Ilya Glazunov Gallery

On Volkhonka Street, opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, stands a gallery housing the creative legacy of the People’s Artist of the USSR Ilya Glazunov. The institution opened on 31 August 2004 and became one of the few museums in Moscow devoted entirely to a single painter. Seven halls of the mansion display canvases from different periods of his work, while a separate exhibition of rarities collected by the artist over his long life occupies the adjoining building.

The mansion housing the gallery was built in 1812, presumably to plans by the architect Afanasy Grigoryev, on land that had once belonged to the Naryshkin family. The building was rebuilt several times and in different years belonged to Princess Maria Obolenskaya and, from 1856, to Colonel Sergei Trubetskoy, a pardoned Decembrist. After the revolution the house was converted into communal apartments, home among others to the theatre designer Vadim Ryndin and Ivan Yakovlev, creator of the modern Chuvash alphabet, together with his son. From 1968 it housed the House of Science and Technology with a cinema hall.

In 1997, for Moscow’s 850th anniversary, Ilya Glazunov donated more than three hundred works to the city, and the authorities allocated the building on Volkhonka for the museum. The restoration cost four times the original estimate, but made it possible to adapt the premises for visitors with disabilities. In 2006 it was decided to expand the complex with the adjoining building: Glazunov donated his personal collection of icons, furniture, engravings, and antique books to the museum, and the Mosproekt M-14 studio prepared a restoration project for an exhibition on the estates of pre-revolutionary Russia.

During its existence the gallery has more than once been the setting for notable events. In 2009, on the artist’s 79th birthday, President Vladimir Putin visited the exhibition. The new building, with an exhibition on the nobility, clergy, and peasantry, opened on 12 June 2017 — shortly before the ceremony it was inspected by Putin and the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. A month later, on 11 July 2017, Glazunov himself passed away: on the day of the funeral admission to the museum was free, and visitors left entries in a book of remembrance.

The main exhibition consists of the master’s canvases — Eternal Russia, The Mystery of the Twentieth Century, The Russian Icarus, Tsarevich Dmitry — as well as portraits of his contemporaries: the diplomat Andrei Gromyko, the director Federico Fellini, and the actress Gina Lollobrigida. A separate hall is devoted to a series of graphic illustrations for Russian classics. In the new building, interiors of different social estates have been recreated: noble drawing rooms, chambers in the spirit of the era of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and a peasant hut with authentic implements, while among the rarities is a canvas by the Italian Guercino that once belonged to Napoleon.

Today the gallery operates as a cultural and educational center: lectures, classical music concerts, and tours for schoolchildren are held here. The collection of paintings, graphic works, and antiques, rescued from loss by the artist, makes the museum on Volkhonka a notable point on Moscow’s cultural map and a monument to one of the most recognizable painters of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.