The Russian Academy Of Arts

On September 7, 2013 two new museums were opened in Moscow: Women’s Museum and Art and Religion Museum (10 Gogolevsky Boulevard). The unveiling ceremony timed to the Day of Moscow was attended by the Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, President of the Russian Academy of Arts Zurab Tsereteli, Moscow officials and figures of culture.

These two museums have been set up on the initiative of the People’s Artist of the USSR and Russia Zurab Tsereteli who is also a Director of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.  

The Women’s Museum, the first museum of its kind in Russia, welcomes visitors by a wonderful bunch of thousands of various flowers executed in 3D enamel technique created by Zurab Tsereteli. The interior space of the bunch’s stem” – an octahedral metal structure with stained glass walls – contains a sculpture of Adam and Eve.  The bunch, a focus of the exposition, is surrounded by eleven female figures and a child personifying such remarkable features of Russian women as faithfulness, dignity, diligence, spirituality, love, beauty, maternity, tenderness.  

In the courtyard one can see Zurab Tsereteli’s sculptural composition “Wives of the Decembrists. Gates of Fate” devoted to wives of many Decembrists who shared the fate of their husbands and followed them into exile to the Siberia. In Russia they are a symbol of the devotion of a wife to her husband. The “Family” monument depicting the Orthodox patrons of marriage St. Peter and Fevronia of Murom is the artist’s dedication to the new Russian national holiday (introduced in 2008) – the Day of Family, Love and Faithfulness. The bronze slabs contain engraved expressions of the most celebrated women in the world and popular sayings about women of the Greek and Roman poets Homer and Ovid to classics of world and Russian literature. The Museum complex also includes an exhibition space for temporary art shows for promoting female artists from Russia and other countries.

The core of the Art and Religion Museum is a Crystal Chapel produced by Zurab Tsereteli in modern materials. It is a recreation of the Chapel of St. Alexander Nevsky built in the Okhotny Ryad in the downtown of Moscow according to the design of D.N. Chichagov in 1882 in memory of heroes of the Balkan War. The  Museum is aimed at showing the understanding of centuries-old Christian tradition in the 21st century in the context of the revival of Russian spiritual culture.  





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