Museum and City: Komsomolsk-on-Amur
Liubov Kovaleva, Ekaterina Burtseva
When in 1932 the ship Columbus carrying the first builders of the city docked on the Amur River by the settlement of Permskoye, among its passengers there was the first artist of Komsomolsk-on-Amur Georgy Tsivilev. After some time, two Moscow artists – Hoskel Sandler and Sofya Tsivilevskaya – arrived becoming the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1966. As of today, its collection is the most ample among the museums of the Russian Far East. Its collection was initially made up of works by artists from Transcaucasia, the Baltics and Soviet Central Asia distinguished by a diversity of themes and providing a full understanding of trends that existed in the artwork of the former Soviet republics. The new concept of the museum’s development adopted in the late 1980s included forming a collection of the Amur River Region art with the aim of preserving the knowledge of traditional technologies and materials and acquainting the public with cult objects of Amur indigenous peoples, such as national costumes, articles made of fabric, fur, bird feathers and fish skin and ritual sculptures.
Key words: Komsomolsk-on-Amur Fine Arts Museum, indigenous art, Soviet art.