Moscow Guide
The Beliy Gorod
The Museum of Modern Art
Opening time: Daily noon–8pm; closed last Mon of month
Price: R200, photo permit R150, video permit R300
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Moskovskiy muzey Sovremenovo iskusstva), in a converted eighteenth-century merchant's house, is the only venture by Luzhkov and Tsereteli that's been welcomed by all. Although the sculptures in the yard veer towards kitsch, what's on show indoors is a stimulating mix of avant-garde art up to 1917, and the end of Soviet power, when "underground" art flourished ever more openly.
Among those at art school in the 1980s were the Marilyn Monroe-impersonator Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe, and Alexander Kosalapov, whose take on Warhol's soup cans, Blue Caviar, is an ironic salute to the pop culture that conquered the USSR without a shot being fired. Tsereteli was, by this time, a successful Soviet artist, whose faux naïve graphics and tapestries (in the corridor and on the stairs) show far more talent than his later sculptures do. Other names on the "underground" scene are represented on the third floor, where 1970s Mytki Primitivists are juxtaposed with contemporary artists like Olga Tobreluts and Andrei Zhelanov, next door to a series of rooms used for temporary exhibitions, often devoted to individual retrospectives.
But the real draw is the second floor, with its Primitivist and Futurist works by Goncharova (Cyclist and Bathing Boys), Filonev (Composition with 11 Heads), Tatlin (Portrait of a Worker), Popova and Lentulov; sumptuous set designs and an Odalisque's costume from the Ballet Russes and other masterpieces from the World of Art movement; and lithographs by Chagall. Foreign Surrealists are also featured, with prints by Léger, de Chirico and Ernst, and bronzes by Dalí.