The Moscow Design Museum was officially registered only in May this year as a private cultural institution and at the same time received from the Moscow authorities a place in Manehe. Until then, about a year the museum’s mobile exhibitions were held on the bus.
The first stationary exposition of the new museum was successful. The theme for the debut is chosen ideally-works of the Soviet industry of 1950-1980-ies. Can not but touch the heart of any spectator. Everyone will find an exhibit, familiar by name: Watch “Flight”, Camera “Zorky”, Car “Moskvich”, tape recorder “electronics” and just a friend: a vending machine with a soda, a radio-tube, a cheerful nevlyashka, skis at the stove Stand — a continuous joy of recognition.
For sure, people will be simple-minded, offer the museum the same used samples of recognizable Soviet design, stored in the attic. The things born in the USSR lived long, even uncasty and fragile, to change them was troublesome and not on what. From long life together to them were tied, as to native, in time did not bury. But the material for the exhibition, as its director Alexander Sankova says, and so collected a lot more than shown.
All exhibited systematized: Autoprom, household appliances, light industry, things for leisure and travel, toys. Explanations are not everywhere, but such and in museums with experience happens. As the background-hung posters, advertising and artistic. A separate section is dedicated to the activities of the All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics, a place quite legendary, a true institute of design, only unproductive in a situation of planned deficit of everything.
Systematization somehow holds the exhibition within a reasonable framework, but the idea does not clarify it. Here there are things to comic ridiculous, for example washing machine, which is in stylistic kinship with concrete mixer. And there are beautiful, comfortable, practical. Typical industrial designs are mixed with aristocrats and bars of the subject world, oriented to fashion Western and even pre-revolutionary, as a monumental sofa-cabinet, standing next to the armchair Soviet, disgusting ordinary.
Things tell us more about time than people do. The exhibition country, where most of the inhabitants of modern Russia was born, is not what idealizes, but demonstrates from the best side, without touching the sad-how these things got, how much cost, how broke. There are no horror stories like “Cheremushki” or boots from “Skorushok”, but no romantic or sentimental line is lined up. For example, space. It can be seen that the authors of the vacuum cleaners “Saturn”, “Chaika”, “Rocket” and “up-1” were in flight during working hours.
Until January 20