Alexei Vladimirov

JUBILEE

Alexei Vladimirov
Grabar’s Workshop

#4 2008 (21)

The Igor Grabar All-Russian Research and Restoration Centre (“Grabarʼs workshops” or “the Centre”) has marked its 90th anniversary. For art restoration in Russia, 90 years represent a whole era, an epoch. Reviewing the history of the development of the workshop one can trace the entire history of Russian art restoration and renovation. The celebration of this milestone anniversary provides a good reason for taking stock and summarizing what has been done, and how over these years the field of art renovation in Russia has developed. Better known as “Grabarʼs workshops”, this institution since its inception until today has been the site of major state-sponsored restoration projects. The Centre is named after the famous artist, art historian and public figure Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar, the trail-blazer and founder of scholarship-based methods of art restoration in Russia. He introduced such methods as pre-restoration examination of the artefact, photo recording and documenting of all restoration procedures, and group decision-making in the process of cleaning works from later additions. Grabar was the driving force behind the creation, in the 1920s, of the Russian art restoration school, that comprises a set of techniques and practices that are unique and have no match in Europe, and continuously develop using research findings from different areas of culture.

MASTERPIECES REBORN

A. VLADIMIROV
A LIFE OF A PICTURE

#1 2004 (02)

"The Taking of Gunib Aul and Shamil’s Capture on August 25 1859" by the academic of the Russian Imperial Academy and outstanding painter of battle-scenes Franz Alexeyevich Roubaud, in its time must have enjoyed a long and honourable pride of place in the Chechen-Ingush Republican Museum of Fine Arts - but another, tragic destiny awaited it: after the political conflict and unrest of the last decade it disappeared, and when it was found again it was almost completely destroyed. The search for, and on-going unprecedented restoration of the canvas created keen interest in it, and when the picture first appeared in the exhibition "Resurrection of Grozny Museum" in the Tretyakov Gallery within the framework of "Russia’s Golden Map" project (JuneAugust 2003), it enjoyed great popularity among both the general public and experts alike. It is not for us to decide who was right and who wrong in the political and military stand-off in Chechnya, instead the interest lies in what happened to the Grozny Museum of Fine Arts and to the works in its collection.