Ahead of this weekend's City Day celebrations, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts opened "The Nature of Lines", an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Katya Golitsyna that honors Moscow's Art Nouveau heritage. The pictures of early 20th-century architectural icons, like the Metropol Hotel and the Ryabushinsky House on Malaya Nikitskaya Ulitsa, capture both the fluid contours of their facades as well as the intricate details.
It is a highly personal vision of Moscow, in part because of Golitsyna's technique. After printing her photographs, she brushes the paper with iodine and draws on it with a hard pencil. These effects allow her to bleach the sky to bring out the line of a house's roof, or blur the borders between the molding and the shadows beneath it. It is a way of enhancing contrasts and perfecting the composition, as well as eliminating unwanted elements, like cars and advertisements. "I get rid of quite a bit", Golitsyna said in an interview Wednesday. "I do whatever I need to get the theme or the atmosphere I want".
That atmosphere, she said, varies from picture to picture, depending on the particular house she is photographing and what its lines and shapes suggest. Golitsyna said her favorite was the Tarkhova House, a narrow building with a bell-shaped roof. Her pictures highlight its flaking paint, which makes a pattern she compared to a painter's canvas or "a spiderweb of cracks".
Tucked away on the quiet Podsosensky Pereulok, near Kursky Station, the Tarkhova House is not as prominent – or well-kept – as Art Nouveau houses in the city center or along the Garden Ring, but Golitsyna thinks it is no less interesting. "It's very alive", she said. "Every square meter is used to explore new ideas".
The extravagance of Art Nouveau mansions was a point of pride for their owners -- often the children and grandchildren of peasants who made a fortune during Russia's industrial boom in the late 19th century. The new money wanted to stand out from the titled nobility, who lived in stately, columned homes, and commissioned mansions in the fashionable style from Western Europe.
For Golitsyna, Art Nouveau is an imported aesthetic. She said she believed the smaller neoclassical estates of the late 19th century -- "not metropolitan, cozy, intimate" – best characterize the city, and insisted it was not just because she is descended from an influential noble family, the Golitsyns, whose members would have been likely to live in such houses. Golitsyna said she was less interested in Moscow's social history than in the pure aesthetic of the fluid and dynamic Art Nouveau line.
Architects working in the style were inspired by vines and flowers, and Golitsyna's photographs accentuate the echoes of nature in artifice. "I wanted to visually demonstrate the source of inspiration for architects' stylizations", she said. Her photographs of the Ryabushinsky House, now better known as the home of Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, achieve this most effectively. Trees, bushes and the shadows of their foliage mingle with the decorative elements on the building's facade. The exhibition at the Pushkin Museum further highlights this idea by juxtaposing pictures from "The Nature of Lines" with her earlier series "Praphenoms, or Dedication to Goethe", where living plants are photographed in a light that makes the viewer wonder if they are real or sculpted.
Golitsyna's photographs bring life out of stone and wrought iron, emphasizing the vitality of Art Nouveau that is absent from boxy late-Soviet architecture and the smooth facades of the new, post-Soviet Moscow. For her, the line of Art Nouveau symbolizes mobility and freedom. "It was the birth of a new aesthetic that was free and very sensual", Golitsyna said. "The architects could do anything. There were no obstacles".
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