СУДЬБЫ РУССКОГО ИЗОБРАЗИТЕЛЬНОГО ИСКУССТВА В ГОДЫ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ И ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ (ОСОБЕННОСТИ ТВОРЧЕСТВА А.А. РЫБНИКОВА)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the fate of the intellectuals who came over to the Soviet power and participated in the revolutionary process. The analysis is carried out on the example of the life and work of artist Alexei Rybnikov (1887-1949), who came from a merchant family, initially received economic education, graduated from Kharkov school of painting and drawin-gand participated in the exhibitions of “Jack of diamonds”.There are considered the peculiarities of his pre-revolutionary art. The author notes the role of the artist in the rescue of the unique art collections in the years of his work in the People’s Commissariat for Education. There is shownhow the Revolution and the Civil war, the nationalization and requisition of artistic values changed the processes of museum construction in Russia and then the Soviet Union. The author points out that the process of nationalization of the historical and artistic values revealed one of the important issues related to the conservation of works of art - the problem of restoration. The solution to this problem was associated with the need to study the technological characteristics of the paintings by old masters, to record the physical condition of all existing works of art, to describe its technical condition. There is shown that the practical work of rescue and restoration of the old masters’ heritage, which was carried out at the State Tretyakov gallery and the Hermitage by artists, technologists, photographers and scientists (chemists and physicists), led to the discovery of new methods of paintings salvation. Russian artist Alexei Rybnikov began his career before the revolution of 1917 as a painter, book designer and muralist.Like many other representatives of this profession, at first he became an officer of the People’s Commissariat for Education, then an employee of a museum. This path of a free artist’s transformation into a serious museum employee gave the world a new way of washing paintings, and then the method of texture photography invented by him. In the history of the world restoration this method is known as “Methode Rybnikoff’.