Ekaterina Lopatkina
The State Hermitage Museum, Russia
In the scientific archives of the State Hermitage, we found a unique body of documents related to the process of organization of “The Room of Contemporary Art” at the Hermitage in the 1930s. Previously it was never mentioned in any publication on the history of the museum. The main aim of the research was to describe “The Room of Contemporary Art”, to define the time frame of its existence, the principles of its functioning and nature of its relationship with the museum’s collection and to find out its location. We discovered that “The Room of Contemporary Art” was created to display “the modern Western European art, giving prior attention to the proletarian art and related
currents” and was located on the 3rd floor of the Winter Palace, in room 415 (now room 318). According to the original plan the exposition was to include the art of contemporary Western European masters, received in exchange for paintings and sculptures of Soviet artists. However, the purchase of paintings for the exchange was never completed, and in early 1932 it became obvious that the organization of the permanent exhibition of contemporary art was in jeopardy. It was then decided to hold a number of temporary exhibitions instead. The first of them, “The exhibition of Dutch revolutionary artists”, was opened in October 1932. Western art department, responsible for its organization, considered “the way of arranging exhibitions” to be a short-term solution, but a permanent display of contemporary art in the Hermitage was not established either in the 1930s or later. Nevertheless, the study of archival materials related to the functioning of the “The Room of Contemporary Art” offers a new approach to the question of studying contemporary art exhibitions in the Hermitage in Soviet times and nowadays.