Exhibition "Fabrics of Moscow" Automatic translate

The Moscow Museum presents a large-scale retrospective of Moscow textile design from 1880 to 1980.

The art historian Osip Brik in the 1920s proclaimed ordinary chintz the top of artwork, and Mayakovsky wrote: “Get rich, / machine, / more, / forever so that / doesn’t stop, / more / of my calico / Komsomol!”. However, not only chintz and not only agittekstil of the avant-garde era became the subject of the exhibition “Moscow Fabrics”.

From the middle of the XIX to the end of the XX century, dozens of factories worked in Moscow, producing the most massive of decorative arts - textiles. The pattern, color and texture of the fabrics — pre-revolutionary examples of Art Nouveau, propaganda textiles of the first decades of the Soviet Union, space thaw plots, op-art and abstraction from stagnation times –– always reflected the most significant images of their time, shaping the era’s style, attitude and way of life of people.

The Moscow Fabrics exhibition will present all the stages of the establishment of textile production in Moscow, tell about the designers of the past century and demonstrate why the textile industry is so important for understanding the culture of the twentieth century. Visitors will see a large-scale panorama of the textile production of the capital: unique exhibits of the Trekhgorka and the Red Rose, Danilovskaya and Golutvinsk manufactories, the First Printsensitive and the Sverdlov factory, sketches of artists and fabrics from different eras, rare photographs and even machine tools.

The exhibition consists of five sections representing the history of Moscow textiles from different angles.

The first section is devoted to pre-revolutionary industry. Textile factories appeared in Moscow at the beginning of the 19th century. They produced and processed chintz, silk, calico, satin, woolen fabrics, printing drawings according to foreign designs. For this, hundreds of French “season tickets” were brought to Moscow - albums with pasted rapports (patterns). The exhibition will present all the variety of textile from the turn of the past centuries: from “folk” chintz in a small flower to samples of the most complicated multi-layer art nouveau print, abstract drawings of the pre-revolutionary era and interior panels with dragons, irises and insects. In addition to never-before-exhibited samples of fabrics and sketches, visitors to the exhibition will see mock-ups of factories, documents and photographs related to the early history of textile production in Moscow.

However, the 1920s can be considered the real beginning of the history of domestic textile design. This is the era in which the “Vhutemas” section is dedicated, which tells about the Higher art and technical workshops where the textile faculty was first opened. The main task of the faculty was to overcome the decorative “handicraft” and introduce technical disciplines into the program. In this regard, most of the teachers were directly related to production. Reconstruction of the workplaces of three artists and teachers of VKHUTEMAS: Lyudmila Mayakovskaya, Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova, will be presented at the "Moscow Fabrics". Mayakovskaya taught airbrushing, worked at Trekhgorka and Red Rose, Stepanova taught artistic composition and worked with Popova at the First Print Factory.

A twenty-meter conveyor showcase will demonstrate the further stages of the evolution of textile design until the 1980s: sketches, genuine fabrics, magazines, documents and photographs, as well as archive newsreels, are exhibited here.

The fourth section presents 12 personal micro-exhibits dedicated to the artists who worked throughout the 20th century and shaped the aesthetics of Moscow textiles - Maria Anufrieva, Natalya Kiseleva, Natalya Kirsanova, Anna Andreyeva, Natalya Zhovtis, Elena Shumyatskaya, Natalya Zyslina, Tatyariiomi and others.

The sad and majestic result of Moscow textile production and the entire industrial era, the final part of “Fabrics” - a large-scale (floor to ceiling) archive - a collection of hundreds of albums with ancient samples of rapport from the end of the 19th to the end of the 20th century.

Alexandra Selivanova, curator of the exhibition: “Moscow Fabrics is the first detailed story about textile Moscow in the history of modern Russia. If the art of textile of the Soviet avant-garde is often exhibited and well studied, the fabrics of previous and subsequent decades usually appear in the shade. For the first time, we show huge factory and university collections of sketches and fabrics, and this allows us to illuminate the topic on a large-scale and from various sides. We wanted to talk with the audience about design, about the change of styles throughout the 20th century, and about the specifics of textile production, and about the end of the industrial era of Moscow. Well, it’s especially exciting for the first time to present to the general public twelve wonderful artists who have created the design of Moscow textiles for decades. ”