The State Tretyakov Gallery
Grand art museum holding the world's largest collection of Russian painting and icons.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow centers on January 1913, when a young icon painter walked up to Ilya Repin's painting of Ivan the Terrible and his dying son, pulled a gardening knife from his coat, and struck the canvas three times. It follows Abram Balashov, the twenty-eight-year-old attacker, through his arrest, and reaches forward to a second attack on the same painting more than a century later, in 2018. Look closely at the frame as you approach the canvas — the old knife marks are still part of the story.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
Neoclassical museum whose vaults once secretly held Dresden's rescued Old Master paintings.
Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art
Fourteenth-century monastery cathedral where a legendary icon painter lived, worked, and lies buried in an unmarked grave.
New Tretyakov Gallery
Soviet modernist gallery of twentieth and twenty-first century Russian art beside a graveyard of toppled Soviet statues.
Музей русского импрессионизма
Converted candy factory galleries devoted to overlooked masters of Russian Impressionist painting.
«Гараж»
Soviet-era restaurant reborn as a contemporary art space behind a glowing polycarbonate shell in a city park.
State Pushkin Museum
Empire-style noble mansion with soaring Ionic columns, tracing the poet's life and era through room after room of manuscripts and portraits.