part 2: ozymandias*

Question: What to do when your CCCP goes bust and you're left with a large collection of ideologically defunct monumental statuary? Answer: stick it in some wasteland to the south of Moscow city centre, lock the gates and forget about it. Then a few years later, once the emotional impact of perestroika and the fall of Russian communism have faded a little, open it to the public. This is just what happened during the eighties and nineties, and now the Moscow sculpture park has become more than simply a home for fallen Soviet icons, and is also populated by a quite large collection of contemporary sculpture.

The park is also right next door to the Tretyakov gallery of modern art, and home to a 100m or so long tent-cum-shack which is filled with paintings by local artists. Some are quite good:

and some are… not. Saccharin kittens and pots of flowers are apparently all the rage in certain Muscovite circles.

The Tretyakov gallery itself is a big secondary-modern of a place and mostly dedicated to Russian artists. There is some brilliant stuff in here. Some of the most exciting bits are in the 20^th century sections - no-one does propaganda quite as stylishly as the Soviet Union did and Vera Mukhina's 'Worker and Kolkhoz Woman' (a large maquette of which is in the gallery) is about as good as it gets. Alexander Deineka is another worth looking at if you don't know him (I didn't). The collection is based very much on figurative works, and doesn't seem to be home to much avant-garde stuff, either contemporary or historic. Having said that, we did half of the gallery at the charge as there was nowhere at all to eat in that part of the city, apart from an ice-cream kiosk, where we filed up on caramel megas – these are highly recommended - and a 'café' selling a couple (this was their whole stock) of slices of plastic white bread with a strip of smoked (with a cigarette) salmon and a hearty topping of bright pink cod-roe (or perhaps third-class caviar).

If you want to see all this, go soon. The park and gallery are soon to be obliterated by Norman Foster's massive Orange (really).

* please forgive the pretentious title of this post