Speculation around the applicability of the term "modernism" to Soviet art has been taking place in Russia for decades. The reason for it remaining open to debate is the notorious anti-formalist campaign of the 1930s which later re-emerged under the banner of the fight against modernism during the Cold War. In tens of monographs from this period, Soviet art critics used the notion of modernism as a negative label. While the notion itself was described as a "dehumanized" territory of "anti-art", artists' "idea-less" interest in formal aspects was interpreted as a form of subversion instigated by the West against the "socially meaningful" art of Socialist Realism.

In official publications of the 1930s-1970s Soviet art was presented as a hermetic monolith impervious to external influences and, importantly, devoid of dynamics and internal development. The battle for "realism", where "progressive" art defeated "degenerate" and "backward" movements, remained the driving force of history. All this caused meaningful consideration of mutual influences between Soviet and Western art to be substantially delayed.

Stereotypes about Soviet art are still alive today. Collective memory shows little recognition of the inheritance of artistic styles across different loci in the history of culture, persistently demonstrating an antithetical way of thinking, where Russian Art Nouveau is counterposed to Constructivism, the epoch of the 1940s to the Severe Style and artists are classified as representatives of avant-garde and arrière-garde and hierarchically ranked. At times some major museums demonstrate the same approach neglecting "unimportant" aspects of Soviet art.

Already in the 20th century, allowing interpretation of Soviet art outside the hierarchy imposed by the party, private collections became an important independent force that led to partial revision of these stereotypes, thus engendering change in museum exhibition policy. Roman Babichev's collection presented in this exhibition allows not only the chance to explore the diversity of modernisms of the Soviet epoch but also to trace some tendencies for interlinking inspiration that stretch back to the beginning of the century. Presented here is an outlook from a Symbolist's perspective.

By 1932 artistic associations in the USSR were banned. They were replaced by the party-controlled Union of Artists which was created as a platform for developing Socialist Realism. The exhibition title Implicit Modernism epitomizes the main issue inherent in Babichev's collection, that of interconnections between post avant-garde artistic associations, which, being "invisible" after 1932, expressed their manifestos wordlessly in the very fashion of their painting. Nadia Plungian

The epoch of Art Nouveau was an epoch of a new "cultural renaissance" which spanned the period from the 1890s to the 1910s (it is conventionally considered to have come to an end by 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War). Whereas Art Nouveau, as a dominant style of the turn of the 19th century, served as a backdrop for the emergence of a sense of modernity – its iconography and visual language at times encompassing contradictory understandings of such grand themes as the past, time and space – as a style in its own right it became a culminating embodiment of the romantic idealism of the past centuries.

The range of aesthetic and formal references as well as artistic trends related to them is particularly broad in the art of the 1890s-1910s. However it is the same integrated environment that has given rise to these mutually remote artistic endeavors. In Russia an interest in the newest French movements and western discoveries was characteristic of the Romantic-Symbolists of Mir Iskusstva and Blue Rose, the Russian Impressionists of Union of Russian Artists and the Futurists and Neo-Primitivists of Jack of Diamonds and Donkey's Tail. The effects of a common starting point – an alluring dream of mythopoeia, that is to say of creating a self-sufficient artistic reality – in one way or another can be sensed in all the creatively vibrant quests of the early 20th century.

With that being said the Art Nouveau – on the Way to Modernism hall aims to reveal the environment, marked by a greater appreciation of the decorative arts, and the lyrically subjective mindset that were characteristic of the first stage of the penetration of innovative tendencies from abroad into Russian art in the late 19th century. These tendencies, concurrent with the flourishing of Art Nouveau, are related to both Symbolism and Russian Impressionism. Presented in this hall are these styles' successors. The work of these artists resonates, in one way or another, with artistic tendencies of two major movements of the Art Nouveau epoch – Mir Iskusstva (1898–1904; 1906; 1910–1924) and Union of Russian Artists (Soyuz Russkikh Khudozhnikov, SRKh, 1903–1924). Initially conceived as a successor to pioneering artistic ideals in St Petersburg's Mir Iskusstva, Moscow's SRKh differed in its aesthetic approach from the sophisticated culture of "Nevsky Pickwickers", as A. Benois dubbed Mir Iskusstva. In comparison with the manner inherent to the Mir Iskusstva members – with its graphic tendency toward stylization and its visual poetics imbued by the nostalgia for an imagined reality – the art of the SRKh plein air artists was predicated on and inspired by realistic landscape painting, which endowed it with a more painterly aspect but at the same more conservatism in terms of verisimilitude.

Encompassing both tendencies of the development of Russian Art Nouveau, works from Roman Babichev's collection allow a less conflicting outlook on the harmonious artistic climate of the turn of the 20th century, where a Romantic Realistic air was not in opposition to a formal decorative search that was intensive in its expressiveness. The art of Art Nouveau epoch, which has raised the poetics of visual language to new heights of suggestiveness, can be justly called, using Andrey Bely's words, "the years of new dawns", a "nodal point" on the artistic biography of the 20th century – a source of the inner, emotional, and plastic oscillations that prefigured the "epoch of new perceptions" of the early avant-garde. Olga Davydova

Jack of Diamonds was one of the few pre-revolutionary associations, the influence of which on artistic processes of the 1920-30s has not been called into question. In contrast with "idea-less" Symbolism of both the Blue Rose and Mir Iskusstva groups, for a long time artists of Jack of Diamonds were well received by Marxist criticism as "realists" with a good command of painting technique, familiarity with the French school and a readiness to pass on their experience to "young cadres".

The former founders of Jack of Diamonds – Ilya Mashkov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Petr Konchalovsky, Alexander Osmerkin, Nadezhda Udaltsova and Alexander Kuprin – became leading tutors in the Moscow branch of VKhUTEMAS in the 1920s, and Robert Falk, who was also among the group's founding members, for a while served there as a dean of the Painting Department. Their disciples understood Cezannism – as well as Suprematism, Cubism and neoclassicism – as a complete system of spacial and color relations which by the 1930s already appeared to be waning, merely an intermediary stage on the way to a new style.

In this hall, paintings of Jack of Diamonds are shown alongside the neo-Cezannesque experiments of artists of the following generations (from Mikhail Perutsky to Tatiana Kupervasser) and early-soviet sculpture in the style of "proletarian Cubism" realized as part of Lenin's Plan of "Monumental Propaganda". Whereas sculptor Boris Korolev developed his revolutionary Futurism as a form of polemic against the academic art of the early 20th century, Nina Niss-Goldman embraced a new form directly influenced by the artists of the Paris school. In the 1900s she worked in La Ruche together with Chana Orloff, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Arkhipenko and Ossip Zadkine. Nadia Plungian

Masters of high modernism – Kazimir Malevich, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, and Pavel Filonov – channelled their efforts into creating proper artistic schools, which after the Russian Revolution, in a way became order systems for a new art. The formation of their disciples took place in a totally different environment characterized by governmental control of culture. Searching for the common ground in Suprematism, Cezannism and Constructivism VKhUTEMAS- VKhUTEIN's alumni were obliged to reconcile these means with the ideological demands of the time.

A major demand imposed by the state was the creation of the "narrative-thematic painting" that would portray "Soviet reality". However in the late 1920s - early 1930s the understanding of what this new "realism" should look like still significantly varied. An endeavor to create large-scale novel works, typical of the VKhUTEMAS generation, for a time resonated with the state's appeal to artists to illuminate the processes of industrialization and Socialist construction. Painters and graphic artists of the OST, Circle of Artists, NOZh, and Rost groups took themselves to remote building sites and sketched in factories, mines, kolkhozes, and communes. However, very soon it became clear that they were expected not to document reality but rather to render it according to the party's ends. Traits of modernist experimentalism were increasingly subject to criticism as a "distortion of reality" and by the mid-1930s they were publicly declared as "destructive" and a "political diversion" – allegations that could cost one one's life.

This hall includes early versions of the Thematic Painting bound up with both the Moscow and Leningrad Unions of Artists, which were the most influential associations and standard-bearers of pre-war Soviet art. The works on view in this hall include an unexpectedly Suprematist workers' village by Martiros Saryan, Fauvism-inspired lilac railwaymen by Nikolay Viting, a Neo-Primitivist chef d'oeuvre Galoshes Workshop (1929) by Victor Proshkin, and Alexander Rusakov's Factory (ca. 1930) and Trial of a Scooter Boat (late 1920s – early 1930s), colorful works awash with scintillating dynamism and humor. Trips to the fringes of the country left artists impressed with the might of the immense dispersed landscape. In Alexey Rybnikov and Vladimir Tyagunov's landscapes one can sense the metaphysical apprehension of the individual in the face of nature, the battle with nature being something which the USSR also faced and still could lose. Nadia Plungian

The ideological demands of the late 1920s-early 1930s were marked by debates on Proletarian Art which extended back to G. Plekhanov and A. Bogdanov's theory of proletarian culture. As with the idea of ideological Thematic Painting, the question of what was the authentic image of the proletariat was constantly subject to change. Some saw in it a symbol of class struggle, others a pretext for poetizing a new lifestyle in the Soviet village and Constructivist city. A separate and continuously discussed theme was the depiction of contemporaneity in monumental painting or fresco-painting.

The works on view in this hall are thematically dedicated to the figure of the proletarian and everyday life. However, they cannot be called monumental in the sense of providing a unified or simplistic picture of the solidarity and unanimity of the Soviet people – the style characteristic of the late Stalin period. These works, each in its own way, are packed with social context in which their protagonists are shown as independent subjects in their own right. Reflected in them is a short and riveting stage of Soviet art which ran parallel with the development of modernism in Weimar Germany. In this period, in which the totalitarian canon was yet to be found, artists were searching for inspiration in different styles without losing interest in the grotesque. Dmitry Lebedev's magnificent and unsettling scene Death of the Comissar. Requiem (ca. 1930) fuses peasant epic with the Neo-Romanticism of the 1930s. Vasily Kostyanitsin's Rest Stop in the Mountains (early 1920s) displays icon painting qualities manifested in its composition, shadings and positioning of figures and rooted in the artist's early career as an icon painter. While in Konstantin Zefirov's portraits one can surmise his reworking of Chardin's legacy, the paintings of both Georgy Rublev and Galina Shubina reveal a dialogue between Neo-Primitivism, Expressionism and techniques typical of Matisse. An even more intricate synthesis of irony, directness and flatness is visualized in Alexander Monin's sportswoman – a delicate monument to the proletarian-intellectual woman of the 1920s.

Images of the first post-revolutionary generation are both contradictory and autobiographical. The idea of the "class-conscious proletariat" dating back to the Narodnics was quickly eliminated from history and was replaced by a demand for art which was "understandable to the masses". This, in practice, turned into clichéd Socialist Realism. Nadia Plungian

The "struggle for realism", understood as Socialist Realism, in art of the 1920s took place against a background of hunger, collectivization, large-scale purges of the party ranks, and show trials against "saboteurs" and "wreckers". Not allowing for any documentary or artistic accounts of these processes, official criticism endeavored to monopolize the very notion of "reality". A constructed "authentic reality" of the Socialist future was depicted in sumptuous genre paintings, extolling an abundance of food, the joyful execution of the labor plan, the birth of children and "unforgettable meetings" of Soviet officials.

Although the "optimism" of these pictures featuring a happy Soviet life was opposed to hostile "naturalism", a negative label for "superfluously" realistic art depicting unattractive or insufficiently idealist reality, the boundaries between "naturalism" and "realism" were blurred in landscape painting – a genre that remained politically neutral. It is in this particular niche that many former artists of Jack of Diamonds tended to work without fully complying with the conventions of Socialist Realism. Consonant with these artists' attempts to blend in with the official ostentatious depiction of Soviet achievements, nature in their late works also grew superfluous featuring mighty oaks, decorative bouquets, colossal "Soviet loaves" and sun-drenched collective-farm fields.

By the end of the 1920s the manner of Moscow Cezannists remarkably changed. A rigid compositional rhythm and a Neo-Primitivist palette transformed into a style, which, characterized by a fractured composition and a vibrating tapestry of paint, displayed much affinity to late Russian Symbolism. Lentulov and Osmerkin's painting of these years, distinguished by the lack of a rigorous rhythm and compositional structure, brings to mind Peredvizhniks' late interest in Impressionism. However, it is these two movements that were consistently set in contrast by Soviet critics in the 1930s-50s as epitomes of opposing ideological camps – those of progressive "realism" and those of bourgeois "formalism". At the same time, the social situation of some of the Jack of Diamonds members also grew vulnerable. Ilya Mashkov's son was repressed. Alexander Osmerkin was accused of cosmopolitanism and deprived of his means of subsistence as a punishment for an allegedly "insufficient qualification". Robert Falk, having returned from his long stay in Paris (1928-1937) was labeled as a "formalist" and withdrew into the shadows to re-emerge in the mid-1950s, when his painting was once again harshly criticized by Nikita Khrushchev and became part of unofficial art. Nadia Plungian

Architectural graphics, included in Roman Babichev's collection, demonstrates a self-sufficient, distinct and almost unstudied path of Russian architecture from the neoclassicism of the 1900s to Soviet post-constructivism, the Monumental Order of the 1930s. Running in parallel with experiments of Constructivists and Rationalists, an active dialogue with the Functionalists, Le Corbusier and Bauhaus's leading figures were other processes that by no means can be fitted within the procrustean confines of the avant-garde, "Zholtovsky's school" or "Shchusev's eclectics".

Ivan Fomin's works on paper and his pupil Sofia Kaufman's graphic works and designs mark a starting point – that for the search of a "new antiquity" – which was quite removed from the preoccupation with desiccated neoclassicism widespread in the 1910s. Fomin and artists of his circle were attracted to ponderous Doric forms, visionary classicism as envisioned by Ledoux and Boullée and the Russian branch of the Empire style – all interpretations of Classical Antiquity marked by the gravitation towards simple geometric volumes: cubes, cylinders, and hemispheres. It is these proto-forms that would lay the foundation for Fomin's Proletarian Doric architecture. The formal tools he developed in the 1920s – predicated on the analysis, generalization and rearrangement of classical elements understood as simple, indivisible geometric forms – would come to resonate with the search for a new Soviet style in the early 1930s. Similar excessively monumental forms preoccupied Boris Iofan in the 1910s, when he was working in Italy under Armando Brasini and was subject to the influence of another visionary architect, Piranesi. In the 1930s his explorations in this field were manifested in his submission for the most significant project of the epoch – the design contest for the Palace of the Soviets – for which his work was praised.

Predicated on 17-18th century etchings and abstracted images of ancient Greek and Roman ruins – abstracted due to the fact that only a partial picture was available, through engravings and blurred photographs – Soviet Monumental Order in architecture effaced the boundaries between an architectural fantasy and architectural design itself. This is also clearly visible in Meer Aizenstadt's works, who from the late 1920s was constructing his autonomous reality from elements of Malevich's architectones, fragments of antiquity and figures of gymnasts and workers. His works on paper and models in plaster and bronze – sketches of "impossible" architecture and sculpture – in a concentrated form convey what was in the air in the 1930s, something which, without ever being brought into reality, would be forever ingrained in the collective unconsciousness through cinema, decorations for city celebrations and candy wrappers featuring the Palace of the Soviets. Alexandra Selivanova

In the history of Soviet art, the period from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s was marked by the tightening of cultural policy aggravated by general historical turmoil. The years from 1935 to 1938 saw several notorious anti-formalist campaigns which led to artists being executed by shooting or receiving prison terms. The Academia publishing house and the Meyerhold theatre were shut down. Now the negative label "formalism" was applied not only to constructivist movements but to the whole range of modernist experimentalism.

At the same time, it is in this particular period that the artistic language of the epoch attained its uttermost decorativeness, which in a certain way fused both the baroque of the Stalin era and the style of intimate small-format works of disfavored "formalists". Historicism and retrospection complemented the perception of the world in the manner of stage props. It was in this new theatricality permeating all spheres of art that the influence of Symbolism manifested itself. A certain theatricality can be witnessed in both Lev Soloviev's panorama of the Volga and a Futuristic sectional view of a railway station by Efrosinya Ermilova-Platova. Antonina Sofronova's zoos and barren landscapes in their deep mysteriousness resonate with Mikhail Sokolov's series titled Imaginary Portraits.

Georgy Rublev's sinister Oriole (1937), in a way, can be considered a manifesto of the decade. Borrowing means from Art Deco and New Objectivity the artist fuses the dead with the inanimate against a twinkling fiery background. Most of these pictures, with no chance of being accepted at exhibition commissions of the Union of Artists, were kept in workshops as monuments of "dangerous formalism".

In Europe similar processes led to the flourishing of Surrealist painting. In the USSR one could speak of proto-surrealist movements which were developing up to the late 1930s. A certain transcendental tension is sensed in Leonid Khoroshkevich's Aerostat (1944). With the outbreak of the Second World War the incorporeal volumes of airships familiar from Alexander Labas's early works grew larger, gargantuan, in a way which did not recall the mechanical but the biomorphic. Nadia Plungian

Four Arts was, if not the largest, the most tightly-knit artistic group of the 1920s-1930s. Amongst its leaders were the founders of Blue Rose and its title was to reflect a monumental synthesis of painting, sculpture, architecture and music – the notion of cross-form synthesis already considered important in the epoch of Art Nouveau.

From 1935 to 1948 artists from the Four Arts group Vladimir Favorsky and Lev Bruni took the lead of the Monumental Painting Workshop at the Academy of Architecture which was responsible for decorating VDNKh (trade show and park Vystavka Dostizheniy Narodnogo Khozyaystva), designing ceiling lamps for clubs and theatres, and painting Moscow façades, rendered in the spirit of "Soviet Art Deco". One of the workshop's aims was the search for a balance between intimacy and monumentality within sanctioned movements of Soviet art. In the official discourse this balance was defined as "soviet humanism" which was counterposed to abstract art.

The "verisimilar humanism" of the 1930-40s already contained the main features of the painting which would come to characterize the period of the Thaw – its emotional elation and intimacy coupled with pictorial flatness. The close-up, an almost cinematic view, allowed avoiding montage and the light-drenched picture plane which was required due to the fact that the state's demand for an optimistic depiction of a Socialist "reality" didn't allow room for tonal contrast. It is worth noting that this flatness itself was a modernist tool.

In this hall one can trace the development of the shared trend of "new lyricism" from the 1930s to the 1950s through works of artists from counterposed camps including the Soviet Impressionism of famous anti-modernists Pavel Benkov and Alexander Gerasimov, the still lifes of Pavel Kuznetsov and Yury Pimenov and the delicate paintings of the founder of Leningrad's Detgiz publishing house Vladimir Lebedev (these were painted after the anti-formalist campaign of 1937-38 that broke him down). Nadia Plungian

As well as the development of the style of monumental intimacy, which took place as a part of Soviet modernism in both the 1930s and the 1960s, these two periods are connected by yet another theme – a gradually increasing tendency towards escapism and personal artistic search.

One of the few Moscow artists whose legacy can be interpreted as a continuous modernist experiment from Symbolism to Futurism and then to neoclassicism is Fedor Platov, the publisher of a futuristic collection "Peta", a member of GAKhN (State Academy of Artistic Sciences) and participant in the OST group (Society of Easel Artists) and the Working Group of Objectivists . In the 1930s, accused of formalism, Platov was banned from being exhibited but continued working on his own. His watercolors, produced in the course of 20 years, explore properties of the same objects. Despite evoking the experiments of Morandi and de Chirico as well as studies of researchers from the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) preoccupied with identifying the "additional element" in painting, these pieces largely fulfill the artist's own ends. Platov is the author of a series of articles on issues related to monumental form, architectural order and the problem of scale. In these articles, including The Experience with the Synthetic Perspective and Drawing in the Light of the Laws of Physics, categories important to Platov – the fineness and transparency of textures, constructivity and immateriality, substantiality and incorporeity – form a coherent narrative. Similar issues were raised by Vladimir Tatlin's disciple and assistant, sculptor Alexey Zelensky. His Torso, assembled from contrasting species of wood, resolves the issue of synthesizing Cubism and neoclassicism into a new aesthetic form.

The demand for a unified artistic language and the fight against abstract art unite Stalin's and Khrushchev's artistic policies. The denunciation of independent work and individual artistic experiment was facing increasing opposition, which resulted in the creation of unofficial associations. One such association was formed around a workshop of sculptor Stepan Erzia. In 1950 he came back from Argentina with a stock of red quebracho wood and works created in the course of 20 years of living abroad. Similar examples of individual continuous artistic development demonstrated an alternative to the fragmentary representation of an artist's career that was common in Soviet times where the artist's "formalist fallacies" were suppressed, making soviet art appear somewhat rootless and thus hampering the advancement of modernist thought. Nadia Plungian

The rise of the Severe Style and its establishment as an officially sanctioned version of Socialist Realism in the epoch of the denunciation of Stalin's personality cult was gradual and not without complexities. The artistic sphere reflected what was happening in society: the rehabilitation of innocent victims of the Stalin regime was accompanied by the rehabilitation of artistic styles, movements as well as certain figures.

At the vanguard of this process was a new generation of artists, who were preoccupied not only with elaborating a style adequate for the Thaw period but also with tracing their predecessors in Soviet art. The exhibition 20 Years of MOSSKh [Moscow Department of the Union of Soviet Artists] became a major event of the epoch, remarkable for the scandal it caused and the subsequent banning of a great number of artists from the profession. However its importance also lies in its demonstration of the legacy of artists from the 1920s manifested through works of the 1950s generation.

Roman Babichev's collection exemplifies how strongly the vision of official artistic leaders of the Thaw period relied on their knowledge of figurative experiments of the preceding decades. This dependency is clearly revealed in small-format intimate works created outside of the ideological requirements of the time. Pavel Nikonov's late Expressionism is rooted in Alexander Drevin and Nadezhda Udaltsova's painterly volumes of the 1930s. Andrey Vasnetsov's painting reveals his scrutiny of Konstantin Istomin's output and a dialogue with Italian and Spanish tenebrists. Nikolay Andronov appears to have adapted the Jack of Diamonds language to the epoch marked by private spaces and nostalgic retrospection, something which also imbued official easel painting. Valentin Dyakonov

During the Thaw period soviet artists addressed the issues of quality and workmanship anew to find solutions in the past, or more precisely, in the early 20th century. Soviet art was resolutely, programmatically unfree. Political censorship aside, a crucial criterion in the selection of works for exhibitions was their adherence to official narratives relating to both the past and present of the USSR. At the same time, in the epoch of late Socialism, artists who had no intention to oppose the established system competed in the extent to which they could include elements of politics-free and more language-focused art into their works.

In counterpoint to the "zone of imperceptibility" – an experimental model fusing art and life which was fermenting at this time within Moscow conceptualism – the "leftists" of the Thaw and stagnation periods (1954-1986) who drew on the avant-garde and figurative painting created before 1932, spontaneously without realizing it created their own "zone of perceptibility" – a range of plastic means that allowed immersion in retrospection without undermining the notion of artwork that the ideology of the times demanded. This allowed them to address formal issues while continuing to work within an understandable content. In the small-format intimate portraits and still lifes on view, the arrangement of color stains is of higher importance than the plot or subject, which is nevertheless present serving as a mannequin on which the artists display the products of their self-expression. Valentin Dyakonov

Dmitry Krasnopevtsev's work, which in terms of genre can be defined as metaphysical still life, is where many major tendencies of Soviet post-war art coalesce. Here everything comes together – the desire to escape into culture common among the intellectuals of the time who were disillusioned with revolutionary ideas; an endeavor to find a space for an aesthetic independence without giving up lyricism and dialogue with the viewer; reflection on the ruins of empires coupled with pessimism, with the latter being expressed in closed, claustrophobic compositions as though part of the eternal landscape. In general, metaphysics – as something closely related to melancholy thanks to de Chirico's painting – was an attractive mode of theorizing to appear not only in Krasnopevtsev's work. In this hall its influence is visible in Andrey Vasnetsov's still lifes and a piece by Andrey Grositsky who makes use of an industrial composition to postulate the futility of all existent things. Valentin Dyakonov

While the state was focused on the creation of Thematic Painting in comparison to which other forms of art were less of a priority, graphic art for years operated as a platform for experimentation under the radar of the government. It is in easel and book graphics of the second half of the 20th century where many of the discoveries of prewar modernism persisted and developed allowing for the continuation of particular schools and movements.

Until the period of the 1940s-60s graphic art remained a form of self-expression not only for the post-constructivists and Neo-Romanticists of Vladimir Favorsky and Alexey Kravchenko's circle but also for post-suprematists and Filonovists, the documentary graphic artists of the 13 group (Vladimir Milashevsky, Nikolay Kuzmin, Antonina Sofronova), survived participants of the former Makovets and Appartment №5 (Lev Bruni, Petr Miturich) groups, representatives of late Mir Iskusstva (Vladimir Konashevich, Dmitry Mitrokhin, Elizaveta Kruglikova) and former artists of the Detgiz publishing house from Vladimir Lebedev's circle (Vasily Kurdov, Alexey Pakhomov, Evgenya Evenbach).

As European artists of the 20th century, Russian modernists were avidly exploring and reviving forgotten techniques many of which were graphic such as monotyping, wood engraving, and dry point. Another technique that deserves separate mention is color lithography, which marks a whole epoch in the history of soviet art. In summary, the development of graphic art can be arranged in its own improvised chronological order indirectly consonant with the logic of the other exhibition halls. Nadia Plungian