The Apothecary Prikaz contains, in a strictly chronological order, sketches of costumes, scenery, puppets, photographs of performances, including "Electra" in 1946 at the theater. Eug. Vakhtangov, which was the last implementation of Goltz as a set designer: he was gone two days before the premiere. The ascetic (in the spirit of the order decorations for "Elektra") design of the exposition creates a delicate background for an intimate, but full of emotional life, the world of stage images.
The plot titled "architect and theater" is unusually gracious, the range of associations it evokes extends from Andrea Palladio with his Teatro Olimpico to Fyodor Shekhtel, who began as an artist of Mikhail Lentovsky's entreprise. It was the Russian Silver Age that made involvement with Melpomene almost the duty of a true artist. The fact that Goltz, born at the end of the 19th century, grasped the spark of this divine inspiration, seems beyond doubt when you look at the fragile, slightly watercolored sheets of his theatrical sketches, reminiscent of the graceful scenery of Benoit and Somov (Goltz was a passionate admirer of the latter) or Bakst's figure expressively filling the entire format released to the artist.
The photographs presented at the exhibition add finishing touches to the portrait of the master: a scene from a dramatic performance staged by students of the Medvednikovskaya gymnasium; starring Georgy Golts and Yuri Zavadsky. "… Goltz was an architect, but the theater remained his love" - these words of the renowned director are used as the epigraph of the exhibition. To what has been said should be added the actor's "experiments" in the silent film "Drama in the Futurists' Cabaret No. 13" and the first production of "Mystery Buff" by Vladimir Mayakovsky, where Golts played the role of an American. His biography is mysterious in places, and his artistic nature is full of contrasts: he was close at the same time the sophistication of the "World of Art" and the brutal aesthetics of Larionov; his talent belonged equally to the art opposed to Eternity and the most fleeting of the arts.
Two thirds of the exposition are works performed by Goltz for the Children's Musical Theater of Natalia Sats, with whom he collaborated throughout his life. The sketches of the costumes for these productions - or, more correctly, the finished stage images - are endowed with grotesque features and demonstrate a clear relationship with the biting satirical graphics of the 1920s. These features of Goltz's manner are even more acute in the sketches for the unrealized production of Cinderella at the Leningrad Puppet Theater under the direction of Evgeny Demmeni (1944). The intrigue of the exhibition is due to the fact that Goltz, the architect of the 30s-40s, makes a completely different impression. A disciple of the rationalist Nikolai Ladovsky at VKHUTEMAS, who did not accept the formalistic principles of the avant-garde, in his mature period of creativity he was one of the participants in the famous "Zholtovsky quadriga" (G. Golts, M. Parusnikov, I. Sobolev, S. Kozhin), who was the co-author of the master Soviet neo-Renaissance in the competition project of the Palace of Soviets (1932).
His professional credo was formed by the classics, and in Goltz's case there is no reason to see this as anything other than an honest choice and a sincere belief in the existence of a universal harmony that surpasses in its significance all technical and aesthetic revolutions: “Bleriot's airplane is outdated, ridiculous, and the Parthenon and is beautiful now. "Being at the head of the planning workshop of the Moscow City Council, designing the restoration and reconstruction of Stalingrad, Smolensk, Kiev and Vladimir, developing the facades of factory-made residential buildings, etc., Golts created academic architecture and, as a result, uncompromisingly serious. His theatrical works reveal the opposite pole of the creative nature, immersed in the element of incessant metamorphosis and programmatically “anti-classical”. (Perhaps only in "Elektra", the set design of which he developed together with Vera Mukhina, Goltz, limiting the space with the colonnades of the "Paestum" Doric, appears as a true classicist, however, alien to any archeology.)
Speaking about his work for the theater, the architect admitted: "At a certain stage, this was, perhaps, the only opportunity to test and implement a number of problems that interested me." Indeed, despite the noted dissimilarities between the "architectural" and "theatrical" aspects of the artistic nature of G. Golts, he also in scenography solved primarily the problem of mastering the space (and its free transformation), taking advantage of the important advantage that the scene provides - the possibility of revealing the image through movement in time. A kind of "flight to the theater" for an artist of the time of the great triumphal style is almost a regularity prescribed by the cumbersomeness of the social task facing art. The stage of the children's theater, with its chamber scale and obviously a little more liberal regulations, at a certain moment turned out to be the last space for an aesthetic experiment that is necessary for any, even the most "classical" and traditionalist art. As Georgy Golts himself noted, “there are no small things in art for an artist”. The outward simplicity of the idea contained in these words does not negate its validity, which can be verified once again under the vaults of the Pharmaceutical Order.
