Museum

The Internet Museum of Prints is a unique project dedicated to prints. Its exhibits are works from the private collection of Myasnoy Dom Borodona Company who initiated the idea of creating this museum, and also some masterpieces from the Russia State Library fund. A virtual museum in the Internet becomes a wonderful format for presenting prints since in ‘real life‘ it is practically impossible to bring so many works of art together in one space, let alone the technical challenge of creating the necessary conditions for exhibiting prints.

Selection of the Russian - Soviet school of engraving of the late 19th –early 20th centuries as the first component of the virtual exhibition is not accidental. That period was the time when engraving in general, and Russian and Soviet engraving in particular, flourished. As is known, at the turn of the 19th -20th centuries, engraving stopped performing a subservient role to painting, prints stopped being used for reproduction purposes only and became an art in its own right.  So, it is this art that our Internet Museum will be focusing on. The Museum’s main sections are dedicated to its various techniques. Represented here are galleries of etching, xylography, linoleum engraving and lithography. Each section contains a detailed description of artistic and production features of these techniques reproducing a lot of works by Russian and Soviet artists - Vasily Mathe, Vadim Falileev, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Pavel Shillingovsky, Vasily Masiutin, Dmitry Mitrokhin, Vladimir Favorsky, Nikolay Kupreyanov – and giving the viewer a graphic idea of different types of engraving and its evolution.

On our website, you will find short biographies of artists, a glossary of key terms and bibliography. Comments to reproductions are made up of excerpts from studies by scholars, letters and memoirs by artists, their colleagues and friends. The website is meant for a wide range of users. It might be of interest to both, experts and those who are not frequent guests to the world of fine arts. You could say it is a kind of arts museum representing a lot of graphic material which is seldom exhibited and also an additional source of information about prints and engravers. With the help of the search engine, you will find the material you are interested in – technique, genre, artist, or historical period. All this gives us ground to hope that our “non-real” museum is capable of really enriching the knowledge and spiritual world of its visitors.  That is exactly what its goal is.