Tatyana Dodina

RUSSIA'S GOLDEN MAP

Tatyana Dodina
The Volgograd Fine Arts Museum

№3 2005 (08)

In Spring 1960, the Russian Ministry of Culture decreed that an art museum should be recreated in the hero city of Stalingrad. The original Stalingrad picture gallery, opened on the eve of the war in 1938, had been totally destroyed in the bombing of August 1942; leafing through the surviving gallery catalogue, published in 1941, one is overcome by pain and regret. Repin, Surikov, Ivanov, Korovin, Aivazovsky, Levitan and Polenov are but a few of the eminent Russian artists whose works had been in the old Stalingrad gallery. Hundreds of works of art by dozens of outstanding Russian and Soviet painters were gone forever.