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Textbook of Russian

Exhibition August 5 − September 26, 2021
Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents a new exhibition project "Textbook Russian.".

The exhibition is devoted to an analysis of the visual forms and images that have been known to every Soviet person since childhood and their reflection in contemporary art.

For several generations educated in the USSR, the Russian language textbook became a kind of fateful book that introduced children to the visual arts. The special part of the edition, devoted to the classics of national painting, published works by such artists as Vasnetsov, Levitan, Chuikov, Plastov, Reshetnikov, and others. Situated at the end of the textbook, after the monotonous instructional text material, such an album evoked vivid impressions and, accordingly, was fixed in the memory. At the same time, the subjects of the paintings were also associated with key social concepts - pupils wrote essays on memory, the past, labor, family, nature, etc., based on works of art. Somewhat changing the view of common concepts and values, the education system today uses the same methods. Modern art can answer a number of fundamental questions that overlap with the thematic range from the old textbook. After all, young artists, brought up already in the post-Soviet period, use in their works a set of former symbols and ideas.

Prepared according to the materials of the official website Moscow Museum of Modern Art.