Architect Matvey Fedorovich Kazakov died after he was informed about the Moscow fire in 1812. At that moment, much of what he built was lost. There were many and even more buildings built, whose projects were signed - approved by Kazakov as the head of the Expedition of Kremlin buildings, in fact, the chief architect of Moscow. Not all buildings from the so-called Kazakov's Albums were completely designed by him, and yet the architecture of mature Moscow classicism is precisely Kazakov, and not the refined capricious Bazhenov, his teacher, a master of French classicism and complex Masonic pseudo-Gothic. Kazakov is the grandson of a serf who built or approved many palaces and mansions of the old capital at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, a confident professional without Bazhenov's excesses. Such masters assert their influence firmly and just as reliably consolidate - once or twice - the chosen style, make it a rule and law, and, consequently, define the era. Kazakov was a master of Catherine's fundamentally French, classicism, and pseudo-Gothic. For Moscow, he is the face of the two main directions of architecture of the late 18th century. It is absolutely necessary to devote books (there are several of them) and monographic exhibitions to such a master.
The current exhibition is just such, large, thorough, "planned" for the 280th anniversary of the birth. Since the founding of the museum, this is Kazakov's fourth monographic exhibition, the curators explain. And it was housed in the suite of the Talyzins' house, the main building of the Museum of Architecture at the beginning of Vozdvizhenka - a building from Kazakov's albums. There are three curators: an architectural historian, a longtime museum employee, author of publications about Lvov and Bazhenov, Zoya Zolotnitskaya, Tatyana Ivanova, curator of the fund of graphics of the 18th-19th centuries, the material of which made up most of the exposition, and Vladimir Sedov, head of the Department of Domestic Art at Moscow State University.
The exhibition is divided into themes, one room in the suite - one theme. The exposition designer Agniya Sterligova assigned its own color to each hall, marking it with a convex structure on the wall on the left, along which the enfilade is lined up, and continuing with colored signature plates. The platforms in the space of the halls, carrying additional exhibits, take on the same color - let's say, revitalization, not always directly related to Kazakov, but representing the era. We're talking about pre-fire Moscow, so here comes classicism furniture from the museum's funds, fragments of gilded wooden columns of iconostases and for some reason a couple of cork models by Antonio Kiki, incomprehensibly related to the hero, but demonstrating the interest of the Age of Enlightenment in the study of antique samples. Kazakov himself looks directly at them, surrounded by parts of wooden iconostases, both classicistic and grape "Naryshkinsky", from a miniature oval portrait.
All these chairs, on the one hand, are needed to add variety to the exhibition - it is not so easy to present an exposition consisting of one, even excellent, graphics; but they also cope with their role of immersion in the era, representations of what the interiors of Matvey Fedorovich's time were filled with. On the colored tables growing out of the stands, there are either books (a rather peculiar, but common way to show a book at an exhibition in a showcase, you cannot leaf through it, but it convinces of its existence and reminds of it), or plaster or wooden fragments - they seem, and maybe serve, as proofs of the materiality of architecture, shown mainly by graphics of plans, facades, view watercolors. Let us switch from the abstraction of the image to the abstraction of the decontextualized building and showcase detail. And look at the interiors of the enfilade of the Talyzin house, it is also an exhibit here, with columns, artificial marble and in situ reliefs. In the former ceremonial bedchamber, a hall partitioned off along a row of columns, in a nook around the corner, they show the interiors of the "Golden Rooms" of Demidov's house in Gorokhovsky Lane, one of Kazakov's surviving and remarkable works.
Multi-colored stands also keep the viewer in good shape, since this or that visitor's scarf no, no, and will fall in tone, joining in the exposition game. Colors - from the favorite shades of the facades of classicism, perhaps a little brighter: golden, blue, green, pink, pseudo-gothic red - invade the interiors of the halls in volumes reminiscent of the faceted diamond rust of the first tier of the Grand Kremlin Palace. We remember: the house of the Talyzins is yellow in the pictures, but after the last renovation by the will of the then director David Sargsyan it remained gray, and now this color inside seems to say: “paint me”, choose a color scheme.
Additions related to Kazakov more directly and directly - the model of the Petrovskoe-Knyazhishchevo estate, better known as Petrovskoe-Alabino, located in the Aprelevka area along the Kievskoe highway on the right, if you go from Moscow. Its main house is the Palladian "Villa Rotunda" with four porticoes, rounded corners and a domed hall in the center. Now there is a huge hole in the middle of the house, once we were told that during the war a bomb hit the dome, and later it turned out that it simply fell from negligence, fell into the basement. But the columns of the house still look very imposing, Pyranesian, like a fragment of "Russian antiquity", in relation to which the authors of the 1958 model act as Antonio Kiki in relation to the temple in Paestum. And it is completely unclear which is better, to restore the house or leave it as a romantic ruin. But it will fall.
A part of the permanent exposition of the museum is connected to the exhibition - a model of the Grand Kremlin Palace of Bazhenov, on which Kazakov worked while still studying. You can accidentally wander into the hall with the layout, which is always worth seeing again, from the exhibition, the door is open and the layout is more than appropriate.
On the contrary, very modern additions - two screens with reconstructions of the Kremlin and Tverskaya Street at the time when they were completely rebuilt under the supervision of Kazakov. Three-dimensional reconstruction models were performed by groups of Moscow Architectural Institute students under the guidance of Yulia Klimenko. Models lack pop-up signatures, transcripts, and in general, but our times, interactivity, since they are played like videos on screens, and give a modern person a touch-pad. The Kremlin turned out to be somewhat arbitrary, but the reconstruction of Tverskaya Street looks fascinating and instructive, in short, the row of the most expensive palaces in the city does not at all look like the current Tverskaya, that is, at all, except that the former Museum of the Revolution, aka the former Noble Assembly, can give we now have some kind of idea. Opposite - a drawn reconstruction of Tverskaya Street based on Kazakov's Albums, drawing by V. V. Kuznetsov based on the materials of E. A. Beletskaya, 1952-1953. It is then that we understand that we have come not just to study Kazakov's work again, but to see the city in which he worked, and to understand what happened, what has changed in this city, how this many palaces sprouted among hundreds of monasteries and bell towers. The city also becomes the last accent - a kind of apotheosis: the last hall is oval, at the end there is a map of Moscow, along the walls there are watercolors by Quarenghi and Kazakov.
Meanwhile, the most important thing at the exhibition, of course, is not the entourage of chairs and models, although it is necessary, and the main thing that the Museum of Architecture keeps is the genuine graphics of Kazakov and his contemporaries from the museum's funds. It is she who needs to be examined and "immersed" in it: there are a lot of details, the execution is magnificent, even a separate block of curatorial comments is devoted to Kazakov's drawing: "… the most interesting are works made in a bright line style - pencil and ink"Indeed, in some places the drawings are so similar to an engraving on copper that it is hard to believe that this is a pen, and not a chisel. But if a pen means a unique thing, not a production one. Although there are etchings here too - in particular, on the design of the Khodynskoye field. And distinguishing them from pen drawing is not easy.
In our time of exacerbation of contradictions between computer and manual graphics, an exhibition filled with originals of an excellent draftsman is an event in itself, even if it were not Kazakov. But so - you can connect the inevitably heard name of the master (and who does not know him) with some new individual, previously unnoticed details.
So you have to go to the exhibition: get to know Kazakov, remember: the Senate, the Petrovsky entrance palace, Demidov's house, Petrovskoe-Alabino, Tsaritsyno, French classicism from an architect who has not been to France, the neo-Gothic style rejected and partially reconstructed according to the second unrealized project (both projects are shown alongside). Moscow has changed a lot since then, it has its sixth or seventh period of renewal after Kazakov - and looking at the layer so long lost, perhaps, will allow us to look at the process a little more philosophically. Or maybe not.
There is no catalog of the exhibition yet, but the museum promises to release it.
The exhibition will run until March 10.
