Saved art: Simferopol Art Gallery in evacuation (1941–1944)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the evacuation of Crimean museum collections in October, 1941. The fate of the lost pre-war collection of the Simferopol Art Gallery, which did not have time to leave the Crimea and was destroyed by fire in Kerch port, is well known. At the same time, a temporary exhibition made up of the works of the Simferopol Gallery was evacuated from Feodosiya Art Gallery along with the masterpieces of the great marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky. Prominent museum figures Nikolay S. Barsamov and Jan P. Birzgal managed to send the exhibits to Novorossiysk, then to Krasnodar. Contrary to the plans of the Committee for the Arts to take these exhibits to Stalingrad, both Crimean galleries were sent to Yerevan. At the end of 1941, Birzgal compiled a list of 50 salvaged exhibits of the Simferopol Art Gallery. Soviet art of the 1920s– 1930s is represented by the works of Igor E. Grabar, Mitrofan B. Grekov, Vladimir A. Eyfert, Peter P. Konchalovsky. The Russian landscape is represented by Vasiliy V. Baksheev, Pavel A. Radimov, Vasiliy V. Rozhdestvensky. From creative trips to Central Asia, Altai and Pamir, new works are brought by Peter I. Kotov and Peter N. Staronosov, Nikolay G. Kotov, Peter D. Pokarzhevsky, Sergei I. Pichugin. The work of Barsamov, the author of the portrait of the artist Bogaevsky (1940), is connected with Crimea. Among the rescued works are the works of Konstantin F. Bogaevsky himself, several of his industrial landscapes, and sketches for the panel Crimea (1921); Bakhchisarai landscapes by Alexander V. Kuprin, Sudak view by Alexander F. Gaush. In the postwar period, the museum workers established the affiliation of works by Ilya E. Repin, Joseph I. Oleshkevich, and Henri-Francois Riesener to the pre-war collection.