Vadim Sidur Museum

Vadim Sidur Museum opened in Moscow in 1989. This is the only Moscow State Museum that is entirely dedicated to modern sculpture. The work of Vadim Sidur is so peculiar and complex (his legacy includes not only a huge number of sculptural and graphic works, but also poetry, prose and even cinematography) that it represents an entire era in the history of Russian art. Vadim Sidur (1924-1986) – the Russia’s foremost painter and sculptor, ‘Soviet Henry Moore’, as he was called by Western journalists in the 70s. Being a nonconformist artist he was subjected to harassment by the Soviet authorities because his work – both in form and in content – presented a sharp contrast to the canons of socialist realism. For 30 years of his artist career, he created more than 500 sculptural works and thousands of graphic works. Even during his lifetime, numerous exhibitions and publications won Sidur glory in the West. At various times, his work was replenished with the meetings of Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Samuel Beckett and Pablo Neruda, Nobel Laureates in Literature, Friedrich Cristianos, Deutsche Bank Chairman of the Board of Directors, Jan Oort and John Bardin, Nobel Laureates in Physics, Benjamin Britten, an English composer, Kundera and Heinrich Böll, European writers, Norton Dodge, an American economist, and many others. After the death of Sidur, which coincided with the beginning of the Gorbachev perestroika, his artistic heritage was publicly recognized as the national treasure of Russia.