Moscow Guide
The Beliy Gorod
The Museum of Private Collections
Address: Next door to the Pushkin Museum
Opening time: Wed– Sun noon–7pm; closed last Fri of each month
Price: R50
The Museum of Private Collections is the brainchild of Ilya Zilbershtein, a collector, and it displays private collections of antique and modern art that were amassed during Soviet times. The individual tastes and limited resources of a score of collectors make for a well-rounded, quirky exhibition, flattered by a stylish interior. All the artworks are clearly labelled in English.
The permanent exhibition begins on the second floor with Salvador Dalí's pen-and-wash drawings from the series Mythology and The Hippies, and anthropophagic illustrations to Faustus and The Songs of Maldoror. Next door features drawings of vases and women by Matisse, and the artist's own palette. Look out for the portraits of Lydia Delektorskaya, Matisse's model and secretary from 1928 until his death, who donated many of his works to Russian museums.
The third floor is more Russian in spirit, with nineteenth-century works by the Wanderers, such as Ilya Repin, whose lurid pink and gold Duel is counterposed by Vasily Polonev's gentle Christ musing over the Sea of Galilee. You will also find set designs by Boris Kustodiev and Alexander Benois from the golden age of Russian ballet; views of Moscow and St Petersburg in the eighteenth century; and a score of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century icons.
The fourth floor offers a feast of twentieth-century art, to which the concert pianist Svatoslav Richter contributed his own pastels and grand piano, and still lifes by Robert Falk. Look out for Kustodiev's After the Storm with a Rainbow and Grabar's Women Merchants, in the room that brings together fin-de-siècle artists fascinated by Parisian nightlife, and rural Russia. Beyond a hoard of whimsical canvases and woodcarvings by Alexander Tyshler are two rooms devoted to Alexander Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova – arguably the museum's prime attraction. Rodchenko pioneered photo-collage and unorthodox perspectives, and his photos, posters and Constructivist book jackets are now classics of the genre, while Stepanova's textile designs have equal retro appeal.