Tretyakov Gallery

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow holds more than 130,000 works of art, ranging from an ancient Byzantine icon to a stark black canvas painted in the early twentieth century. It began not as a government project, but as a personal obsession. A textile merchant named Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov started buying paintings in the middle of 1850 with a singular idea: to build a collection so comprehensive that it could one day become a museum of national art. The questions that follow are about how that private dream became the foremost depository of Russian fine art in the world, how a fairy-tale facade came to mark the building on Lavrushinsky Lane, and how, more than a century after Tretyakov's death, a single medieval icon triggered a clash between the museum and the Kremlin itself.

• 2. The Merchant's Eye

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  In 1856 Pavel Tretyakov purchased two paintings that would mark the gallery's founding year: Temptation by Nikolay Shilder, and Skirmish with Finnish Smugglers by Vasily Khudyakov. He had, in fact, bought drawings and Dutch Old Masters the year before, but those two Russian canvases in 1856 set the mission in motion. Tretyakov was a Muscovite merchant, not a nobleman or a court official, and his ambition was nationalist in spirit. He wanted art made by Russian artists, about Russian life, collected for the Russian public. By 1867 the Moscow City Gallery of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov opened its doors to visitors, already containing 1,276 paintings, 471 sculptures, and 10 drawings by Russian artists, alongside 84 works by foreign masters. The collection grew because Tretyakov kept buying, and the family mansion on Lavrushinsky Lane, purchased in 1851, kept filling up. Additions to the building were made in 1873, 1882, 1885-1892, and again in 1902-1904, as each new room was absorbed into the growing exhibition. In August 1892 Tretyakov presented the entire collection to the city of Moscow as a gift. At that moment the holdings included 1,287 paintings and 518 graphic works of the Russian school, along with European paintings, sculptures, and icons. The official opening of what was then called the Moscow City Gallery of Pavel and Sergei Tretyakov took place on the 15th of August 1893, less than a year after the donation.

• 3. A Facade from a Fairy Tale

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  Viktor Vasnetsov was a painter celebrated for his images drawn from Russian folklore, and it was his drawings that gave the Tretyakov Gallery its distinctive face. Working from Vasnetsov's designs, which he produced between 1900 and 1903, the architect V. Bashkirov translated them into stone, with construction managed by architect A. M. Kalmykov. The finished facade appeared between 1902 and 1904. It sits to the south of the Moscow Kremlin and announces itself in what observers have called a peculiar Russian fairy-tale style: arched ornament, medieval lettering, and patterned brickwork that reads less like a European museum and more like an illustration from a Slavic epic. The building the facade adorned had grown organically over decades from the Tretyakov family mansion. By the time Vasnetsov's design was realized, the gallery had already been absorbed into state life. In early 1913 the Moscow City Duma elected Igor Grabar as trustee, and on the 3rd of June 1918 the Soviet government declared the gallery property of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic, renaming it the State Tretyakov Gallery. Grabar was appointed director again, and under his leadership that same year the State Museum Fund was created, which remained a key source of new acquisitions through 1927.

• 4. War, Evacuation, and Return

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  From the first days of what the source calls the Great War, gallery staff began dismantling the exhibition. Paintings were rolled onto wooden shafts, wrapped in tissue paper, placed in boxes, and sealed with waterproof material. In the middle of the summer of 1941, a train of 17 wagons left Moscow carrying the collection to Novosibirsk, deep in Siberia, far from the advancing front. The gallery did not reopen in Moscow until the 17th of May 1945, after the war's conclusion. The building itself was not idle in the intervening years. The Church of St. Nicholas in Tolmachi, which had been closed in 1929 and handed to the gallery in 1932, was gradually integrated into the exhibition space. A top floor was added to the old church building specifically to display Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov's enormous painting The Appearance of Christ Before the People, which Ivanov worked on from 1837 to 1857. In 1956, to mark the gallery's centenary, the Alexander Ivanov Hall was completed. The postwar decades brought steady expansion. From 1983 onward, new construction phases added a depository and restoration workshops, conference facilities, a computer and information center, and a children's studio. The building called the Corps of Engineers, added in 1989 on the south side of the main structure, took its name from the engineering systems it housed.

• 5. What the Walls Hold

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  The collection Tretyakov started with two paintings now exceeds 130,000 exhibits. Its range is hard to compress into a single description. At one end stands the Theotokos of Vladimir, an icon whose origins predate the gallery by many centuries. At the other end hangs Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky, one of the most commanding works of twentieth-century abstraction, and the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, a canvas that provoked arguments about what painting itself could mean. In 1977 the gallery acquired a significant part of the George Costakis collection, adding to its holdings of the Russian avant-garde. Attendance tells its own story about the collection's pull. In 2019 the museum drew visitors in numbers that the following year's figures make vivid by contrast: in 2020, attendance stood at 894,374, which represented a drop of 68 percent from the prior year, attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, the gallery ranked 13th on the list of the most-visited art museums in the world in 2020. In May 2012 the gallery stepped outside its usual role and hosted the FIDE World Chess Championship between Viswanathan Anand and Boris Gelfand, with organizers reasoning that the event would promote both chess and art simultaneously.

• 6. Icon, Church, and the Kremlin

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  In May 2023 the Tretyakov Gallery refused a request from the Russian Orthodox Church to hand over one of its most famous icons: the Trinity by Andrei Rublev. The museum's objection was not rhetorical. The gallery had held the icon as part of its collection, and its staff understood what transfer to active religious use could mean for a fragile medieval work. The refusal did not hold. In June 2023, on the personal order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the icon was transferred to Moscow's main cathedral despite the museum's protests. The episode drew attention to a tension that museums worldwide face in different forms: the relationship between cultural custodianship and political authority. The gallery's satellite network extends well beyond Moscow. Administratively, the State Tretyakov Gallery organization includes a gallery of contemporary art in another part of central Moscow, housed in the Central House of the Artists along the Garden Ring. The grounds of that branch contain a sculpture garden known informally as the graveyard of fallen monuments, where statues removed from Soviet-era public spaces have been relocated, including Yevgeny Vuchetich's Iron Felix, taken down from Lubyanka Square in 1991. The two remote branches in Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, at the extreme west and far east of Russia respectively, were funded with reserved oil and gas revenue.