Museum-studio of the soviet artist of D. Nalbandyan

The museum-studio of D. Nalbandyan was created by the Moscow Government on the basis of the collection which was donated by the artist to the city at the end of 1992. Dmitry Nalbadyan moved to an apartment on Gorky Street (Tverskaya), 8/2 in 1956. The windows of the second building looked out onto the building of Moscow City Council and Sovetskaya (Terskaya) Square with a monument to the city’s founder, Yury Dolgoruky, which was opened in 1954. Demian Bedny, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Mikhail Romm lived in this house. In 1958, the bookstore № 100 of the Moscow House of Books was opened here. The last floors of the house were decided to be given to artists - Kukriniks, Nikolay Zhukov, Fyodor Konstantinov, Vladimir Minaev, Dmitry Nalbandyan and others. Today there are more than 1500 work of artist in the collection of the museum-studio, the structural division of the Museum and Exhibition Association "Manege". Among collection there are paintings, sketches, drawings, photographs, personal things. Dmitry Nalbadyan was born in 1906 in Tiflis. In 1931, Nalbadyan came to Moscow after graduation of Academy of Arts of Georgia in Evgeny Lansere and Egishe Tatevosyan's classes. He worked as the caricaturist in "Crocodile" magazine, the animator at Mosfilm and the poster artist in “Izogiz” (State publishing house of the fine arts). In 1934 there was an event, which in many respects defined the fate of the artist. In the Kremlin he meets Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the friend of the father Arkady Nalbandyan, who was killed by Mensheviks in Georgia. Ordzhonikidze acquaints Nalbandyan with Sergey Kirov and enters into a circle of party elite. Soon Nalbandyan writes the first big cloth "S.M. Kirov's Speech at the XVII congress of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks)" – the picture is exposed in the State museum of Fine Arts, published in the Pravda and Izvestia newspapers, duplicated in reproductions… Already later Nalbandyan will become the member of the Moscow union of the Soviet artists and the member of Academy of Arts. He will get the Stalin award for Stalin's portrait and Lenin – for images of a leniniana. For the Soviet viewer, Nalbandyan was "the first brush" of the Politburo, the classic of socialist realism, the portraitist-reporter of an era, the author of the thought-up and directed pictures: "Vladimir Mayakovsky in Georgia (Baghdadi) in 1927", "V.I. Lenin and A.M. Gorky among fishermen on the island of Capri 1908", "Vernatun (The Five), a group portrait of outstanding figures of the Armenian culture", acquaintances much on reproductions in the ‘Ogoniok’ magazine. Nalbandyan’s Landscapes and still-life paintings are much less known, though they speak about him as about “the impressionist of the korovinsky sense (Korovin K. A. as Russian painter and theater artist)”, capable to transfer mood by a fast and easy brush. Nalbandyan’s graphics is known even less. His drawings - it is gallery of the top officials of policy and art: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Saryan, Roerich, Wang Klibiern, Katayev, Leonov, and others – behind a clear exception became from nature and today submit surprising documents of time. In the beginning of 1990s, Nalbadyan bequeathed part of his collection of works to the city, provided that they didn’t leave the walls of his studio. Today the Museum D. A. Nalbandyan recreates the space of life and creativity of artist of the Soviet time, as it was then.