthand, many had passes to sports stadiums, they sat in stadiums for days, watching athletes in motion, capturing the dynamics, the expression, the emotions that fill sports and inspire those. artists like few others. And in many paintings and sculptures, these emotions simply splash at the viewer, like splashes of water on Anatoly Melnikov’s canvas “Water polo players. Acute moment.” Nearby, “Cyclists” by Pyotr Ossovsky from the Oryol Museum, has a similar dynamic: the leader of the race takes a deep breath, rests his foot on a post on the side of the road and looks at his pursuers.
This work, like many others, arrived from Russian museums in conditions unsuitable for exhibition, and was left in condition suitable for exhibition by Tretyakov’s restorers.
The exhibition was prepared thanks to the joint efforts of former athletes, with whom, at the request of the curators, Moskomsport employees communicated, and thus professional comments under the paintings were born. “Deineka’s goalkeeper flies upside down after the ball, this is riddled with broken ribs,” ex-Russian national team goalkeeper Ruslan Nigmatullin enlightens the viewer and criticizes the classic.
At the exhibition there was even a place for chess: here are the combine operators resting on the board (“On Rest” by Viktor Popkov). Among the celebration of energy and beauty, he is surprised to find in the section “On the Ski Slopes and on the Ice Slopes” a plot familiar from childhood: “Deuce Again” by Fyodor Reshetnikov: an angry mother, a sister with a reproachful look, a guilty one. look of a child. But… the skates are sticking out of the tattered briefcase and my ears and cheeks are burning from the frost. Yes, again he chose not a class, but a skating rink. What if this was the future Boris Mikhailov? Maybe we can forgive him this time?
